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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.


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  • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:59PM

    by quacking duck (1395) on Thursday June 11 2015, @01:59PM (#194951)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by BK on Thursday June 11 2015, @05:23PM

    by BK (4868) on Thursday June 11 2015, @05:23PM (#195046)

    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 imposing democracy on a country that isn't ready for it.

    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.