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Amid all the media hullabaloo about President Donald Trump and European leaders discussing who should control Greenland and why, a colleague and I found it nearly impossible to find out what seemed to us to be a critical factor: what the people who live there think.
So I set out to find someone who could explain just that. Since both my colleague and I lived for many years in Maine, the answer was right in front of us: the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine.
Most of Greenland lies above the Arctic Circle. Museum Director Susan A. Kaplan and Curator Genevieve LeMoine are both anthropologists who study the Arctic and its people. They were kind enough to write up a fantastic look at the people who call the world’s largest island home.
Kaplan and LeMoine discuss how and when people first got to such a harsh place, how their descendants live there now, and how a rock band helped catalyze a movement for independence that may mean a halt to both U.S. and Danish designs on Kalaallit Nunaat, the land English speakers know as Greenland.
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People walk along a street in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland.
Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images
Susan A. Kaplan, Bowdoin College; Genevieve LeMoine, Bowdoin College
Greenland’s inhabitants call it Kalaallit Nunaat, or land of the Kalaallit. It is an Indigenous nation whose relatively few people now mostly govern themselves.
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Environment + Energy
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Christy Remucal, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Education
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Joanna Dreby, University at Albany, State University of New York; Eunju Lee, University at Albany, State University of New York
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Politics + Society
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Peter Harris, Colorado State University
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Laura Tedesco, Saint Louis University – Madrid
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International
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Aili Mari Tripp, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Amy McAuliffe, University of Notre Dame
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David S G Goodman, University of Sydney
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Health + Medicine
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Arjun Mohan, University of Michigan
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Chris Meyers, George Washington University
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Arts + Culture
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Jared Bahir Browsh, University of Colorado Boulder
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Ethics + Religion
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Ronald S. Green, Coastal Carolina University
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