SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the well-intentioned-but-oh-so-wrong dept.
In 1951, Denmark had resolved to improve living conditions in Greenland, its Arctic colony. Many people still made a living by hunting seal, only a small percentage spoke Danish, and tuberculosis was widespread.
The best way to modernise the island was to create a new type of Greenlander, the Danish authorities decided, so they sent out telegrams to priests and headteachers asking them to identify intelligent children between the ages of six and 10. The plan - formed with the help of the charity Save the Children Denmark - was to send them to foster families in Denmark so they could be re-educated as "little Danes".
Denmark, the colonial master over Greenland, decided to remove a group of 22 intelligent Inuit children from their families and relocate them to Denmark for re-education. The children were first quarantined and then placed in foster families. The next year part of them were returned to Greenland but they were placed instead of their homes to an orphanage where they were not allowed to use their mother tongue. Instead of becoming some new wonderful breed of citizens many of the subjects became alcoholics and died young.
[A female reporter looking at this event] received a letter from the Danish Red Cross in 1998 in which it said it "regretted" its role in the episode.
Finally, in 2009, Save the Children Denmark apologised too. But an internal investigation showed that some of the documents detailing the organisation's involvement have disappeared - Save the Children admits they could have been deliberately destroyed.
"When we look at what happened, it was a clear violation of children's fundamental rights. There's hardly a rule that hasn't been broken here," says Mimi Jacobsen, secretary general of Save the Children Denmark. "Their well-being was set aside in favour of a project. They meant well, but it all went terribly wrong. I suppose the thinking at the time was that they wanted to educate and improve Greenlanders to give them a better future."
The Danish Government has not yet apologized for this experiment. Greenland now has it's own parliament which decides upon and administers internal matters, but Denmark retains control over constitutional affairs, foreign relations and defence.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 11 2015, @05:02AM
Despite that I am an engineer and a physicist I am quite strongly in favor of religious freedom. Consider how many have willingly faced martyrdom rather then deny their faiths.
Despite it's widespread reputation as a forward-thinking nation, Canada has a long history of similar human rights violations. I expect it does better today in part because of its horrified contemplation of its own past.
There are lots of Inuit in northern Canada as well, particularly Labrador. When I lived in Canada it was all over the news that Inuit children could not be stopped from inhaling plastic garbage sacks full of gasoline vapor. See they were settled into villages, provided with education of course that free medical care Canada is so famous for but what they weren't provided with was anything meaningful to do with their abundant free time.
While not as severe it was somewhat like that in my ex' home of Newfoundland. St. John's was a real nice place to live but Bonita told me that when she was a teenager, there wasn't a whole lot for them to do other than steal cars, joyride them for a little while than push them over a cliff. Her hometown in "outport Newfoundland" - also known as "round the Bay" - that is, small rural fishing village, is hundreds of years old and of significant historical and economic importance. Even so it is dying in that there are no jobs for the young people. No one seems to have the initiative to establish new businesses there.
It's been particularly bad since the collapse of the code fishery in the seventies or so. The provincial and federal government funded lots of vocational skills - beauty colleges and the like - with the result that everyone has a vacational certificate but are still unemployed, this because they cannot bear to leave the home their people have known for five hundred years.
Bonita was excited at first to come live with me in Santa Cruz. She had visited a couple times so we both thought she knew what to expect but during the plane ride when she was actually coming to stay, she was overcome with tears of grief the entire way.
Finally, Bonita's grandmother was taken from her family in Birmingham, England during World War I for reasons I'm not clear about. Bonita thinks it was to keep her safe from the bombing but England was not bombed at all during World War I. She hopes to visit Birmingham someday, to find her roots, but she is of very modest means. Despite that we are divorced I hope to pay her way there someday.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 11 2015, @05:06AM
It is commonly taught that the Pilgrims left England to settle at Plymouth Rock because they faced religious persecution. In fact it is true that all manner of religious sects were among the New World's earliest colonists - not just in the US but Canada too.
In reality the Pilgrims left England for Holland where their religion was completely cool with the locals.
What really happened was that they decided to sail to America because their children were speaking Dutch.
While not true in a strict sense, it can be said that they chose to land at Plymouth Rock rather than the destination they originally planned because they ran out of beer.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Appalbarry on Thursday June 11 2015, @06:01AM
And just this week the final report came out from Canada's "Truth and Reconciliation" Committee - the group that examined Canada's "Residential Schools," where native children were shipped to teach them how to be White. Details. [www.trc.ca]
Thankfully it's been almost a week since that story broke, so we can forget about it again and focus on telling each other how peachy keen non-racist we are.
(Score: 0) by Kurses on Friday June 12 2015, @04:26AM
I honestly don't understand this report. I grew up learning about residential schools in grade school 20 some years ago, and had heard about them quite often since. How is this report new news? Are there people who didn't know that they had existed?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 11 2015, @09:54AM
Correction [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by BK on Thursday June 11 2015, @12:41PM
Who should be responsible for providing something meaningful to do?
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:59PM
Those that settled them in villages, and imposed civilization on them, i.e. disrupted their culture's way of life.
It's like imposing democracy on a country that isn't ready for it.
(Score: 2) by BK on Thursday June 11 2015, @05:23PM
That's a bit simplistic.
Hunter-gatherer cultures, if successful, expand and encroach on each other or on other (types of) civilizations. Sometimes the other civilizations and cultures encroach on the hunter-gatherers. The result is the same in either case. This is called war.
In the last century, for a variety of reasons, it became possible to settle the survivors after winning the wars. While horrible to the cultural relativist, this is the best option available so far... unless you want to re-fight the same war every 15-25 years... or kill every last one of them (which has also been tried and is also unpopular among cultural relativists and others.)
It's like the winner of the war sets the terms and maintains the peace... victor's justice. In Canada and the USA at least, they aren't trapped in these places... these reservations. These are not prisons. They can move to Montreal or Saint John or Toronto or whatever. But they don't want to. But it's a choice.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday June 12 2015, @06:22AM
roam around in the woods and across the ice.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2015, @03:51PM
England WAS very much bombed during WWI. By Zeppelins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_strategic_bombing_during_World_War_I [wikipedia.org]
Please note the opening lines of the article: "The best-known German strategic bombing campaign during World War I was the campaign against England..."
Countless books, movies, etc. are available on the subject. Though to be fair, if history is not one's hobby, then one may not know. In which case one should not mention it.
_