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.)

Dark and light I found photographing tales from World War II

Taken in 2000, in Aarhus, Denmark.
Taken in 2000.

In 2000, I completed a photodocumentary project highlighting human rights abuses by the Nazis throughout Europe. For part of that project, I met some Danes who were involved in that country’s famous boat lift of its Jewish citizens to Sweden to escape being deported and murdered by the Nazis at death camps. It is one of the few positive stories from this incredibly sad, psychologically dark, and awful episode of human history. One of the couples I met, David and Lilian Birnbaum of Aarhus, Denmark, met in Sweden after they were successfully carried to temporary safety. Some recent exchanges I had from someone who knows them made me think about their incredible story again and how wonderful it was to have stumbled on such a bright tale from such an awful time. The other photo I am including is a sample from hundreds of photos I took at more than 20 death and concentration camps scattered across Europe. This one, Stutthof, is located about 35 kilometers east of Gdansk. It was a terrible place to those sent there. (Click on each photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)

Piskefløde med jordbær (strawberries and cream to us non-Danish)

It cannot get more Danish than this (2000).

There is nothing more Danish than strawberries and cream in late May. Ah the wonderful memories of my too short of a stay in Denmark in the spring and summer of 2000. (Click on the photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)