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Greenland, known in the Inuit landguage as Kalaallit Nunaat (“land of the people”), has been inhabited by successive waves of Inuit cultures for almost 5,000 years. The earliest people came across the narrow strait between Ellesmere Island and Thule in northern Greenland at times when the sea was frozen. Their stories have been pieced together from the artifacts they left behind, interpreted by archeologists and anthropologists.
Among the earliest Greenlanders were members of the Saqqaq Culture, reindeer hunters who first
crossed the strait more than 4,000 years ago and remained in Greenland until about 900 BC. Later came the Dorset culture, who used large snow-cutting knives that indicate that they built igloos. The ulo, a type of women’s knife still used today, was also characteristic of these people.
After about a 900-year gap during which Greenland appears to have been uninhabited, an Inuit group now known as Dorset 2 settled in the eighth and ninth centuries in the northern part of the island. The Thule culture followed around the tenth century, spreading along both the east and west coasts. Thule people developed the qajaq (kayak), harpoon, and dogsled. Today’s Inuit are descended from the Thule and are known as the Inussuk.
Although it is likely that Norse sailors from Iceland first sighted Greenland around AD 900, it wasn’t until AD 985 that Eric the Red brought significant settlement. The Icelanders first established themselves in communities on the western coast not far from present-day Nuuk. There may have been about 5,000 people in Greenland at the height of settlement in the 13th century. The reasons for the later disappearance of the Icelandic colonies, sometime after the last known report from them in the early 15th century, remain an intriguing mystery.
The Inuit had Greenland largely to themselves for a time, with only occasional expeditions from Norway and England, as well as European whalers stopping by from the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries. King Christian IV claimed the island for Denmark in 1605, after European interest had been revived by the search for a Northwest Passage, but it wasn’t until 1721 when missionary Hans Egede arrived that settlement by Europeans resumed. Egede found the Inuit receptive to Christianity and established the Evangelical Lutheranism that is still practiced today. Greenlanders have held full Danish citizenship since 1953 and have exercised home rule in domestic affairs, with their own parliament, since 1979.
In 2008, a special referendum was passed to increase Greenland’s self-rule, giving the local population more control over the court system, the police, and the coast guard. Although it was a historic step towards political independence, the economy of Greenland remains very much tied up with Denmark’s, and certain areas of government are still under Danish control.