Page 53 - Untamed Iceland

Among the earliest Greenlanders were members of the Saqqaq Culture, reindeer hunters who
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BC. Later came the Dorset culture, leaving large snow-cutting knives that indicate they built
igloos. The type of women’s knife called the ulo, and still used today, was also characteristic
of these people.

After about a 900-year gap when Greenland appears to have been uninhabited, an Inuit group
called “Dorset 2” settled in the eighth and ninth centuries in the northern part of the island.
Around the tenth century, they were followed by the Thule Culture, which spread along both
the east and west coasts. Thule people developed the qajaq (kayak), harpoon, and dogsled.
Today’s Inuit are descended from the Thule and are known as the Inussuk Culture.

From Norse and Danish Influence to Autonomy

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Nuuk. There may have been about 5000 people in Greenland at the height of settlement in
the thirteenth century. The reasons for the later disappearance of the Icelandic colonies,
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intriguing mystery.

The Inuit had Greenland largely to themselves for a time, with only expeditions from Norway
and England and European whalers stopping by from the sixteenth to early eighteenth
centuries. King Christian IV claimed the island for Denmark in 1605, after European interest
had been revived by the search for a Northwest Passage, but it wasn’t until 1721 when
missionary Hans Egede arrived that settlement by Europeans resumed. Egede found the
Inuit receptive to Christianity and established the Evangelical Lutheranism that is still
practiced today.

Greenlanders have held full Danish citizenship since 1953 and have exercised home rule in
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passed to increase Greenland’s self-rule, giving the local population more control over the
court system, the police, and the coast guard. Although it was a historic step towards political
independence, the economy of Greenland remains very much tied up with Denmark’s, and
certain areas of government are still under Danish control.

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