The first clash of new technology and traditional society took place in the Arctic Circle, where it brought about some strange effects. The people of Greenland were so taken with the idea that they embraced a Danish social experiment to take Inuit children away from their families and teach them Danish values. This was a failure on many levels – but not least because the children didn’t want to be separated from their parents after all.
The “Denmark Indigenous” is a social experiment that took place in Denmark. The project was designed to separate Inuit children from their families and place them into Danish homes to learn the language and culture of Denmark. However, the project has been widely criticized for its failure to provide adequate support for the children who were placed with families.
Helene Thiesen was one of 22 Inuiit children that were removed from their family 70 years ago in Greenland.
Note from the editor: This article is part of CNN’s ongoing commitment to exploring topics of race, gender, sexuality, religion, class, and caste.
Helene Thiesen, seven years old, stared out the window of the passenger ship MS Disko, knowing she was sailing from Greenland to Denmark. What she couldn’t comprehend was why her mother had sent her away on that dreadful day in 1951.
Thiesen, now 77 years old, recounted to CNN, “I felt really heartbroken.” Thiesen couldn’t return the wave to her mother and two brothers, who were watching from the port off the shore of Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. “I gazed into (my mother’s) eyes and wondered why she was allowing me to go.”
Thiesen was one of 22 Inuit youngsters who were abducted from their families and forced to participate in a botched sociological experiment. Many of children, aged 5 to 9, would never see or live with their relatives again, becoming forgotten and neglected in their own country.
Greenlanders were suffering from high levels of poverty, bad quality of life, and high rates of death at the time, according to Einar Lund Jensen, a project researcher at the National Museum of Denmark.
After a visit from Queen Ingrid of Denmark, the Inuit children are shown at an orphanage in Greenland wearing clothing prepared especially for them. According to Thiesen, the girls referred to them as their “princess outfits.”
According to Jensen, who co-authored a recent government-commissioned paper probing the program, Denmark’s goal was “to generate tiny Danes who would become the intelligentsia; role models for Greenland.”
As postwar decolonization movements swept the world, the Danish authorities felt obligated to modernize the northern colony in order to protect their interests. According to him, they adopted a concept from the Danish human rights group Save the Children of bringing Inuit children to the nation to recuperate from what they regarded to be poor living circumstances.
He went on to say that the presumption at the time was that “Danish society is superior than Greenlandic society.”
After a year and a half in Denmark, the children were sent back to Greenland to live in an orphanage managed by another organization, the Danish Red Cross, in Nuuk, where they were segregated from their relatives and forbidden from speaking their native dialect. The Danish Red Cross has been contacted by CNN for comment.
Many of the youngsters returned to Denmark as adults, despite the fact that they were seen as aliens by Greenlanders. According to Jensen, up to half of the group suffered mental illness or drug misuse issues later in life. Many people were jobless and living in poverty, according to Thiesen.
Kristine Heinesen, 76, who, along with Thiesen, is one of the six Greenlandic social experiment survivors living today, says the Danish government “ripped our identity and family away from us.” Heinesen confesses that her life has been good since her days at the orphanage as she walks through a cemetery in Copenhagen where several of her old buddies are now buried. “But I know many of the other children suffered more as they grew up, and I believe the fact that we’re only six out of 22 — it tells the tale very well,” she remarked, her face hidden by a Greenlandic fur-lined cloak.
Kristine Heinesen pays a visit to a Copenhagen cemetery where some of her acquaintances are buried.
In 2015, Save the Children issued an apology for their role in the social experiment. After pressure from campaign organizations, the Danish government issued an apology five years later, but has failed to pay those who are still living, according to the victims’ lawyer, Mads Krger Pramming. In late December 2021, he filed a compensation suit in Copenhagen’s district court for 250,000 kroner ($38,000) apiece.
According to their claim, the Danish government has acted “in contravention of existing Danish legislation and human rights, including the plaintiffs’ right to private and family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).”
Denmark’s Minister of Social Affairs and the Elderly told CNN that the government was investigating the compensation claim.
“For the Danish Government, the most essential part has been a public apology to the now-adult children and their families for the betrayal they suffered.” Astrid Krag said, “This was a huge step in redressing the Government’s failure; a duty that no prior government had taken on.”
“The administration and I think that acknowledging previous errors is important in and of itself, and that we must learn from them so that history does not repeat itself.”
The hearing is expected to take place within the next ten months, and Pramming said that “it is still our goal that the government would resolve the matter and provide compensation before the hearing.”
“They don’t believe an apology is adequate” after what the six victims have gone through, he continued.
Heinesen had been separated from her family since she was five years old.
‘Cultural elimination’ is a term used to describe the process of eliminating a culture.
The experiment’s goal, which was approved in 1950, was to enroll orphans, but according to researcher Jensen, it was difficult to locate enough youngsters. He stated that the limits were expanded to include motherless or fatherless homes, and 22 children were chosen, despite the fact that many of them were living with their extended families or with one parent.
Thiesen’s widowed mother first turned down two Danes’ offer to take her small daughter to Denmark, Thiesen said CNN. But, in the end, she accepted on the condition that Thiesen have a higher education.
According to Jensen, the Danes, who assisted in the identification of the youngsters for the experiment, wielded power in Greenland as colonists.
Karla Jessen Williamson, a Greenlandic assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan and a member of the Greenland Reconciliation Commission, told CNN that it would have been difficult for a Greenlander to deny them at the time.
“The authorities (were) revered and feared, as they were in every colonial country; rebutting these authority was impossible,” she stated.
There were questions about whether any of the parents were completely informed or understood what they were committing to, according to the report Jensen co-authored on the project.
What happened to the children, according to Williamson, exemplifies the catastrophic and purposeful impacts of cultural annihilation throughout colonialism. “There was an elimination of the distinctiveness of culture, of the link with the land, of the diversity of languages, and spirituality in colonial times — and these would have been done away with so that (the colonized) could be socialized into being part of the colonial state,” she added.
The kids spent their first four months in Denmark at Fedgaarden, a summer camp.
The youngsters were sheltered in Fedgaarden, a Save the Children summer camp on the southern Feddet peninsular, for four months after arriving in Denmark. The youngsters were not allowed to speak Greenlandic, an Inuit dialect, and were instead taught Danish.
The kids were both afraid and awed by their new environment. Heinesen was just 5 years old at the time, but remembers “all the trees – we don’t have any trees in Greenland, so I remember how tall and enormous they were.”
They were subsequently separated and put with different foster homes for a year. Thiesen did not feel at ease at her first foster family’s house. Her eczema necessitated the use of an ointment, and she was not permitted to sit on the furniture. “Every day,” she said, “I felt homesick.”
Her second foster home was more kind, purchasing a bicycle and a doll for her and treating her as if she were a member of the family.
Six of the Inuit youngsters stayed in Denmark and were adopted by their foster family when it came time to return to Greenland. According to historian Jensen, the adoptions were “totally against the entire concept of returning back (to Greenland) and joining the intellectual elite.” “It was, in my judgment, a mistake,” he remarked.
‘I couldn’t see anything because of my tears.’
In October 1952, they returned to Greenland and were put in a Danish Red Cross orphanage in Nuuk. The children’s custody was given to the orphanage’s headmistress, according to the court suit.
During her seven years at an orphanage, Thiesen only visited her mother a few times.
Thiesen remembers her family waiting for her at Nuuk’s quay. “I threw down my luggage and dashed up to them, telling them all I had seen.” “However, my mother did not respond,” Thiesen stated. It was because she was speaking Danish and her mother was speaking an Inuit dialect of Greenlandic, which Thiesen couldn’t comprehend.
Their reunion lasted a total of ten minutes. Thiesen told CNN that a Danish nurse caring for the children urged her to let go of her mother since she was now living in an orphanage. “I sobbed the whole way to the orphanage because I was so excited to visit my hometown, but I couldn’t see anything because of my emotions.”
16 of the youngsters were placed in an orphanage. They were only permitted to speak Danish, were placed in a Danish-speaking school, and had little or no contact with their family. According to the court allegation, no one notified Heinesen that her biological mother died shortly after she entered the orphanage.
According to Jensen, maintaining in contact with the foster family was a priority. Thiesen’s mother was only permitted to see her daughter a few times throughout the seven years she was detained, according to the court suit.
“For these youngsters to be isolated from Greenlandic culture and their parents in such a way was psychologically painful,” Jensen added. “Even those who (had relatives in Nuuk) said that they were not permitted to see them.” On Sundays, the orphanage would sometimes invite the family to coffee, but the children were never given a proper opportunity to communicate with their relatives.”
Gabriel Schmidt examines a collection of vintage pictures. He is one of just six people living today who survived the social experiment.
They were enrolled in a Danish school and were not allowed to play or mingle with the town’s Greenlandic youngsters. According to survivor Heinesen, the youngsters were only permitted to interact with famous Danish families who resided in Nuuk.
The children started to be seen as foreigners by the Greenlanders. Greenlandic youngsters in Nuuk would cry, “You don’t know Greenlandic, you’re not Greenlandic,” and hurl rocks at them, according to Gabriel Schmidt, 76, one of the six survivors of the sociological experiment who now lives in Denmark. “However, I couldn’t comprehend much of what they said since I had forgotten my language in Denmark,” he said from his home.
Greenland was completely incorporated into Denmark in 1953 and awarded self-government in 1979. During that time, according to Jensen, Danish and Greenlandic authorities lost interest in the social experiment as Greenland’s infrastructure, commercial sector, and healthcare changes gained precedence.
‘Do you have a seat?’
By 1960, all of the orphans had left the institution, and virtually all of them had returned to Denmark. The six survivors claim it has taken them a lifetime to recover their sense of self.
Schmidt moved back to Denmark to live with his foster mother, where he finally found work as a Danish army solider. Schmidt, speaking from his clean Copenhagen home, claimed the army had called him. “It was a lifesaver for me.” It provided me with structure, companions, and a sense of purpose in my life, and it was, in many ways, the finest period of my life.”
Schmidt saw himself as an alien in his own country of Greenland.
Thiesen was unable to connect with or forgive her mother, who had sent her away. “I was upset with my mother for much of my life because I felt she didn’t want me,” she said.
Thiesen didn’t find out the truth until she was 46 years old, in 1996. Tine Bryld, a late Danish radio personality and writer, contacted Thiesen’s house with some tragic news. “‘Are you sitting down?’ she said. “I discovered something in Copenhagen, and you were a participant in an experiment,” Thiesen said. “I wept when I fell to the ground.” It was the first time I’d heard about it, and it was horrifying,” she said.
Heinesen, who went to Denmark in the 1960s and worked as a seamstress, told CNN, “I felt terrible when I realized the reality.” “You don’t experiment on children because it’s simply wrong.” She advertised in the Greenlandic newspaper in 1993 that she was going to visit and was seeking for surviving relatives. “It was wonderful to go back and visit — for all of us, it was quite emotional,” she remarked.
Thiesen has spent a significant portion of her adult life attempting to re-establish ties with Greenland and its people. Her house in Stensved, a little hamlet about an hour and a half outside of Copenhagen, is proof of that effort.
Thiesen told CNN that studying Greenlandic and writing her biography were both part of her recovery process. She sat at a dining table in front of a sideboard covered with snow white-colored tupilaq carvings, legendary Greenlandic Inuit creatures supposed to protect their owners from danger.
Jens Mller, her second husband, who is Greenlandic, was instrumental in making it happen. “He gave me the greatest gift… to learn the Greenlandic language,” Thiesen recalled, “but he also taught me fishing, hunting, and all those things I had never done as a youngster, but which are fundamental aspects of the Greenlandic culture.”
It hasn’t erased the social experiment’s massive harm, but it has helped her reconcile the agony that started onboard the MS Disko in 1951 in certain respects. At the very least, she now comprehends why her mother sent her away.
Thiesen sits at her Stensved, Denmark, home. Her Greenlandic ancestors have bonded with her.
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The “eksperimentet” is a social experiment that took place in Denmark. The idea was to separate Inuit children from their families and raise them in the Danish society. The results of the project were not what they expected, as it caused many issues for both the children and their parents.
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