NS AND NATIVES


The relation of the Europeans to the Greenlanders is in many respects
unique, for the Eskimos have been treated more tenderly than any
other primitive people which has been subjected to our experiments in
civilisation. The Danish Government certainly deserves the highest
respect for its action in this matter, and it were much to be desired
that other States would follow the example here given them. Care for
the true welfare of the natives has been largely operative in their
policy, and there is scarcely another instance of a people of hunters
which has come into such close contact with European civilisation and
proselytism, and has held its own so well for so long a time.

We do not often meet with such enthusiasm as that which impelled our
countryman Hans Egede and the first missionaries to seek out this at
that time almost unknown land, and led them to endure so many hardships
there. They did it with the best of motives, and thought that they
were thereby advancing both the spiritual and temporal welfare of the
Eskimo. If we compare this mission and the treatment of Greenland as
a whole with the conduct of Europeans under similar circumstances in
other parts of the world, we cannot but recognise the working of an
unusually humane spirit; and as we examine the whole history of the
government of Greenland down to our own day, we find ever new and
gratifying examples of this spirit.

With all the good will in the world, however, civilised men cannot
resist the tendency to look down upon a primitive people as essentially
their inferiors. Even in the history of Greenland we find many proofs
of this. We learn from his own writings that the devoted Hans Egede
himself cherished no small contempt for the natives whom he held it his
mission to christianise. He even relates how he often beat them, and
had them flogged, or given the rope's end. On one occasion, learning
from a small boy that an angekok, named Elik, had said that it would
be an easy matter to root out the foreigners who had come to their
co