Articles of Distraction

[Angrboda]

The villagers of Uummannaq were given just four days to leave their homes.

It was the spring of 1953, the Cold War was nearing its peak and the United States had set its sights on this remote Greenlandic settlement more than 700 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The broad plain at the edge of the ice sheet was viewed as the ideal spot for an expanded Air Force base to defend against Soviet missiles. But the 116 civilians living nearby would have to go.

At the behest of the Danish government, which then ruled Greenland as a colony, the villagers hastily packed their belongings and bade farewell to the land where their ancestors were buried. They traveled by dog sled to a rocky peninsula 80 miles north, where they spent months living in tents while waiting for a new town, called Qaanaaq, to be built.

“The people who remember it, they have something bad inside them,” Toku Oshima, a community leader in Qaanaaq, told Washington Post journalists who visited the town in 2023. “They still hurt.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-e...ory-vance/