Thule

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.)

Grandpa’s role building an air base at the top of the world

My grandfather helped to build the Thule Air Base, and he took this picture during his stay as a contractor.

In the early 1950s, a sheet metal worker from Detroit providing for his wife and two kids saw an advertisement for his trade to work in Greenland. He flew there, via Newfoundland, and helped to build a new U.S. air base called Thule. It was built where Inuit had traveled and traded for thousands of years, and still lived. Thule played a key rule during the Cold War as an intercontinental ballistic missile station and air station. This also was the time when the U.S. Air Force continually had nuclear-armed B-52 bombers airborne at all times. During the height of the cold war, these nuclear-armed bombers landed and one even crashed there, to the dismay of Denmark, which includes the vast island in its kingdom as a home rule territory. (I read about this story on my flight to Greenland on a Greenland Air inflight magazine.)

This is how Thule looked when my grandfather took this photo. He described being able to bowl at a bowling alley there and leaving before his contract was completed, as he missed his wife, my grandmother. He never met the locals because the U.S. military had strict prohibitions to prevent the contractors from meeting with the resident Greenlanders. At the time, they wore traditional dress, he recalled. Decades later, he gave me the slides he took.

I still would like to visit Thule one day. I never got that far north, as one still needed special permission to visit the U.S. run airbase when I visited Greenland for the first time more than 15 years ago.

Click on the photography to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.