GREENLAND UNDER DANES

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21200, 24 August 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

GREENLAND UNDER DANES

Cultural Administration :: An Expensive Luxury

(Professor W. W. Jervis, in Manchester Guardian)

(GREENLAND IS AN ISLAND, the largest island in the world, measuring more than 827.300 square miles. It is true that almost six-sevenths of the total area Is covered with an enormous and continuous ice-cap which is uninhabitable and almost inaccessible, but at the present moment, in seventy different settlements and trading places, there are about 17.000 colonists entirely cut off from Denmark and their only source of supplied? Since 1776 Greenland trade has been carried on at the cost of the Danish Government. The Royal Greenland “Trade” or Trading Company has the sole right of navigating and trading in these parts. Both Danish subjects and foreigners alike are forbidden to trade with the Greenlanders or Danish settlers and all vessels met off these coasts by Danish warships are bound to submit to the right of search. Denmark made a “Closed Country” of Greenland so that the Greenlander should continue as far as possible to pursue his natural economy and to live his own life, that contact with the Danes should aim at bringing to Greenland the advantages of Western civilisation as far as they could be assimilated and adopted, without its disadvantages. In other words, the aim was to create a good Greenlander and not a poor imitation of a Dane. The rate of progress from Stone Age culture to ability to participate in the general cultural life of Europe should not proceed at a quicker rate than the majority of natives can keep pace with. The Greenlanders themselves could not possibly handle the trade, they have no natural ability for commerce, and to grant them entire freedom of trade at present would be but to hand them over to deal with private individuals rather than with a protective and benign State. It worked In this way. In Copenhagen there existed a special department of the Ministry of the Interior whose function it was to deni with all affairs relating to trade, health, religion. and education in Greenland. This department (the Gronland Styrelse) was presided over by a director under whom there was an assistant who was responsible for the purchase of commodities to be sent to Greenland and for the sale of all merchandise exported from Greenland. Wheaten flour, coarse rye meal, rice, wooden boards for house-building, coffee, sugar, tobacco, rubber boots, fishing tackle, net strings, ironware, enamel-ware, fabrics, glass and china were sent to Greenland, while the State ships, which normally make the voyage to Greenland four times a year, brought back cargoes of skins of fox, bear, seal and narwhal, ivory tusks and barrels of blubber. At the end of the financial year Every Penny of Profit on this trade went to the Greenlander in the form of a bonus. The only mineral that has become an article of trade and given rise to a commercial undertaking in mining is cryolite, that rare fluoride of aluminium and sodium which is largely used for the making of opalescent glass and, with bauxite, in the production of aluminium. Greenland is the only country in the world where this mineral occurs extensively enough to justify large-scale

mining operations. It is found and worked at only one spot in the country—at Ivigtut, on the shores of the Arsuk Fiord. Since 1865 a monopoly for this mining has been granted to the Cryolite Mining and Trading Company, under the terms of which contract one-third of the net profits went back to the Greenlanders. Since 1782 it was recognised that the provinces of North and South Greenland were virtually Two Separate Countries, one inside and the other outside the Arctic Circle, and in each the regime of life is entirely different, each showing quaint differences in the matter of “human response.” Each has therefore its own Parliament to administer its own affairs, the Northern Parliament—consisting of twelve members elected on the basis of proportional representation—meeting at Godhavn, and the Southern Parliament meeting at Godthaab. The next large administrative unit is the Sysler. a county which has a council called the Sysselraad to administer its affairs and is presided over by a Dane who is the manager (or chief civil servant) of the colony. Every little settlement, or Udsted, has its own Community Council (Kummuneraad), whose chief function is the administration of relief to the poor and needy. The chairman of these councils serve on the Sysselraad ot their districts. All this has arisen out of Denmark’s consciousness of responsibility as trustee of these “backward inhabitants.” No charge was levied on the Greenlanders for medical attention and schooling was free. North and South Greenland each can boast an excellent newspaper issued monthly and given gratis. All Greenlanders over the age of 55 were given a pension by the Danish Government (£4 10s a year to a single person and £6 15s to a married couple). To the people of Denmark the possession of their Greenland colony was a costly luxury, the only justification for the possession of which was the recognition of a Cultural Obligation to the natives. Greenland was their trust —a trust nobly discharged. Every outlying “dwelling place” of Greenland received daily from Denmark a wireless programme, the news being broadcast in Danish and Greenlandic. But what is the situation today ? Such a cultural obligation is beyond the comprehension of the Nazis. What news is reaching Greenland of the events in the outside world ? To whom must these poor folk, living at the edge of the habitable globe, now turn for succour ? We remember, of course, that a short while ago endeavours to establish an air route between America and Europe for a time focused the eyes of the whole newspaper-reading world on Greenland. We remember that in 1832 the United States of America promulgated that dictum known as the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that no nation outside America is allowed to obtain new territory in the western hemisphere or to establish a new Government over any part of it. That Monroe Doctrine carries with it great responsibility. Greenland is in the western hemisphere.