The multicultural festival in Nuuk this week seems like a good time to think about embracing diversity. There were activities involving food, art, and culture to celebrate Nuuk’s limited diversity. It’s needed. Since we moved to Greenland from Australia, I have noticed a marked change in my young son’s attitude toward foreigners. He notices people who look different from himself, and different from Greenlanders, far more than he used to.
We didn’t have the best starting point, coming from Australia, which doesn’t have a great reputation for racial tolerance. But fortunately, when he started school in Australia, he was at a remarkably culturally diverse inner-city school, which also happened to have one of the best academic performances in the state. The students came from sixty-six different countries. Of his close group of four friends, one was the son of white Australian parents, and the other three from families who did not speak English at home. One was the son of recent Polish immigrants, one from South Korea, and the other from Jordan. The latter two spoke no English when they started school and they all got by with body language for a while until, after about four months, all of them spoke perfectly good English. The kids in his class had a range of different skin colours and features. Noone seemed to notice. In referring to a black child, my son identified him by referring to his height and personality. Skin colour didn’t seem to come into it.
But these days, I find myself picking up on his generalisations on the basis of race, rather more than I would like. It’s perhaps not surprising. Greenland has a rather homogeneous society. According to Statistics Greenland, around ninety percent of residents of Greenland are Greenlandic. Almost all of the rest are Danish, with a very small minority of Thais, Icelanders, and Filipinos, and a smattering of other nationalities. Nuuk, the capital and the centre for the government administration, has a higher proportion of Danes than the rest of the country, at around twenty percent. Danes, whether or not they were born in Greenland, are not considered Greenlandic by Greenlanders, or by the Danes themselves. And officially, one is not necessarily Greenlandic if one is born in Greenland. To be Greenlandic, one has to have Greenlandic parents.
Sadly, quite a few Greenlanders also consider that Greenlanders who don’t speak Greenlandic are in fact not Greenlandic – language is a powerful driver of nationalism. This is especially sad because there are so many Greenlanders without a strong grasp of Greenlandic, particularly in Nuuk where, given the large numbers of kids with one or more Danish parents, and the relatively large numbers of native Danish speakers generally, the schools struggle to develop strong Greenlandic literacy in their students. Not only that, but as a result of varying past official policies, some generations of Greenlanders were given Danish language education at the expense of Greenlandic.
When it comes to my son, he speaks fluent English and Danish and can understand quite a bit of Greenlandic, but speaks it very little. Even if he did, he would never be regarded as Greenlandic, no matter how long he lived here. I feel a little sad about that when I think back to his friends in Australia. Those kids from South Korea and Jordan who couldn’t speak English, and their parents who had moved their whole lives from one country to another, who were trying to make things work, and who were making a home. These immigrants give a diversity and richness to community life that is of enormous benefit to their community, and my son was lucky enough to be at the centre of that. Now he is here, I hope delivering some of those same benefits to a different community.
For his Korean and Jordanian friends back in Australia, there was no question in the teacher’s mind, no question in anyone’s mind at that school, that those kids were also Australian. They just didn’t speak English yet.
