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the status of the Thule tribe as an indigenous people, so that this status is also understood to be
valid for the other two groups. The emphasis of the role of the Greenlanders as an indigenous
people in the Arctic was successfully represented at the environmental conferences of the United
Nations or within the framework of the activities of the
International Union for Conservation of Nature
and Natural Resources
(IUCN) and also in the
Arctic Council
, the
Inuit Circumpolar Conference
3
(ICC), as
well as in the
International Whaling Commission
(IWC). The last body has a special relevance because
Greenland, due to its being recognized as an indigenous people, is allocated quotas for whale kills.
What speaks against the Greenlanders being an indigenous people – so the text argues – is that
Greenland strives to be seen as a small Nordic nation in accordance with its own laws, to have an
internationally recognized independent government, and have its own flag to use for shipping and
sporting events. The group of experts points out that international acceptance is endangered:
With increasing autonomy the difficulties in preserving recognition as an indigenous
people according to ILO and UN understanding grow, because one of the conditions is
that indigenous peoples must be subject to heteronomous authority. Regardless of how
unacceptable this may appear from the Greenlanders‘ point of view, the fact is that the
more power given to Greenland‘s
Landsting
[parliament] and
Landsstyre
[state government],
the more reluctant the surrounding world can be expected to regard Greenlanders as an
indigenous people‖ (document A: 6).
The concluding discussion describes the political dilemma of Greenlanders understanding
themselves as an indigenous people and also ―wishing to be the masters in their own home‖
(document A: 7). The simultaneity of indigeneity and national independence has not been foreseen
and is not recognized internationally, leading the expert group to call the term ‗indigenous people‘ a
tacit racial policy of the international community. They literally wrote: ―[i]n reality the term
‗indigenous people‘ is a euphemism for ethnic groups who are not of the ‗European race‘ and were,
at the time of colonization, slaves or people who were economically exploited or exotic – and dark-
skinned – extras playing minor roles in colonial exploits‖ (document A: 8).
The authors of document A share the opinion that in Greenland itself the term ‗indigenous people‘
did not take hold because the people there always saw themselves as independent communities:
[v]iewed in a modern context we could say that the Greenlanders whom the
Norwegian and Danish missionaries met in the 18
th
century made up an independent
community, which was not, however, recognized by the Danish king…Viewed against
this historical background we can understand that, overall, the term ‗indigenous
people‘ is having difficulties in finding acceptance in Greenlandic society; for example
it is not mentioned in the
Landsting‘
s legislation. The people of Greenland generally
consider themselves to be Greenlanders,
Kalaallit
, and that they belong to the island in
the same way the Icelanders belong to Iceland or the Faroese to the Faroe Islands. The
key issue is that the land belongs to them and to no one else…Where they live, the
Icelanders and the Faroese are, strictly speaking, an ‗indigenous people‘ too and merely
do not want to be called thus. And they are not called so because the international
community desires to respect the self-identification of every people (document A: 9).
In the concluding section of the working paper, the experts recommend that the Greenlanders
continue to define themselves internationally as an indigenous people in order to have a claim to
whaling quotas from the
International Whaling Commission
(IWC):