Arctic Conflict

With love from Portland to Greenland and Denmark

In response to the ongoing threats being made by the leader of the United States to Greenland and Denmark, I want to say to my personal friends in both lands, and all the people that call those places home, we in the United States, the people of the United States, are your friends. We send love.

To show this, I took these photos this morning (January 25, 2026) in Portland, Oregon, at Nordia House, a cultural center celebrating the ties between Nordic nations and peoples and the United States.

Everyone who I met shared warm words for all the people in Greenland and Denmark. We the people will never sever our friendship. We the people are not spoken for by the increasingly dangerous man who is leading my country to a dark place.

To that darkness, I shine light. That light is the love you see here from the people, some who have relatives in Denmark and others who will be visiting.

To see all of my portraits as individual photos, visit the my “Love Portraits” page dedicated to the people of Greenland and Denmark.

Greenlanders: Nobody’s Fools
This is my friend, Lars, who I had the great pleasure of meeting in 1998 in Sisimiut, Greenland. He took me seal hunting with his family, at a fjord just north of the coastal city. I did this trip with his brother and father.

This past week, from March 23 to 28, 2025, the world again saw Greenland and Greenlanders at the center of a global security debate if the United States could assert control of Greenland, beyond longstanding and existing security arrangements that have seen U.S. military on the island continuously since World War II.

After the snow settled, one outcome was clear: Greenlanders are nobody’s fools.

The mostly ethnical Inuit population have called the more than 830,000-square-mile arctic island, the world’s largest, their home for nearly 5,000 years. Today, Greenlanders number about 57,000 residents, of which nearly 90 percent claim ethnic Inuit identity.

They are smart, resilient, and fiercely grounded in their identity as descendants for nearly five millennia of their homeland, what they call Kalaallit Nunaat in their Greenlandic language.

They are not pawns, patsies, or stupid.

I can say this based on my own experience, having befriended many residents there during my visits in 1998, 1999, and 2000. During my trips now more than a quarter century ago, I had lively discussions with Greenlanders who shared divergent views of becoming independent or staying aligned under semiautonomous status with Denmark.

What is clear is that Greenlanders made abundantly clear to the world they are opposed to coming under greater military and political control of the United States, as announced by the Trump administration.

(See my full story on the significance of Trump administration’s plan to take full control of Greenland on my website.)