Many of the Greenlanders interviewed by media outlets recently have communicated an understated dignity, a particularly admirable poise given the verbal assaults from the White House.

In this Danish territory of just 57,000 people, 80 per cent of which is covered by a gigantic ice sheet, Inuits account for almost 90 per cent of the population and most of them are strongly disposed towards independence.

But Donald Trump’s covetousness and his sanctioning of violent encroachments elsewhere finds them looking to their Danish umbrella more than they would wish to, ensuring they are reckoning with tricky historical dispensations.

Charles Waldheim, a Harvard professor of landscape architecture, wrote in 2022 of Greenland as a territory “that has remained on the periphery of our awareness and understanding”; a place of “contested claims, competing agendas and contrasting futures”. These are the consequences of centuries of a challenged Arctic, a vast and extreme landscape, meaning various imperialists projected “their own fantastically radical vision of this place and its potentials”.

Amid this, adapting the traditional Inuit “sila”, described as a Greenlandic concept “for weather, the mind, consciousness – a universal order where man is in unity with nature”, has been a great challenge.

Trump, it is safe to assume, does not embrace........

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