NUUK, Greenland — The crowds lined the quay at the Colonial Harbor to cheer the start of the annual seal hunt competition on Greenland National Day. With a blast from an antique cannon, the rugged little skiffs darted out into the inky fjord. Soon the docks were slick with blood. The meat would feed residents at nursing homes, and the skins would make traditional clothing.
The hunter who shot the first seal? He won a rubber dinghy.
In their chill way, the citizens of semi-independent Greenland partied. Meaning, they drank coffee and ate cake, sang the national anthem in Greenlandic and waved Greenland’s red and white flags, adopted in 1985, just six years after Denmark granted partial home rule to its former colony.
National Day, held on the summer solstice, is a relatively new holiday, yet extremely popular — a way to celebrate not just a nation-to-be, but the survival of a unique, enduring culture.
Greenland believes it is winning. A reassertion of “Inuit pride,” especially among young people, is giving Greenlanders the strength to push back against a new would-be territorial governor: President Donald Trump, who vowed “one way or the other” that he would “get” Greenland.
For years a Cold War backwater, covered by a mile-high ice sheet, Greenland has emerged on the world stage mostly because of Trump — who burst back on the scene just as Greenland is undergoing a kind of postcolonial revival.
The cultural reawakening is especially pronounced among the young, who are taking renewed interest in old traditions, rediscovering facial tattoos, throat singing, drum dancing and kayaking. In schools, there are lessons with pre-Christian stories of spirits and monsters. Shamans and traditional healers have reappeared in the capital city and out in the settlements.
“We’re a lot stronger than many people think,” said Aviaq Reimer Olsen, who works with the seal skins at the Kittat Sewing Room in the historic harbor. “And we’re not going anywhere.”
Soon after Trump’s return to the White House, a visitor could find Greenlanders who were genuinely anxious that their neighbor, a superpower, might find a pretext to invade.
“Do you think we can do without it?” Trump asked in March. “We can’t.”
Trump has insisted that the world’s largest island is crucial for U.S. national security, as a bulwark against Chinese and Russian ships operating off North America’s furthest shore. His administration also covets Greenland for its untapped mineral wealth, especially the rare earth metals that power new technologies.
In his first term, Trump said he wanted to “buy” Greenland, perhaps like America bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. But he never made an offer.
In Greenland, people were pretty unanimous in saying their home wasn’t for sale.
More recently, Trump has alluded to a deal that might make the locals rich. But the language of a New York real estate developer might sound a little jarring to a native people who lived under full Danish colonial rule for 232 years.
Greenlanders point out that it is not possible to own the land itself here, only homes and other structures built on it. All land is held by the government and managed communally, a system that some call “Inuit socialism.” A sheep farmer can pass the use of the land to their children, but only if they farm it and the community agrees. If not, the use of the land goes to someone else.
There are ATMs, banks and mortgages, of course, and a modern market economy (based mostly on prawns, halibut and Danish subsidies) with potential for growth in tourism and mining. But there aren’t a lot of obviously rich folk in Greenland.
“We don’t really have millionaires, and I think most Greenlanders are okay with that. We’re all sort of in the middle,” said Malik V. Rasmussen, a young engineer in southern Greenland, who believes the coming generation of plugged-in Inuit — with more education and more training — could both preserve and transform the society.
Inunnguaq Petrussen is a musician, political adviser and writer in Greenland who sings in a rock band called Inuk. “We’re still a young democracy,” Petrussen said. “We all need to be more active, not just sit on the sofa and complain. We don’t need others looking after us anymore.”
Greenland’s tiny population, just 57,000 people, may be too small to be fully self-sustaining. About 90 percent are of Inuit descent. The rest are mostly Danes, who historically played an outsize role. A colony until 1953, Greenland is today an autonomous territory in the Kingdom of Denmark that has the right to declare independence — and form its own alliances and arrangements in the future, with Denmark or the United States or whomever, really.
Trump’s ardor, once viewed as threatening, has come to be seen in more subtle, and transactional, terms.
“When Donald Trump first started talking about buying Greenland, we thought it was a joke. But the more people thought about it, what they saw was that the president was underlining the geopolitical value of Greenland,” said Ebbe Volquardsen, a cultural history professor at the University of Greenland.
In that sense, the U.S. president helped debunk the idea that Greenland was a financial burden to Denmark, that it was just a welfare state to be supported as penance for the past sins of colonization of an Indigenous people by Danish missionaries and by resource extractors, who took whale oil, seal skins and most recently cryolite, used to make aluminum.
“So what Trump has done, essentially, is increase Greenland’s market value,” Volquardsen said. “Like, look, there’s someone out there willing to pay more! There’s a competing offer. So it’s not just an act of benevolence that Denmark supports Greenland.”
He added, “The idea now is that Denmark is getting something valuable in return.”
The professor said he sees a process of “mental decolonization” at work, in which Greenlanders are casting off colonial thinking to embrace their own culture. Trump, he said, might even be accelerating this.
Denmark grants Greenland about $700 million a year, about half of Greenland’s annual budget.
There is some poverty in Greenland — and binge drinking, suicide, sexual abuse and murder (with far higher rates of homicide than in Denmark). But there is also free education, free health care and subsidies for housing and social services, which might be hard for Washington to match if Greenland were made the 51st state.
The territory’s leadership say they welcome partners and investors but not new overseers. Since Trump’s return to office, Greenland has kept its American suitors at arm’s length.
Donald Trump Jr.’s one-day jaunt last January was largely viewed as a publicity stunt. Vice President JD Vance’s idea to attend dog sled races was nixed, as there was no official state invitation. Instead, the Vances ended up spending a few hours in March at the U.S. Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland. “It’s cold as s— here,” Vance told the troops.
Denmark has been careful not to provoke Trump but not to give ground, either. The Danish government twice this year has summoned the top American diplomat in Copenhagen to express its concerns over vague allegations of U.S. influence operations in Greenland.
At the same time, Trump appears to have rekindled Denmark’s interest in Greenland.
In September, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen traveled to Nuuk to offer a formal apology for her country’s role in the medical mistreatment of Inuit girls and women, who were given invasive contraception without their consent by Danish health workers, in cases dating from the 1960s until the early 1990s. The forced contraception was designed to lower the Indigenous birth rate.
Then in October, Denmark suddenly announced a big new defense package worth $8.5 billion, to bolster security in the North Atlantic, including Greenland. The buy includes new U.S. F-35 fighter jets, two Arctic vessels, maritime patrol aircraft and a new headquarters for the Joint Arctic Command in Greenland.
Greenland is not only feeling the love from Denmark, but also from European leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron, who visited Nuuk in an act of solidarity.
Lena Pedersen, who lives in Qaqortoq in southern Greenland and works at the regional hospital, has emerged as a leader in protesting a proposed mine that would have released uranium as a by-product.
At her home, she laid out medicinal plants on the dining table and poured cups of juniper tea. She joked that a snow bunting who visited her bird feeder must be a reincarnated relative. Pedersen said Greenlanders these days “are more proud that we are Inuit. And I think nearly everyone now is strong enough to say no to Trump.”
“It’s more important to Greenlandic people to be who we are,” she said. “And the world can learn from us.”
Pele Broberg, a leader of the opposition Naleraq party, said he sees “a new assertiveness” in his fellow Greenlanders. “More and more, the people are realizing they have rights,” Broberg said.
Greenland, however, is not like some former satellite country emerging from behind the Soviet Iron Curtain. “We are a formerly colonized people seeking independence,” he said. “Money should not be an impediment. First we decide if we want independence. Then negotiate the divorce.”
At present, the government in Greenland appears content with a slow but steady move toward more sovereignty and independence — but not going it alone. Polling is difficult on an island with scattered communities, but the most recent survey in January by pollster Verian, commissioned by the Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq, showed just 6 percent of Greenlanders in favor of becoming part of the United States, with 9 percent undecided and the rest against.
“It is odd the way that Donald Trump speaks to us,” said Ujammiugaq Engell, a leader of the local history museum in Nuuk. “The language feels very old-fashioned. He says ‘We are going to buy you’ or ‘We are going to get you.’ He knows that Greenlanders are Inuit? He knows that Greenland was a colony?”
Sorpa and Abel Jakobsen, a wife and husband, run a kayaking club in Qaqortoq in southern Greenland. She said students should learn that Greenlanders invented the kayak and paddled the boats for thousands of years. “Then the Danes brought the outboard engine and the kayak almost disappeared,” she said.
Two young men toted their handmade kayaks down to the water’s edge.
“It’s not a toy,” Abel Jakobsen told The Washington Post. “It saved our culture.”
He continued, “The Danish were quite aggressive. They didn’t care about our language, our traditions. As Inuit we almost lost our identity.”
Greenlandic wasn’t an official language in Greenland until 1979. The territory’s first — and only — university didn’t open until 1989.
Elizabeth Buchanan, author of the book “So You Want to Own Greenland?” and a senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said she assumed the most likely scenario for Greenland was to maintain the status quo.
“I think they will politically play off mum and dad,” meaning Denmark and the United States, “and attract as much funding as possible to lift social ills and deal with acute issues there,” Buchanan said, adding: “I think the Greenlandic people are smart and agile.”
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