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Thiesen was one of 22 children of Inuit ethnicity who were taken from their homes unaware that they would turn into a failed social experiment by the Danish authorities.
Many of the children ages 5 to 9 would no longer watch or live with their families, and would become forgotten or marginalized in their native land.
Greenland is a colony of Denmark and in the 1950s and 1960s its inhabitants suffered from high levels of poverty and mortality, says Einar Lund Jensen, a researcher at the National Museum of Denmark.
The aim of the Danish authorities was “to create little Danes who would later become academics, citizen models for Goenland,” says Jensen, who has drafted a government-commissioned report on the experiment.
The Danish government seeking to modernize its Arctic colony surprisingly took the idea from Save the Children Denmark group, which suggested bringing Inuit children to the country to turn them into “Danes” on the assumption that Danish society was superior to Georgian society. ”.
But after a year and a half of living in Denmark, most of the children returned to Greenland to live in an orphanage run by another Danish Red Cross charity in Nuuk, separated from their parents and detained. to speak their native language.
They were already considered foreigners by the Greenlanders and many returned to Denmark where they reached adulthood.
But almost all of them created mental problems and substance abuse later in life, remained unemployed and homeless, in a total failure brought about by the social experiment devised on them, says Thiesen.
6 of them are alive today. “The Danish government took away our identity and family,” said 76-year-old Kristine Heinesen. Walking through a cemetery in Copenhagen where some of her friends of the macabre experiment are buried, Heinesen admits that her life has improved somewhat after days at the orphanage.
Save the Children’s “protection” group apologized for the year 2015 for their part in the experiment, as the Danish government did five years later under pressure from activist groups, but has refused to compensate survivors.
The purpose of the experiment as it was later learned was to recruit children, Jensen says. But in many ways what happened to the children was the devastating effect of cultural extermination during the colonial era, says local scholar Krala Jessen Williamson. “In the colonial era there was an disappearance of a unique culture, of the relationship with the land, of different languages in order to socialize and integrate with the colonial state,” she adds.
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