Donna Loring
January 2026. This unpublished article explores Greenland as an Indigenous homeland, challenging modern expansionist rhetoric that treats land as an empty prize rather than a lived nation with rights.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Donald Trump spoke openly about his intention to take Greenland by negotiation or, if necessary, by force. Framed as a matter of national security and strategic advantage in the Northern Hemisphere, Greenland was reduced to what he described as “a big piece of ice.” Not once did he acknowledge the people who live there.
Greenland is not an empty prize on a geopolitical chessboard. It is home to a living nation. More than 56,000 people live there, the vast majority Inuit, whose ancestors have lived on that land for thousands of years. Their homeland has a name Kalaallit Nunaat and it has a language, a culture, and a system of self-government that long predates modern nation-states. To describe Greenland as merely ice is not a harmless mischaracterization; it is a familiar colonial tactic used to erase Indigenous presence so that powerful nations can justify taking land without consent.
This is history repeating itself.
When powerful nations fight wars or redraw borders, Indigenous peoples are routinely left out of the conversation even when they have fought alongside those nations to defend their own homelands. When the Revolutionary War ended, Indigenous Nations were excluded entirely from the agreement that determined the future of their lands. The Treaty of Paris of 1783, which formally ended the war between Great Britain and the United States, was negotiated without a single Indigenous Nation at the table, despite the fact that Native peoples had fought alongside both the British and the Americans. In that treaty, Britain ceded vast Indigenous homelands east of the Mississippi River to the United States as spoils of war, as if those lands belonged to European powers to give away. For Indigenous Nations, the war did not end in peace; it marked the beginning of a more aggressive phase of dispossession.
We are seeing the same pattern now. The arguments for and against U.S. control of Greenland focus on military positioning, shipping routes, rare earth minerals, and global competition while the people who belong to that land are treated as an afterthought, or ignored entirely. Greenland is discussed as territory, not as home.
President Trump also reminded European leaders that without U.S. intervention in World War II, they would be “speaking German or a little bit of Japanese.” The irony is profound. Without Indigenous peoples in the United States without Native American Code Talkers America itself might well be speaking German, or a little bit of Japanese. Tribal Nations across this country provided the U.S. military with unbreakable codes rooted in Indigenous languages the federal government had long tried to destroy through boarding schools and punishment. Those same people, whose lands were taken and whose sovereignty was denied, helped save the nation in its hour of need. To celebrate American power while erasing Indigenous sacrifice follows a long and troubling tradition: using Native people when convenient, then writing them out of the story once the war is won.
Greenland today has its own elected government and leadership, including Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede, who has stated clearly that Greenland is not for sale. While Greenland remains part of the Kingdom of Denmark, it exercises self-rule, and its people continue to debate their own future, including the possibility of full independence. Those decisions belong to Greenlanders not to Washington, Copenhagen, or any other distant capital.
Referring to Greenland as a barren, frozen place reinforces the dangerous idea that land without visible cities or farms is unused and therefore available. Indigenous peoples know this argument well. It has been used for centuries to justify dispossession, removal, and occupation. Declaring a homeland “empty” is the first step toward taking it.
There is a human side to this attempted acquisition that must not be ignored. Greenland’s Inuit people are not abstractions. They are families, elders, hunters, artists, and lawmakers living with the daily realities of climate change, economic pressure, and the long legacy of colonialism.
President Trump is not an anomaly, but part of a long American lineage shaped by a colonial mindset one that treats land as a resource to be claimed and people as obstacles to be managed. George Washington spoke of liberty while presiding over expansion that dismissed Indigenous sovereignty. Andrew Jackson turned that logic into policy through forced removal and broken treaties. Trump’s approach to Greenland reducing a homeland to its strategic value while ignoring the people who live there rests on the same assumptions. The vocabulary may be modern, but the thinking is not.
History shows that this way of seeing the world does not lead to stability or peace. Colonialism does not end conflict; it produces it. When nations pursue expansion without consent, they invite resistance, militarization, and war. Greenland is not Denmark’s to give away, nor America’s to take. It is Inuit land. Until the United States confronts and abandons this colonial mindset, it will continue to repeat a cycle that has cost Indigenous peoples their lands and the world its peace.