Aqqaluk Lynge was 19 years old when an American B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear weapons as well as conventional bombs crashed off the northwest coast of Greenland, the island where Lynge was born and raised. That was January 1968, and the plane was headed to Thule Air Force Base, a U.S. military installation in Greenland, now known as Pituffik Space Base. When the plane hit the Arctic waters, the conventional bombs detonated but the nuclear weapons did not.
Six American military personnel parachuted from the plane before it crashed, shivering on the frozen ground before Inuit dog sled teams found them and saved their lives. One service member trapped on floating ice 6 miles from Thule survived the negative 21-degree Fahrenheit weather by wrapping himself in his parachute.
Now, aged 78, Lynge wonders if the United States remembers that Inuit dogsleds saved American lives. Or the fact that Greenlanders fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan as enlisted members of the Danish military, dying at the second-highest rate of any country besides the U.S. That U.S. Air Force base is still operational and 150 American military personnel are currently stationed there. “Why should a friend for so many years be treated like this?” Lynge said. “We need support from democratic-minded people in the United States.”
An Inuit dog team stands on frozen Baffin Bay near site of crash of a U.S. B52 nuclear bomber on January 21, 1968.
Bettmann via Getty Images
American military survivors of a B52 crash in Greenland smile for a photo in 1968.
Keystone-France / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
President Donald Trump has demanded that the United States acquire Greenland and said that control of the island is necessary for national and international security. He has threatened European allies with tariffs and even hinted at seizing Greenland by force. On Wednesday, Trump backtracked on both threats and said he’d reached a “framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland” without giving any details; however Trump’s behavior over the island has already undermined America’s relationship with Europe by threatening longstanding alliances.
Less publicized is how Trump’s threats have refocused attention on the United States’ relationship and history with Indigenous peoples: Greenland is 90 percent Inuit and has maintained its traditions, language, knowledge, and land despite centuries of colonial rule, and is viewed as a model of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty.
Lynge, who is Inuit, is part of that history. He co-founded the Inuit Ataqatigiit, a democratic socialist party in Greenland that advocates for independence. He helped lead the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an organization that represents Indigenous peoples in the Arctic. And he’s a former member of the Greenlandic Parliament, as well as the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which helps advise the U.N. Economic and Social Council on issues related to Indigenous peoples.
Greenland is still part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a colonial relationship that’s existed since the 18th century, but thanks to the work of people like Lynge, the island has achieved a level of political independence that many Indigenous peoples aspire to. “The extensive self-governance of Greenland is an inspiring example of the implementation of Indigenous self-determination for many Indigenous Peoples worldwide,” said the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, in 2023.
Aqqaluk Lynge, left, listens during a 2009 press conference on the Inuit Circumpolar Council on the effects of climate change.
Casper Christoffersen / AFP via Getty Images
Yet despite the still-strong presence of Inuit peoples in Greenland, Stefan Aune, a historian and the author of the book Indian Wars Everywhere, said he’s been struck by how much Trump’s threats have been framed as conflict between the U.S. and Denmark or the U.S. and European countries, ignoring the presence of Indigenous peoples. “This really kind of evokes the way the history of North America often gets narrated, which is a kind of imperial squabble between the British, the French, and the Spanish, and then later the United States, despite the fact that there’s all these different Native nations that play a really equally important role in the war, the politics, the economics, and the diplomacy on the continent,” Aune said. “So there’s definitely a parallel there.”
Aune is among many experts who see Trump’s policies and rhetoric as echoes of historical entitlement to Native land reframed as a defensive struggle against Indigenous nations or other threats. “The iconic image of this is the surrounded wagon train, which you can see in all kinds of art, paintings, and then later movies and television and video games,” Aune said. “Settler colonialism consistently gets reframed as a defensive struggle rather than an invasion.”
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Peter Mancall, a historian and author of the book Contested Continent, said he was struck by how quickly Trump pivoted from the security reasons to capture Venezuela’s president to his plans to sell 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil. “The rapid pivot from the pretext of the invasion to the extraction of resources [in Venezuela] was quicker than anything I had seen in the early American period,” he said. “We’ve seen this before, and it has often had catastrophic consequences for Indigenous peoples as well as deleterious impacts on various environments.”
Jonathan Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, the dean of Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawaiʻi, sees parallels to the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which he wrote about in his book Dismembering Lāhui. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was motivated to annex Hawai’i in order to cement economic control over the islands’ sugar plantations and to establish military control over Pearl Harbor.
“The fact that the president of the United States no longer feels that it’s necessary to justify imperialism in any other way except that ‘We need it’ is deeply revealing and clarifying,” Osorio said. “When you remove all of the pretext and you realize that all this has ever been about has been the acquisition of opportunities and other peoples and other peoples’ countries … it’s never been any different.”
Greenland is three times the size of Texas and home to about 56,000 people. The island has 39 of the 50 minerals that the U.S. considers to be critical for military technology and the U.S. economy, many of which are used for clean energy technology like electric vehicle batteries. Investors are hoping that melting ice caps due to climate change will make it easier for companies to mine minerals like gallium, which can be used to create computer chips.