Today, as Greenland once again becomes a strategic prize, history seems poised to repeat itself. Staying with the Polar Inuit means refusing to speak of territory while erasing those who inhabit it.

On 16 June 1951 Jean Malaurie was travelling by dog sled along the north-west coast of Greenland. He had set out alone, almost on a whim, with a modest grant from the French National Centre for Scientific research (CNRS), officially to study periglacial landscapes. In reality, this encounter with peoples whose relationship with the world followed an entirely different logic would shape a singular destiny.

That day, after many months among the Inuit, at the critical moment of the spring thaw, Malaurie was travelling with a few hunters. He was exhausted, filthy and emaciated. One of the Inuit touched his shoulder: “Takou, look.” A thick yellow cloud was rising in the sky. Through his binoculars, Malaurie first thought it was a mirage:

“A city of hangars and tents, of metal sheets and aluminium, dazzling in the sunlight, amid smoke and dust… Three months earlier, the valley had been calm and empty of people. I had pitched my tent there, on a clear summer day, in a flowering, untouched tundra.”

The breath of this new city, he would later write, “would never let us go.” Giant excavators hacked at the ground, trucks poured debris into the sea, aircraft circled overhead. Malaurie was hurled from the Stone Age into the Atomic Age. He had just discovered the secret American base of Thule, codenamed Operation Blue Jay.

Behind this innocuous name lay a colossal logistical operation. The United States feared a Soviet nuclear attack via the polar route. In a single summer, some 120 ships and 12,000 men were deployed to a bay that had previously known only the silent glide of kayaks. Greenland’s population at the time numbered barely 23,000 people. In just 104 days, on permanently frozen ground, a technological city capable of hosting giant B-36 bombers carrying nuclear warheads emerged. More than 1,200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, and in almost total secrecy, the United States built one of the largest military bases ever........

© The Conversation