Denmark's colonial rule over Greenland

Danish colonial rule in Greenland is depicted not as a single episode of direct force but as an evolving arrangement that shapes education, language, administration, commerce, and access to territory. Its central contradiction is that it can improve material security while weakening the institutions and practices through which Greenlanders govern their own lives. The novel traces that contradiction from Smilla’s childhood schooling to the tightly controlled expeditions and industrial development of her adult world.

Schooling, language, and authority

Smilla remembers that her first six months of schooling took place in her village, taught by a hunter’s wife. Then a Danish pastor and a West Greenlandic catechist arrived and ordered her to go to town without looking at the children’s faces. They called the northern residents avanersuarmiut, and her father, Moritz Jaspersen, made her attend the boarding school in Qaanaaq. She stayed five months, until she felt able to refuse and return home. In her account, the transfer is both an exercise of authority over a child’s life and an interruption of the local arrangements through which she had learned and worked.

The boarding school offered regular meals, daily hot baths, and clean clothes every other day—comforts that differed sharply from village life, where bathing was less frequent and water had to be gathered as ice and heated. But Smilla also recalls a loss of practical initiative. On a summer visit back to the hunters, she and the other students found that they could no longer readily undertake familiar tasks such as cooking, washing clothes, and preparing skins. School had provided services, yet dependence on those services had made it harder to resume responsibilities. When Smilla recognized this direction, she rebelled against Moritz and went home, recovering some contentment in her work.

Language policy extends that transformation beyond the school building. At Qaanaaq, Smilla and other children had teachers who knew no Greenlandic and did not intend to learn it. Students who excelled were promised education and a route to Denmark; that ascent was to take place in Danish. Smilla links this promise to the political effort to designate Greenland as Denmark’s northernmost county, call Inuit “Northern Danes,” and educate them to the same rights as other Danes. The language of equal status therefore arrives alongside an educational system that privileges Danish and treats Greenlandic as something to be left behind.

The loss is gradual rather than immediate. Smilla describes Greenlandic as the language in which she thought and remembered, but after moving to Denmark she found herself searching for ordinary words when she met another Greenlander. Later efforts to relearn it left her in an unresolved position: neither fully successful nor simply defeated. She compares this attrition to safety-line carabiners tested on Disko Island, which appeared dependable after three months in sea fog but could be pulled apart with a fingernail. The comparison makes the process legible as deterioration under exposure: a language can seem intact until its weakening becomes undeniable.

Everyday life and cultural misrepresentation

The novel counters official and ethnographic images of northern Greenland with the complexity of lived practice. Smilla describes her mother as moving across activities that European categories would separate as masculine and feminine: she raised children and cleaned skins, but also shot, paddled a kayak, and brought home meat. This is not presented as a performance for outsiders. It belongs to a way of life that does not fit neatly into imported classifications.

Smilla connects that account to the way Thule is represented by ethnographers. They preserve an image of Inuit life as innocent and timeless, with familiar exhibition-like figures drawn from the expectations of early explorers. Her mother unsettles that image in practical terms: she could use an old-style kayak while also using a sealed plastic container as a hunting float. The juxtaposition is important because it refuses the choice between an untouched past and wholesale assimilation. Local knowledge and adaptation coexist, while the external gaze tends to turn a living society into a fixed display.

Smilla’s own recollections of hunting make the cost of such simplification clear. When food is scarce, waiting, catching birds, and preparing food are part of a collective practical knowledge, not a decorative remnant of tradition. Her memories attend to the circumstances and relationships within that work. Against the institutional habit of classifying people from outside, they establish Greenlandic life as a set of learned practices and judgments that cannot be represented by a label alone.

Administration, commerce, and layered control

Colonial authority also appears through companies and public institutions rather than only through schools. A former chief accountant recalls that a corporation had six separate cafeterias, divided by occupational and managerial rank. On the day she was named chief accountant in 1957, she challenged the arrangement in a conversation with the minister of social welfare, arguing that its hierarchy was difficult to reconcile with Christian ideals of shared provision. A few years later, only one cafeteria remained. The episode shows that company practices could be challenged, but also that reform took place within a structure where public officials and corporate boards were intertwined.

The same accountant describes the complexity of public and private ownership. The company received some state support, the government held a seat on its board and owned a third of its shares, and some accounts were available for inspection. Yet cooperation with private companies and geological bodies produced complicated arrangements, and parts of the books were inaccessible even to her. Her own ledgers, bound in gray moleskin and kept in a safe, stand as a material sign of the difference between formal openness and complete access. Authority is distributed across government, companies, auditors, and technical institutions, but that distribution does not mean that every participant can see or decide everything.

Military and scientific access form another layer. Smilla is told that across nine expeditions in twelve years she served as navigator and used confidential maps, satellite and radar photographs, and meteorological information supplied by the military. Each time she signed a declaration of secrecy. The disclosure complicates her position: her history of conflict and nonconformity has not prevented institutions from granting her access to sensitive material in Greenland, while her familiarity with the region has made her valuable to those same institutions. The territory is not simply an open field of travel; access is managed through permits, specialized information, and obligations of confidentiality.

These systems of records and permissions reach into daily life. Smilla groups punch cards, work schedules, lists, passport controls, birth certificates, compulsory schooling, disclosure requirements, financial obligations, and secrecy oaths as parts of a broader machinery of state demands. She recognizes that Western systems of control and cataloguing are often meant to help, yet experiences their reach as an imposed framework that may confront a person at any moment. The small telephone through which orders can be issued aboard the Kronos condenses this tension: useful communication and centralized supervision occupy the same device.

Development, material benefits, and coercion

The narrative resists a simple account in which colonial change is only deprivation. Smilla recalls an elder, Ittussaarsuaq, who had lived through the transformation from an earlier way of life to the arrival of radio. Asked how life compared with the past, she answered that it was better because Inuit rarely died of hunger anymore. Smilla treats this judgment seriously. The improvement in material security cannot be dismissed merely because colonial power shaped the conditions under which it came about.

That recognition makes criticism more difficult, not less necessary. Smilla argues that hatred of colonization cannot remain pure when colonization has also improved the material conditions of an existence that was exceptionally difficult. Her account therefore distinguishes the relief of need from the question of who directs social change. The fact that people benefit from new services does not settle who controls education, language, resources, or the terms on which development proceeds.

By the time Smilla describes the offshore Greenland Star platform, coercion has taken a different form from the orders imposed on children at school. The enormous installation, made of linked metal pontoons and anchored far offshore, embodies a new scale of technological and resource-led development. Smilla says its creation is directed toward coercion, but clarifies that the point is no longer simply to coerce Greenlanders by military presence or direct violence. Those older forms are nearly at an end in the Arctic; the appeal to greed is now sufficient. Development works through the promise of gain and through a social order organized around that promise.

This change in method gives the novel’s treatment of colonial rule its lasting tension. Direct authority remains visible in schools, military restrictions, confidential information, and administrative demands, but it operates alongside corporate interests and the inducements of economic development. Greenlanders are not portrayed as passive objects of this process: Smilla resists schooling, returns home, and continues to interpret her own language and experience. Yet resistance takes place within institutions that control access and define the terms of advancement. Colonial rule persists less as a single command than as a network of dependencies whose material benefits and constraints cannot be cleanly separated.