Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Thursday June 11 2015, @04:16AM   Printer-friendly
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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Informative) by innocent_white_lamb on Thursday June 11 2015, @05:58AM

    by innocent_white_lamb (5074) on Thursday June 11 2015, @05:58AM (#194857)

    This sounds very similar to the Indian experience in Canada with residential schools. In the late 18th century and into the 1950's or so, Indian children were removed from their families and sent to residential schools where they were forbidden from using their own language and many were even assigned new names. Though most of them were operated by churches, the schools were apparently pretty much hell-holes with physical and sexual abuse being pretty much the standard operating procedure.

    Many of the people who were put into the residential schools are now broken people; drug and alcohol abuse is common and the whole thing is really shameful.

    I think that residential schools were established with the best of intentions, trying to integrate the "savages" into European-style civilization. And it didn't work out well.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Informative=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Thursday June 11 2015, @06:10AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday June 11 2015, @06:10AM (#194860) Journal

    Hose-heads, eh? Louis Riel!! Time for a Metis Nation, away from that oppressor Janeway! Oh, sorry, wrong Sci-fi convention? And besides, that was the "maquis", or the "resistance", nothing racial about it, except in Star Trek Voyaguer. Why do I keep coming back to that. Canada, voyageurs, the Bourgeoius, the Metis, Sun River in Montana, Royal Mounted Police, with the emphasis on the "mounted". and, "the Sun never sets on the British Empire". Danes were lucky they got a little geld early on. They obviously cannot compete when it comes to genocide. k

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @06:13AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @06:13AM (#194862)
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @07:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @07:03AM (#194871)

    The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

    Having worked for the Canadian organisation taksed to "fix" the probelm with Indian relocation orphans, I can tell you it gets no better.
    Money, Casinos and free education is what they get for years of sexual abuse and destroyed culture.

    Didn't they also have a similar program in Australia?

    Why can't we find those do gooders and strip them from their homes? Wonder how they would like it.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by jdccdevel on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:09PM

    by jdccdevel (1329) on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:09PM (#194982) Journal

    You forgot to mention the death rate. Over the course of the program in Canada, the odds of the students dying was 1 in 25. (For reference, the odds dying for a Canadian serving in WWII was 1 in 26)

    The last "residential school" in Canada didn't close until 1996, a number operated through the 1980s.

    Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission [www.trc.ca] on the history of these schools uncovered some staggering facts [www.cbc.ca]:

    The Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Canada's Indian residential schools uses the term cultural genocide for what happened to the 150,000 or so aboriginal children and their families while the schools operated.

    "Residential schooling was always more than simply an educational program: it was an integral part of a conscious policy of cultural genocide," the TRC's summary report states.

    In media interviews, TRC chair Justice Murray Sinclair has also revealed that the TRC has documented the deaths of over 6,000 residential school students as a result of their school experience, adding that there are probably more. It appears more about the number will await a later commission report.

    Those 6,000 deaths put the odds of dying in Canadian residential schools over the years they operated at about the same as for those serving in Canada's armed forces during the Second World War.

    As bad as they were, the "early years" of the program were even worse! Also from the article:

    Odds of a residential school student dying in the early years of the program: 1 in 2

            Duncan Campbell Scott, then deputy superintendent-general of Indian Affairs, wrote in 1913: "It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education, which they had received therein."

            During the program's first half-century, tuberculosis and then influenza were the primary killers. The neglect, abuse, lack of food, isolation from family and badly constructed buildings assisted disease in killing residential school "inmates," as Scott termed them. A lawyer who conducted a review in 1907 told the government, "Doing nothing to obviate the preventable causes of death, brings the Department within unpleasant nearness to the charge of manslaughter."

    As a Canadian, I can only imagine that how I feel about our history of residential schools must be similar to how Germans feel about the Holocaust.

    I am ashamed to know that my country, which prides itself on its multiculturalism, had a "conscious policy of cultural genocide". To know that my country waged a hidden war (with a death rate worse than one of the deadliest in history) against aboriginal youth and culture for 113 years sickens me.