A view from Greenland about forced child removal as Greenlanders protest Danish welfare services

As hundreds of Greenlanders in Nuuk, Copenhagen and other cities and towns protest Danish child welfare actions, I’m writing to provide broader context and perspective about the legacy of child welfare systems in the Arctic and their impacts and implications for Inuit and our human rights.

The story of a Greenlandic Inuk woman in Denmark whose newborn baby was forcibly removed from her in November by Danish social services has drawn international attention and sparked fierce protests in both Greenland and Denmark.

The protests also highlight the disturbingly high proportion of Greenland Inuit children in Denmark who are removed from their families by the Danish child welfare system. These children face linguistic and cultural assimilation, risking the loss of their identities and heritage.

In recent years, as many as 5.6 percent of all Greenlandic children in Denmark have been living in care, compared to 1 percent of ethnic Danish children. According to Statistics Greenland, about 15,000 Greenlanders live in Denmark, making up less than half a percent of Denmark’s population.

While the Government of Greenland exercises jurisdiction over child welfare within Greenland, Greenlanders who move to Denmark fall under Danish jurisdiction. For many Indigenous Peoples, child welfare systems carry a sinister legacy of being weaponized by governments to accelerate cultural assimilation by placing Indigenous children with non-Indigenous families.

In Greenland, many Inuit perceive similarly dark intentions behind the Danish child welfare system, rooted in the legacy of Danish colonialism and racism toward Greenlanders. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, and possibly even more recently, the Danish government sterilized thousands of Greenlandic Inuit women—many of them minors—both in Greenland and in Denmark without their consent.

The Danish press has previously reported on the cultural biases and other systemic problems within parental competency tests used by many Danish municipalities to decide whether to remove Greenlandic and other children from their parents. These tests rely on dubious measures, such as psychological evaluations based on Rorschach inkblot tests and IQ tests conducted in Danish—a second language for most Greenlanders, with spoken varying levels of proficiency.

In November, Greenland’s minister for children called on his Danish counterpart to direct Danish municipalities to stop applying these tests to Greenlandic parents. However, Danish lawmakers have so far deferred to municipal governments, leaving the decision-making process unchanged.

In the U.S. and Canada, child welfare systems were deliberately weaponized against Indigenous Peoples during the 1950s and 1960s. Children were forcibly removed from their families by social services workers for the flimsiest reasons, such as caregivers feeding children traditional foods or raising them in traditional dwellings—practices deemed “uncivilized.”

This history is one of the reasons the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirms the right of Indigenous Peoples to belong to their communities or nations and calls on states to prevent and provide redress for forced assimilation. However, despite Denmark recognizing Greenland Inuit as Indigenous people, no legal framework exists in Denmark or Greenland affirming specific Indigenous rights. Nor is it clear who such rights would apply to if they were established.

Unlike Inuit in Alaska and Canada, who are members of federally recognized tribes and Inuit Treaty Organizations, Greenland Inuit are Danish citizens and have no separate legal status. This places them in an ambiguous position compared to other Inuit in North America.

By contrast, governments in Canada and Alaska have taken steps to remedy the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in child welfare systems. The U.S. Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 affirms the right of tribes, including Alaska Inuit tribes, to exercise self-determination over the placement of their members. Similarly, Canada’s 2019 legislation affirms the right of Inuit and other Indigenous Peoples to exercise jurisdiction and lawmaking authority over their child welfare systems.

The Inuvialuit Regional Corporation in Canada, for example, has developed its own child welfare laws. These frameworks rely on Indigenous Peoples’ ability to determine their membership and exercise their rights in child welfare matters.

Greenland, however, has a unique history and political status as a self-governing, majority-Inuit island nation under Danish sovereignty. Despite grumblings among some lawmakers here about the need to establish a process for determining who is an Inuk, as a possible step toward exercising Indigenous rights, the concept is perceived as controversial and even discriminatory by some in a society that has only recently begun to grapple with these challenges.

In the absence of a legal framework granting greater control to Greenlanders over Inuit child welfare in Denmark, Inuit children will likely continue to be disproportionately represented in the child welfare system, regardless of the criteria used to evaluate their caregivers.

The sad reality is that many child welfare workers likely hold preconceived, negative views of Greenlanders, who report high levels of discrimination in their daily lives in Denmark. While some Greenlandic families in Denmark undoubtedly face struggles and require support, removing children from their caregivers should be a last resort—an action taken in their best interests and in the interest of preserving Inuit culture and society, guided by their own people and on their own terms.

Tim Aqukkasuk Argetsinger is Iñupiaq from Anchorage, Alaska, with roots in Kotzebue and Deering. He has lived with his family in Nuuk, Greenland, since 2019.