‘Don’t expect people to speak Danish to you. Also prepare yourself for the fact that there will be people who say no to a conversation. They are tired of the attention of foreign journalists. You just have to accept that as a given.” Before my departure to Greenland, I spoke at length with the Danish journalist Martin Breum (1959), who has been writing for years about the Arctic and the relationship between Denmark and Greenland. “But as long as your ears are more active than your mouth, you can go a long way.”
I am not in Greenland as a journalist, but as a tourist. They are looking forward to it, it is an important source of income, although it is a challenge for the relatively small population (approx. 56,700) to manage the logistics that come with it. The number of tourists increased explosively from 90,000 in 2022 to 149,000 in 2025, closely tracked by tourismstat.gl. This growth is partly due to the opening of a new international airport in the capital Nuuk and the increased curiosity now that the largest island in the world is in the news everywhere. I do all kinds of tourist things, like catching my food on a fishing boat, visiting a glacier, going on a whale safari.
Of course I am curious whether there is any evidence of Trump’s annexation drive. In Nuuk two signs stand out on the street with the text ‘Greenland is not for sale’ in the eye, and that also applies to the Pride flags flying next to the Greenland one. Caps are sold with the Greenland flag and the text ‘Already Great’ and ‘Make America Go Away’. In a cultural center I see works of art that depict the complex relationship with both Denmark and the United States. There is a work by the Greenland artist Julie Edel Hardenberg about the relationship with the Danes: five small masks with the Danish flag and black hair. I interpret it as Greenlanders learning to put on their ‘Danish’ mask. And there are drawings depicting Trump as a pig; two Greenlandic men decisively expelled him from the country. They’re not waiting for him.
Two signs with the text ‘Greenland is not for sale’ catch the eye. Caps sold with ‘Already Great’ and ‘Make America Go Away’
Whoever wrote the masterful piece “Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland” by journalist Ben Taub in The New Yorker reads, understands the suspicion towards Americans. Taub painstakingly reconstructs how four Americans tried to infiltrate Greenland, among them a banker, a self-proclaimed private investor, and a man in a cowboy hat and black leather jacket with a ‘Bikers for Trump’emblem, the motorcycle club he founded in 2015 to act as a bodyguard at Trump’s campaign rallies. The fourth was the Greenlandic bricklayer Jørgen Boassen, who walked around Nuuk in a MAGA cap and secretly kept a list of Greenlanders who would be sympathetic to the annexation.
From a Danish couple I started talking to, I heard what became of him: he was more or less put on a plane to Copenhagen. Greenlanders no longer wanted to see him walking around with his cap. Now that I’m in Nuuk, it dawns on me how small this town is, you could literally bump into that man anywhere.
Martin Breum believes it is important that journalists continue to follow Greenland, so that more people become aware of the importance of the Arctic for Europe. The biggest misunderstanding about Greenland among foreign journalists, he says, is that they think that Greenland’s pursuit of independence means completely breaking away from Denmark. But 55.3 percent of the Greenland government’s budget is covered by financial support from Copenhagen, and Denmark invests a lot. In Greenland, self-determination in one’s own country is paramount. “If you say the word ‘separation’ used, it sounds like a hostile attitude towards Denmark. Journalists think of detachment and separation, while the political process is much more complicated.”
It turns out, just like twenty years ago when I was last in Greenland, that I can go to many places with my Danish, but it is indeed less obvious. The language issue has become complex. Between six and eight thousand Danes live in Greenland, and Greenlanders learn both Greenlandic and Danish at school. One is raging debate whether that second language could better be English; Greenland is located in North America and there is a lot of trade with the United States. Greenland also attracts people from Thailand and the Philippines who work in (culinary) tourism and fishing, who learn a little Greenlandic, but do not speak Danish.
And then it will be June 21, the national holiday, Ullortuneq. The country turns red and white, the Greenlandic identity is proudly celebrated. Nivi Olsen, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports and Church, speaks on the stage of the cultural center in Nuuk. “No one can take our country away from us,” she says in her speech. The party starts. Trump seems far away for a while. The sun does not set that day.
