Greenland, China, and Colonialism

August 30, 2019 By Christopher Skeet

A few years ago, my wife and I were vacationing in Iceland. In a Reykjavik corner store selling tourist trips and activities, a large poster screaming Greenland! caught my eye. It pictured a few colorful houses on a rocky shore, but little else. We asked the clerk if she recommended the advertised boat ride. She glanced around to make sure nobody was in earshot, then bluntly said, “No, not unless you like hanging around fishing villages with nothing to do”.

We don’t, so we passed on that trip, opting instead to snowmobile across a nearby glacier. I haven’t thought about Greenland since, until President Trump recently expressed interest in buying it from Denmark. Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide-by-Clinton took the back burner as pundits filled the airwaves with commentary regarding the utility of such an endeavor.

But leave it to The New Republic to publish this gem  by staff writer and I'm-gonna-remind-you-in-every-waking-moment-that-I'm-Native-American Nick Martin. Martin is in a tizzy over the prospect of “colonizing” powers extending their tentacles over Greenland to expedite the “erasure of Indigenous people and the land they steward.” The indigenous people are the local Inuit, who settled the island 700 years ago and who “understand the land they live on not as an opportunity to stuff their pockets, but as a place to protect and preserve.” .........To Read More...