As in Canada, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 did not go unnoticed in this icy Danish province. In the year of its passage Greenlanders voted into their provincial council463 some radical youth, including an unknown twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher, Lars-Emil Johansen (whom I would meet years later as the former prime minister of Greenland), and the young firebrand Moses Olsen. These two began stridently objecting to Denmark’s sovereignty of Greenland, and for the first time in memory, Greenlanders began thinking seriously about disentangling themselves from Copenhagen’s colonial rule.
One year later, Greenlanders heartily rejected Denmark’s referendum to join the European Community (predecessor to today’s EU) with 70% of the vote. Alongside their growing nationalism, natural resources were again a root cause, but this time going the other way: Danish membership in the EC would impose fishing restrictions and a sealskin ban on Greenland, both dear to her small aboriginal economies. The referendum passed anyway, but the vote was a wake-up call to Copenhagen. Within months the Danish Parliament was cooperating with Greenland’s minister and provincial council to explore the possibility of political self-rule. Greenlanders then overwhelmingly passed a public referendum on whether or not to advance the idea. In 1979 the Greenland Home Rule Act was passed, and Greenland became a politically autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark. 464 In 1982 she withdrew from the European Community.
Greenland Home Rule wasn’t a “land claim” in the property title sense, as there is no private land in Greenland (while privately owned structures may be built, all land title is held for the public good). But the end result was the same. For the next thirty years Greenlanders controlled the use of their land and set about building up an autonomous government, services, and political apparatus, just as Nunavut is doing today.
This continued for three decades. Then, in 2008, Greenlanders headed back to the polls. A new Greenland referendum was proposing even further divorce proceedings from Denmark. Its sweeping reforms would include taking over the police force, courts, and the coast guard. Greenland’s official language would be changed from Danish to Greenlandic. Revenues from future oil and gas development would be shared between the two countries, so that the Danish subsidies needed for Greenland’s survival could be phased out. Greenland would conduct its own foreign affairs with other countries. The referendum passed overwhelmingly and entered effect in 2009. This island—bursting with offshore gas along both flanks—is now on a political path to full and complete independence.465
The Unfair Geography of Aboriginal Power
The modern land claims agreements in North America, and Home Rule in Greenland, are big deals. Politically, they portend a fundamental shift of power from central to aboriginal governments. Economically, they portend abolishment of a culture of paternalism and welfare in favor of engaging aboriginal people in the modern global economy. These new commitments are here to stay. In Canada, for example, the new land claims agreements are even protected by a constitutional amendment.466 While not perfect, this devolutionary trend is a giant step forward relative to abuses of the past. It signals a profound return of autonomy and dignity to many northern aboriginal peoples.
Notice I said “northern.” Nearly all of this new control lies north of the sixtieth parallel. It is an assemblage of people living way up there—the Alaska Natives, Inuit, Yukon Indians, Dene Nation, Greenlanders, and others— who have most cause to celebrate.
Geography and luck greatly explain this uneven spatial pattern of new aboriginal clout. Many remote northern groups escaped being cajoled into old-fashioned treaties during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries because their homelands were distant and undesired. Permafrost tundra and spruce bogs held little appeal to white homesteaders. While northern aboriginals were infected, harassed, and resettled, they were not forced to sign away their claims to the land. With no historic treaty signed, their ancestral claims to the land were never extinguished.467 Legally, this left them in a strong bargaining position by the time a more progressive interpretation of their legal and civil rights arrived in the 1970s.
Most importantly, their remote geography meant there was actually still something left to negotiate
The unfair geography of aboriginal power. Shaded areas indicate lands where aboriginal groups have total or partial control, either through reserves, deeded property, or joint management through modern land claims or home-rule agreements. Alaska boundaries delineate the jurisdictional borders of the twelve Regional Corporations established by ANCSA. Aboriginal control is greatest in the far north and Greenland; in southern Canada and the lower 48 U.S. states it is constrained to much smaller reserves and reservations set by historical treaties. (Map data assembled from multiple sources.468)
The situation is totally different in southern Canada and the lower forty-eight American states. While British colonial law did hold a modicum of respect for aboriginal land rights,469 you know already the centuries-long tale of death and displacement following European colonization of the New World. Between 1492, when Christopher Columbus found Haiti (and misnamed its inhabitants “Indians”), and 1923, when the last Indian Reserve Treaty was signed in Canada, North America was a place where white settlers shot, diseased, and connived aboriginal people off their land. Millions of deaths and four centuries of lopsided treaties later, their descendants are boxed into tiny scattered fragments of land, often enveloped by private property. These treaties, no matter how unfair by today’s standards, extinguished their land claims. They have no hope of another. Reservations can grow, but only by buying out their neighbors, if they’ll sell, at market value. Even if surrounded by public lands, with their claims extinguished they have no legal standing to sue for a new treaty.470
ANCSA deeded about forty million acres of property to Alaska Natives. The modern land claims agreements in Canada ceded joint or total control of just over one billion more,471 with dozens of smaller claims still pending. In contrast, the sum total of all aboriginal reservations in the lower United States is about seventy million acres, which, if you could sweep all the bits together, might add up to the area of Colorado. Reservation populations may be growing, but their borders are not. There will not be another Nunavut.
President Keskitalo’s Argument
I was in Tromso sitting with Aili Keskitalo, president of the Norwegian Sami Parliament. She was describing the plight of her Sami people (Lapps472), the aboriginal occupants of northern Europe. The petite thirty-eight-year-old mother leaned forward in her chair, speaking quietly but blue eyes blazing.
“Our language. Our symbols. Our traditional knowledge. They are threatened. In some areas, to a very large extent. We need to have a say in how the natural resources are exploited!”
I nodded. Once again my climate-change project was going down the tubes. When was she going to talk about crusty snow and starving reindeer? But then, while explaining how her parliament was very busy yet politically toothless, with no vote in Oslo, she unknowingly connected the dots for me.
“The climate change, it makes the oil, the gas, the mineral resources in the North more accessible. So the need to get control over the resource management is even more important, because of the climate change.” She sat back in exasperation. “If you have no representation, how can you have an influence on resource management?”
If there was ever a moment when my perspective suddenly broadened on the future of the northern countries I was traveling, that was probably it. We talked some more, so I could assemble in my own head what was already so obvious in hers. Everything is linked. Shrinking ice, natural resource demand, and political power were all tugging on each other. My scientist’s training had wrongly led me down the path of dissect, isolate, and rank. This works well for a focused problem, but is not always best for gaining a synoptic understanding of the
