In 1951, a ship left Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, headed for Denmark: on board there were 22 children between six and ten years old, separated from their families inuit to be educated in Europe, and to be able to facilitate as adults a “modernization” of Greenlandic society, hoped for by the Danish government. Of those 22 children, only 16 returned to Greenland a year later, who have since lived in an orphanage to preserve the customs and language they learned in Denmark.
Almost seventy years later, the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen she apologized officially: “We can’t change what happened, but we can take responsibility for it and apologize to who we should have protected.” For many years, the children and families involved in the affair had been asking for official recognition of their suffering and an apology, but the previous Danish governments had considered it not their responsibility.
Helene Thiesen, one of the Inuit girls brought to Denmark in 1951, told the Danish news agency Ritzau to be relieved that the apology has finally come: “It’s very, very important. It means everything. I’ve been fighting for this since 1998 ». In 2015, Thiesen he had told its history a BBC, explaining that she only found out she was separated from her family for a social experiment in 1996, when a Danish author who had researched the national archive revealed it to her. Until then, Thiesen did not know why her mother had sent her to another country for months, and had not welcomed her back into the house.
An Inuit fisherman in 1930. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
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The project was decided by the Danish authorities in collaboration with the local division of Save the Children, applying an ethnocentric solution to what they perceived as a problem to be solved: the alleged social and cultural backwardness of the Inuit, the population that had inhabited Greenland for centuries, where from the eighteenth century sporadic Danish colonizers and missionaries had begun to settle. Its status as a colony would have been abolished in 1953 with the drafting of the new constitution of Denmark, which still manages its monetary, diplomatic and military matters.
At the time, a large part of the Greenlandic population lived by hunting seals and did not speak Danish, and tuberculosis was common in the settlements. To solve these problems, the Danish authorities tried to turn about twenty Inuit children into perfect Danes, so that when they returned home they could guide the progress of their settlements. Thiesen’s father had died of tuberculosis for three months, and his mother was left alone with three children to raise. When there was a knock on her door asking that she let Helene go, she refused: but after long insistence and promises about her better future she was convinced.
So did 20 other families, whose children embarked without understanding exactly why they were separating them from their parents, brothers and sisters. Thiesen told a BBC that as soon as they arrived in Copenhagen they were placed in quarantine, after which even the queen visited them. They were then sent to as many families around the country, and within a few months the experiment was already described as a success in Danish magazines: “The lifestyle in Denmark is very different from what these children are used to, but their ability to adapt is remarkable. Problems related to their reaction to civilization are very rare ».
In the first adoptive family Thiesen found herself very ill: due to an eczema her father, a doctor, smeared her with an ointment and forbade her to enter the living room for fear that it would dirty, while her mother had mental problems and was always in bed. The second family was much more loving, she said, but the following year she and 15 other children were sent back to Nuuk. The others were adopted by the families who had fostered them, despite their biological parents being alive.
But once home, after embracing his mother again, Thiesen realized that they now spoke different languages and could not understand each other. Just to preserve what they had learned, the children were immediately taken by bus to an orphanage built by the Red Cross, to prevent them from returning to the living conditions of their families. The children were not given explanations, and Thiesen never really recovered from his mother, who was forever resentful of the treatment she received and for which she did not know the reasons.
That experience profoundly marked her life, from an emotional point of view, and only at 52 did Thiesen discover the truth about her mother’s behavior: «Is she sitting? He took part in a social experiment, ”the author told her who had discovered the documents on her history. Seven of the 22 children who left for Denmark are still alive today and live in Nuuk, and they meet occasionally, Thiesen said. Some died young, homeless and alcoholics, and none were the driving force behind the modernization advocated by the Danish authorities. Indeed, he explains BBC, mostly they lived on the fringes of even a small Greenlandic society, deprived of their roots and their identity, their language and their family ties. “We all think it was wrong, we felt a sense of loss and a lack of self-esteem, and these emotions never went away.”
The first apologies to Thiesen came in 1998 from the Red Cross, then in 2009 from Save the Children Denmark (which, it turned out, probably destroyed internal documents on the affair) and finally this year from the Danish government. Today Thiesen lives in Denmark: she had sworn that she would never marry a Dane after what had happened to her, but in the end she did. She graduated, worked as an educator and is now retired.
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