White Supremacy in the Nordic Countries: Erasing Racism and Indigenous Voices

Abstract

Recent scholarship has called for greater attention to white supremacy. This is closely linked to broader efforts to foreground the structural and institutional dimensions of racism. In the Nordic context, such a perspective challenges longstanding assumptions of exceptionalism by highlighting the historical and contemporary presence of coloniality and racism in the Nordic countries. This article examines the concept of white supremacy in relation to the Nordic countries, arguing that white supremacy has constituted a longstanding feature of Nordic societies and that the erasure of Indigenous concerns and voices presents one way in which white supremacy has been expressed. It uses two recent cases involving artist production connected to Iceland, Kalaallit Nunaat, and Denmark to analyze the links between the past and the present. The historical embedded analysis of these cases demonstrates that white supremacy has been an enduring feature of Nordic societies. Nordic Indigenous critiques, as well as discussions concerning Indigenous people within and beyond the Nordic countries, reveal thus how white supremacy operates through everyday structural and institutional practices in the Nordic context. These findings underscore the importance of addressing white supremacy as a pervasive and normalized aspect of Nordic social and political life.

1. Introduction

Hot tubs at local swimming pools in Iceland serve as sites of relaxation and communal gathering but can quickly turn into sites of political contestation and discomfort. In a hot tub at a public swimming pool in Hafnarfjörður, several people are enjoying the warm water, including a man and a woman already engaged in conversation when I arrive. I do not know them—or anyone else there—when I slide into the pool, grateful for the warmth against the cool breeze outside. The atmosphere is relaxed. The two must know each other at least slightly, as they are familiar with the names of each other’s family members.

When I sit down, the conversation turns to the difficulties young people face today, such as in securing housing. The man remarks that young people in Iceland now have fewer children than in the past. “Oh, really,” the woman replies with interest. The man explains briefly: it has simply become too expensive for them. “Yes, of course,” she agrees, and then explains firmly, as if stating an obvious fact, “Except, of course, the Arabs. They have a lot of children.” I can see the man edging a little bit further away from her, like she is suddenly less familiar to him—it is probably not intentional—and his expression betrays discontent as he searches for a response. He finally replies, somewhat awkwardly, “Well, this is just all kinds of things” (in Icelandic, þetta er bara allskonar). The woman does not take the hint. She continues, “We have to think about the white man as well.” He shifts even further away from her in the small space of the hot tub, and with visible unease, tries to steer the conversation elsewhere—bringing it to the then recently elected Trump in his second presidency. She responds by firmly proclaiming that, actually, not everything he is doing is bad, giving a rather familiar pro-Trump speech. Again, the man shows signs of discomfort. “Take for example Greenland,” he protests, referring to then Trump‘s recent proclamation that he wants to buy Greenland or Kalaallit Nunaat to use the indigenous name for Greenland-“This is just ridiculous. He is treating the country and its people as a real estate.” “Well,” the woman counters, “They don‘t like the Danes any more than we do. And the Danes are still taking babies away from their mothers—something we would not want.” The desperation on the man’s face has turned into a distant stare as if he has realized that this is a lost cause. Perhaps concluding that every topic will turn out toxic, he politely says goodbye to her and leaves the hot tub.

The voice of the woman in the hot tub talking about that “we” have to think about “white” people in the context of “the” Arabs in Iceland having too many children evokes connections with replacement theories (Ekman 2022), reflecting the long-standing dismissal of racism as part of Nordic histories (Hübinette 2012; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012; Rastas 2005). This has meant ignoring the historical diversity of the region; its fluid national boundaries (Keskinen et al. 2009); mobility back and forth to the area we see as delimiting the Nordic countries; and, at the same time, failing to acknowledge the systematic exclusion of Nordic Indigenous populations (Fur 2013). Claims of cultural homogeneity have accompanied these as a defining feature of the Nordic countries (Gullestad 2016).

The woman’s reference to the shared past of Kalaallit Nunaat and Iceland as under Denmark’s rule evokes a colonial past as always being not far under the surface, simultaneously as she apparently seems to find it natural to submit Kalaallit Nunaat to another settler colonial state, with her pro-Trump rhetoric reflecting how extreme right politics that advocate a return to “a” past have become increasingly evoked in the present (Taş 2022). Sharpe’s (2014) multivocal concept “wake” calls for the recognition of the structural position that black people are forced to occupy, as well as the long duration of racism and colonialism. The concept can be read in many ways, including a mark a ship makes in the sea, affecting everything around it. Her concept draws attention to how the past in decolonial times does not constitute a past but a part of the present, which shapes its surroundings in multiple ways.

In the present, white supremacy ideas are increasingly flagged out in the open, reflecting, as pointed out by Lewicki and Clark (2025), that far-right agendas have become nested at the “center-stage of politics” (p. 1), often placing women at the center as objects of affection and paternalistic protection (Bonds 2020). As predicted by Garner (2017) in the late 2010s, assumptions and ideas that were previously linked to the far-right have thus in general become more mainstream in the Nordic countries, meaning that white supremacy ideas are increasingly normalized (p. 1591).

This discussion focuses on the concept of white supremacy in relation to the Nordic countries, stressing that while the surge in white supremacy sentiments in the Nordic countries in the present needs to be recognized (Valaskivi et al. 2023), it is necessary as well to take a long historical perspective on white supremacy as being a part of the Nordic countries for a long time. I follow Beliso-De Jesús et al. (2023), who have shown how the surge of interest in white supremacy after Trump’s election in the US in 2016 can be misleading in terms of constructing white supremacy as something out of the ordinary, rather than constituting a “mundane part of everyday life” (Beliso-De Jesús et al. 2023, p. 425). My discussion seeks to draw attention to the importance of not limiting the analysis in the Nordic countries to white supremacist movements, with the key being that while analysis of such movements is certainly crucial, if we only focus on white racist hate groups or movements, we risk making racism appear as something exceptional or out of the ordinary in the Nordic countries (Pierre et al. 2025). Looking at Indigenous people within and outside the Nordic countries, both in the present and in the past, shows clearly how white supremacy has been a part of being and becoming in the Nordic countries.

Whiteness studies have been a significant field of analysis in the Nordic countries for the last few decades (Rastas 2012; Lapiņa and Mantė 2020; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012; Sverdljuk et al. 2020; Lundström and Teitelbaum 2017), following trends that have taken place more widely elsewhere, while also showing the historical particularities of racialization (Thomas 2021). I see the concept white supremacy as an important addition to the analysis of racism in the Nordic countries and encourage its increased usage as an analytical tool to understand the different expressions of racism in the Nordic countries. In addition to the concept of whiteness, I see its usage as facilitating the non-exceptionalizing of racism, and as bringing out the long duration of systemic exclusion of certain Nordic populations and making visible logics of dehumanization and exclusion. In my analysis, I take two recent events and reflect on them by utilizing my past research that has to do with racism in the Nordic countries. To give these events more depth, I contextualize them in 19th century coloniality as a way of thinking about the world and relations within it (Grosfoguel 2011).

I start the discussion by providing some outlines of the concept of white supremacy and give my reflection on why the concept is important in the Nordic context. I then move to the two examples that concern engagement between the past and the present: a film about Danish cryolite production in Kalaallit Nunaat and an artwork addressing early arrivals to the American continent from the Nordic countries. I anchor the discussion of the film in my own research on early investigation on the mines that coincidently I was conducting a few years before, but I believe it shows clearly the continuation of colonial themes in the case of Kalalliit Nunaat, or how we exist in the wake of the recent past, to use Sharpe’s (2014) terminology. In the case of the artwork, I give a deeper contextualization with two strands of my earlier research, i.e., on Icelandic schoolbooks that touch on Leifur Eiríksson and Christopher Columbus, as well as the desire of people living in Iceland in the 19th century for wider recognition within the fold of civilization and whiteness (see, for example, Loftsdóttir 2019).

I do not attempt to present these two examples in all their complexities or bring out the colonial histories of the respective Nordic countries, Denmark, Kalaallit Nunaat, and Iceland. Rather, I use these examples and others to anchor the importance of the concept of white supremacy as an analytical tool in the Nordic context, but criticism of black and Indigenous scholars on different critical scholarships (Beliso-De Jesús et al. 2023; Dahl 2021; Moreton-Robinson 2015) shows clearly the importance of bringing white supremacy more strongly into the picture.

To position myself in relation to this subject, I would be socially classified as a white woman. I hold Icelandic nationality, and my background is several generations without a migrant background. While lack of migrant background has not always had the same meaning in Iceland—in the past, it was more a sign of privilege than in the present—this means today that I tick boxes of hyper privilege. As discussed in this article, Iceland has claimed a position of innocence regarding racism. As such, I am positioned in a particular way in these structural processes and hierarchies that I am criticizing here, benefiting from white privilege in multiple ways. As I have discussed in other contexts, even though I have devoted much of my academic carrier to try to detangle and criticize racism and demask whiteness in the Icelandic context, that does not change the fact that I benefit from a particular global ordering and white supremacy and racism are still part of the air that I breath, which means that I am also affected by them in multiple ways (Loftsdóttir 2002; Loftsdóttir 2012).

2. Nordic Space in a World of White Supremacy

2.1. White Supremacy

Whiteness research is about racism, not whiteness as such, as it has to do with relations of power (Garner 2017, p. 1584). As anthropologists and others have shown, ideas of race have changed historically (Mullings 2005), meaning that as other racist constructions, whiteness is not fixed or coherent (Garner 2017; Twine and Gallagher 2008), but embedded in different histories and localities (Harrison 1998; Loftsdóttir 2019, p. 6). Racialization has not only revolved around a simple black–white binary (Garner 2006, p. 258), but has intersected with other categories of identity such as of culture, class, and sexuality, where some populations have been seen as less white at particular points in time (p. 265). Within the nineteenth and early twentieth century, for example, health discourse focused on purity of the nation, often leading to sterilization based on ideas of race, class, and sexuality, demonizing queerness (Sudenkaarne and Blell 2022).

As a category, “white” seems, however, always to be placed at the top as superior and as a point of reference (Pierre et al. 2025, p. 3). Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre (2020) refer to white supremacy as a “baseline” in understanding how the modern world works to capture its importance (Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre 2020), and it is a global project despite being produced within particular locations (Bonds 2020). Scholars have stressed the importance of the concept for clarifying the structural and institutional mechanisms by which racism and discrimination operate (Bonds 2020; Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre 2020). The recent call on a more global scale for stronger engagement with the concept of white supremacy as an analytical tool draws attention to the need for a greater recognition of the structural and institutional aspects of racism where whiteness is not only privileged but assumed as self-evident. By drawing attention to structural issues, the concept of white supremacy simultaneously draws attention to the importance of embedding racism in history and imperial and colonial relations (see also Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre 2020). Scholars have furthermore stressed the gendered aspects of white supremacy with white women’s central role in its reproduction, particularly in notions of white women’s gendered vulnerability (Bonds 2020). We see these mobilized in white supremacy movements (Jezierska and Towns 2018; Norocel et al. 2020), as women have long maintained a symbolic role for nation-states (Yuval-Davis 2001), and are seen as represented by their bodies (Pratt 1990; Yuval-Davis 2001).

Indigenous scholars have highlighted the links between white supremacy and space (Moreton-Robinson 2015). White supremacy can be conceptualized as revolving around space both in terms of who belongs in what space, and regarding space as physical, i.e., land. In Europe, for example, current racism continues to revolve around a refusal to acknowledge that certain bodies belong in Europe, even those who have a long history there, such as regarding black bodies that are persistently refused to be recognized as part of Europe’s history (Gilroy 1993). A similar story can be said about Muslims who continue to be seen as alien within the space of Europe rather than as part of its history (Hening 2021; Nadia 2019), with Muslims frequently racialized within European societies and seen as a threat to particular nation-states (Keskinen 2014). This reflects how racism—and claims to whiteness—intersect with notions of religion, nationalism, and culture. The classical work of Puwar (2004), on space invaders, is useful here to show how some bodies have the right to belong in certain places, while others never become seen as anything else than trespassers (p. 8). Geographers have long shown that “racism shapes places” (Pulido 2017, p. 534), dictating who can live where and who belongs where. Roy (2019) talks about racial banishment to capture how racialized populations have been discriminated against in terms of housing, and thus excluded from certain areas and spaces.

Indigenous scholars‘ links between white supremacy, land, and environments (such as Moreton-Robinson 2015; Spears 2021) draw attention to how white supremacy works through the logic of dispossession—from land, space, and property—reminding people of the important connection that exists historically between white supremacy and settler colonialism, even though white supremacy cannot be reduced to settler colonialism. Moreton-Robinson (2015) uses the concept of “possessive logics” to draw attention to the fact that whiteness is not only about identity but also revolves around ownership and power exercised by states. She shows the links between white possessions, the disowning of Indigenous sovereignty, and the making of nation-states (p. xiii), where the state becomes both a site of white possession and a means to execute it through legal means. While for white people, different spaces of white possession can be invisible, they are “hyper visible” for Indigenous people, as these possessions shape their daily lives (p. xiiii). As argued by Bonds and Inwood (2016), we need to stress the “material production” involved in white supremacy (p. 716), with land and space as important for general subsistence and living. Furthermore, by placing white history at the center, Indigenous history is obscured and Indigenous voices silenced, as well as Indigenous occupation on that land made invisible (Pulido et al. 2025, p. 1909). A part of the dispossession of Indigenous people from their land has been the rendering of their use of land as insignificant and nonproductive (Buchan and Heath 2006; Hendlin and International Association for Environmental Philosophy 2014; Junka-Aikio 2024).

The Nordic countries have diverse histories and status within the history of colonialism and imperialism (Naum and Nordin 2013), with shifting alliances and borders. These complex colonial histories, as argued by Junka-Aikio et al. (2021), have resulted in quite different experiences for Sámi who live within different Nordic states in Scandinavia (and Russia) in their dealings with the modern state (pp. 4–5). Norway, Iceland, Finland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands have been under the control of Sweden and/or Denmark at different points in time, which intersect with these two countries’ imperial expansions. In addition to its possessions in the Northern Sea, Denmark was a global empire, having several overseas colonies, engaging in transnational networks of slaves, properties, and commerce (Naum and Nordin 2013). The Swedish scholar Anders Retzius created the “cranial index” which was widely used across scholars in Europe for cranial measurements and for racial classifications (Andreassen 2014). Sven Nilsson—also Swedish and an archeologist—was one of the first to develop the concept of prehistory. He located the Sámi outside of normal time and participated in the trade and exchange of Sámi cranial collection, which was a prevalent practice in Swedish universities. These networks of Swedish scholars with students and clergymen in provincial areas in Sweden provided well-known racist scholars with Sámi crania for further studies, such as Samuel George Morton and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (Andersson Burnett 2025, pp. 774–75). Furthermore, as elaborated by Andersson Burnett (2025), the presentation of these people as existing in the past and having no future provided powerful justification for depriving them of land and resources (p. 775).

Even Nordic countries without overseas colonies, such as Finland, had colonial ambitions, as the early twentieth-century visions of Petsamo as a Finnish colony reflect (Lahti 2025). As pointed out by Lahti (2025), Finland’s claim as a “civilized European nation” increasingly rested on its capacity to colonize the north” (p. 184), which reflects how the language of civilization has been the language of colonialization. Within wider European discourses and hierarchies, there has long been the assumption that being European is to claim a colonial history (Dzenovska 2013; Loftsdóttir 2019, p. 90). Iceland also struggled to position itself as a “civilized” country in the eyes of the outside world (Loftsdóttir 2019) with whitness in Iceland shaped by its liminality in multiple sense (Loftsdóttir 2025a; Sciuto 2025). In the present, Iceland has been firmly established as a space of whiteness, aided by the tourism branding in recent years (Loftsdóttir 2019). The instability of whiteness can be clearly seen in the arrivals of Nordic subjects to North America as immigrants in the 19th century, where their white positionality was in no way certain but often intersected with their nationality (Sverdljuk et al. 2020). These new migrants had to learn to embody and practice their whiteness within this new terrain, taking advantage of dispossession and violence against Indigenous people (Bergland 2020). While positioned as racially external in the Nordic countries, the Sámi were positioned as white in the US context but had to hide their origin as Sámi to avoid discrimination (E. M. Jensen 2020).

Due to differences in global and colonial history, it was surprising to me, when I started working with other Nordic scholars a long time ago, to observe the similarities in discourses across the different Nordic countries. I am referring to the strong sense of exceptionalism that characterizes the Nordic countries, even though it is articulated differently locally (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012). Nordic exceptionalism revolves around seeing the Nordic countries as exceptional—more equal, more prone to peaceful solutions—and as exempted from past wrongs, especially regarding imperialism and colonialism. Part of Nordic exceptionalism has thus become making certain histories and relationships invisible, while engaging in the act of classification regarding what is racism and what is not; what qualifies as colonialism and what does not (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012). As I will explain later, when Nordic exceptionalism is placed in the context of Nordic Indigenous and non-white migrant populations, it becomes clear that the perspectives of the white majority serve as the point of reference, which corresponds to Pierre et al. (2025) definition of white supremacy (p. 3).

Whiteness scholars in the Nordic countries have identified whiteness as becoming central in defining what it means to be Nordic. Hübinette and Lundström (2011) critically point out, for example, that “the idea of being white” is the “the central core and the master signifier of Swedishness” (p. 44). Similarly, Dahl (2021) shows that academic feminist discussion in the Nordic countries takes “whiteness as its naturalized point of departure,” as both innocent and invisible (italics in the original, pp. 116–17). Dahl’s criticism can be linked to the criticism of Indigenous Nordic scholars of white scholars in the Nordic countries, who often fail to listen to Indigenous concerns and include Indigenous voices (Alakorva 2021; Dankertsen 2021; see also discussion in Groglopo and Suárez-Krabbe 2023). Sámi knowledge is rendered invisible within academic institutions (Eriksen et al. 2024) and, as Aikio (2021) states in relation to museums, Sámi need to be recognized as active agents and producers of knowledge, not only as producers of objects (p. 114). Here we see how the majority population in the Nordic countries become the point of reference. In addition, as argued by Kuokkanen (2020) regarding the Sámi, the majority population in the Nordic countries has quite limited knowledge of them and even less about the assimilation policies of the different Nordic states against them, their lands, and their cultural rights. She stresses that many Sámi feel that these experiences of colonialism and exclusion are largely ignored by majority populations across the Nordic countries (p. 294). Thus, logic of elimination has taken place regarding how invisible Indigenous people have been made and continue to be made in multiple senses in the Nordic countries. That does not trivialize the multiple ways that Nordic Indigenous peoples have constantly resisted different policies (Alakorva 2025; Buhre and Bjork 2021; Fjellheim 2020), or the important role of Indigenous researchers (for example discussion in Junka-Aikio et al. 2021, pp. 7–9; Magga 2021). The flags of Sápmi and Kalaallit Nunaat can be seen as one point of resistance, as both use the sun as a symbol through two semicircles rather than a cross, which is the dominant symbol in the flags of the other Nordic countries (Alakorva 2025).

Several Nordic scholars have worked with the concept of innocence in relation to whiteness in the Nordic context (see, for example, Gullestad 2005; Svendsen 2014), but innocence as a key feature of Nordic exceptionalism as Lars Jensen and I discussed in our edited volume on Nordic exceptionalism (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012). It is one way that white supremacy has worked in the Nordic countries and innocence is claimed through denial or dismissal of racism or in the idea that Nordic countries stand outside colonial histories, or as phrased by Gullestad (2005) concerning Norway, they conceptualize themselves as “historically innocent in regard to slavery, colonization and racism” (p. 43). The refusal to acknowledge that Nordic states also colonized Indigenous Nordic people has been ongoing for a long time (Fur 2013)—including in certain scholarly fields and preoccupations (Höglund and Burnett 2019). Claims of innocence have, furthermore, served to advance the claim that “it is different here,” which has functioned to deny the existence of racism in the present (Rastas 2012; Clarke and Vertelyté 2023; Loftsdóttir 2014) or to make colonialism appear different, even paternalistic (L. Jensen 2022). In anti-racist education within Nordic educational systems, racism tends to be seen as belonging in the past, and students’ experiences of racism are discredited (Clarke and Vertelyté 2023). As argued by Laura Pulido (Pulido et al. 2025), white innocence is a “discourse of denial,” securing “moral legitimacy” (p. 1907). In other continents, as earlier said, Nordic migrants benefited from the dispossession of Indigenous people, settling on the land of displaced people (Bergland 2020), often assuming that it was a natural process that Indigenous people would disappear and the future of North European settlers to take over the continent (Bergland 2020; Grav 2020).

White supremacy ideologies are an integrated part of Nordic histories. Nordic scholars were active participants in the development of race science in the 19th century, with some becoming highly influential (Andreassen 2014). Nordic scholars contributed to evolutionary models that placed Indigenous people at inferior stages of human development, marking them as racially and temporally different, and also gave or traded human remains of Nordic Indigenous people to scholars elsewhere (Andersson Burnett 2025; Fjellheim 2020). These classifications were ambiguous, as reflected in the long-standing view of Finns as inferior and their placement alongside Indigenous populations (Keskinen 2019). Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian scientists debated which nationality represented the purest Nordic race, concerns that were entangled with the rise in nationalism (Kyllingstad 2014, p. 20). White supremacy has worked through the welfare state in the Nordic countries, which has long been central to the idea of Nordic exceptionalism. Violence has systematically been executed on Indigenous and racialized people in the Nordic countries through various interventions of the welfare system. To take one example, the Danish government has performed since the 1960s a “silenced genocide” in Kalaallit Nunaat, as phrased by Dyrendom Graugaard and Ambrosius (2023), through the insertion of intrauterine devices (IUDs) in Kalaallit women and adolescents. This was frequently without their knowledge or consent. As this targeted approximately half of the female Kalaallit population, the Danish IUD program—only publicly revealed in 2022—has led to a loss of a half a generation of the Kalaallit population. Closer inspection shows that this was not a practice of the past but took place as late as the 2010s, both against Kalaallit women in Kalaallit Nunaat and Kalaallit girls in Denmark (Dyrendom Graugaard et al. 2025).

Dispossession of Indigenous people has continued in the Nordic countries (Fjellheim 2020; Spangen et al. 2015). There have been new challenges, such as in Finland, where settlers have, for example, aimed to claim indigeneity for themselves, not through “firstness” but through claiming a vague, distant Indigenous ancestor (Junka-Aikio 2023). As Laura Junka-Aikio (2023) has shown, these are well-organized populist movements that seek to undermine Indigenous communities in the respective areas. Kuokkanen (2020) points out in the context of the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in the Nordic countries that many Sámi have asked how it is possible to trust a state in terms of reconciliation, when the state is now pushing for an aggressive destruction of Sámi livelihoods and rights. The call for a green transition has further dispossessed the Sámi of their lands, with the language of sustainability used to justify mining and other forms of resource extraction (Kårtveit 2021; Sirniö et al. 2025).

In the next section of the article, I will give insight into different expressions of white supremacy through two examples. One concerns my native country, Iceland, and its consistent disregard for the Indigenous present, and the other reflects the Kalaallit people as Indigenous people who apparently need to be guided by Denmark. Both examples reflect Sharpe’s (2014) concept of “wake,” with the past and the present firmly embraced.

2.2. Settlement Stories in Iceland—Being the First

In 2022, two artists, Bryndís Björnsdóttir and Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir, placed a cast entitled “The First White Mother in America” into their sculpture in the shape of a small rocket ship, with the declaration that it should be launched into space due to its racist connotation. The cast, generally in a public place, was a replica of one of Iceland’s beloved artists, Ásmundur Sveinsson’s artwork, which he created for the New York World’s Fair in 1939–1940. The discussion that followed largely criticized their action and completely disregarded the artworks’ critical intervention. In many ways, it echoed heated debates about racism connected to another artwork almost a decade earlier (Loftsdóttir 2013), separating Ásmundur from racism and seeing the artwork as a personal criticism of his persona. The case in 2022 can be seen as an opening up of wider questions of how Icelandic people have engaged with indigeneity and the difficulties of raising questions of white supremacy in Iceland.

Ojibwe scholar Jean O’Brien’s identification of what she calls “firsting” and “lasting” is an extremely powerful tool of analysis, and even though O’Brien is using them to analyze the US context, they are helpful as well in the Icelandic one. O’Brien points out that replacement narratives in the US attempt to assign “primacy” to non-Indigenous people, producing narratives that celebrate “first-ness” (or firsting), in attempts to seize indigeneity for themselves. These are accompanied by narratives about the extinction of Indigenous people, which make it unavoidable and natural (O’Brien 2010). These narratives refuse to acknowledge the continued existence of Indigenous people as part of the present, and as the actual Indigenous inhabitants of certain areas of the US were made invisible and claimed to be extinct in local histories, origin myths were constructed that gave primacy to non-Indigenous people who had settled in these areas. These narratives stress different “firstness” of the non-Indigenous populations, thus claiming nativeness to themselves (ibid.).

“Firsting,” in O’Brien’s sense (2010), has been a part of Icelandic nationalistic discourse formulated through narratives on Iceland as the “first” to “discover” America. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this emphasis on “firsting” can be read in the wider context of Icelandic intellectuals attempting to position themselves within discourses that gave higher status to those who were active participants in coloniality and colonialism (Loftsdóttir 2019). Iceland was under Danish rule, gaining home rule in 1918 and full independence in 1944. While Iceland was seen as part of the far north early on, inhabited by savage others and a site of resource speculations (Agnarsdóttir 2013; Oslund 2011), Icelandic intellectuals attempted in the 19th and early 20th century to prove themselves as belonging to the civilized part of Europe, often by using racism against other people under foreign power like themselves. Thus, Iceland’s engagement with colonialism is dualistic in the sense that it was both an object of colonialism and thus of imperial resource speculations as well as its intellectuals were actively embedded in coloniality through the reproduction of racist and colonial discourses (Loftsdóttir 2019).

My earlier analysis of late nineteenth and early twentieth century schoolbooks in Iceland shows European past exploration and colonization of the world as an important and celebrated subject (Loftsdóttir 2010, p. 84). Some of these textbooks mention Leifur Eiríksson. In a translated history book from a Danish schoolbook, the Icelandic version—published in 1878—has added that it was the Icelander Leifur Eiríksson that found America (Melsted 1878), while the original Danish book says that it is thanks to the people in the North—the “Nordboerne”—mentioning as well Leifur Eiríksson’s name (see discussion in Loftsdóttir 2009; Erslev 1865, p. 226). At the time, Iceland was under Danish rule, reflecting how this discussion can be read as part of claiming pride in their nationality. The schoolbook by Arngrímsson and Hansson (1943) says that it is mainly the Icelandic people that can be thanked for initiating the age of discoveries or as it says in the original: “Since Icelanders had found Greenland in the 10th century and Vínland during the year 1000, many people in southern Europe had known that there was a country west in the Atlantic ocean” (p. 8). The text explains that this encouraged Columbus to seek new routes to Asia and that consequently the “Icelander” Leifur Eiríksson is who should be thanked that American was “found” (p. 8). It adds generously that Columbus can still certainly be credited for having found the route there (Arngrímsson and Hansson 1943, p. 10). These can be seen as examples of how Icelandic intellectuals tried to insert Iceland into the logic of settler colonialism, emphasizing that it was not Christopher Columbus who “found” America, but Leifur Eiríksson, and that Leifur was Icelandic.

This schoolbook’s emphasis did not exist in a vacuum, but different discourses have emphasized “firstness.” The youth magazine Æskan is just one demonstration and the confident tone of the text is especially telling regarding how cemented these ideas were. The text starts with rhetorically wondering that perhaps many have read the Icelandic Saga of Eirik the Red that narrates the story of Leifur Eiríksson. If so, the author of the text claims that they “know” that Eirík the Red “found” Greenland and settled there and his son Leifur “found America during the year 1000 first of all”1 (Leifur Heppni Finnur Ameríku 1926, p. 65). The text specifies that Leifur went back home, and that the route to America was lost until Christopher Columbus “found” it again, and after that, America “started becoming settled by civilized people and thus Columbus is seen as the one who found America” (p. 65).2 These narratives of Columbus demonstrate how Icelandic elites generally did not challenge the underlying logic of white supremacy. Instead, their concerns centered on Iceland’s own status within this racial order, particularly the risk of being associated—by other European intellectuals—with non-white or colonized populations (Loftsdóttir 2019).

When Icelandic people began migrating to the Americas in the late 19th century, they, like other Nordic migrants, benefited from settler colonial structures and the white supremacist hierarchies that were underpinning them (Eyford 2006). The anxiety of the Icelandic population about being placed on the “outside” or alongside colonized populations was clearly demonstrated in various exhibitions where Icelanders did not represent themselves (Loftsdóttir 2019, pp. 32–33). This discontent was clearly evident in the colonial exhibition in Tivoli in Copenhagen in 1905. Icelandic people were to be displayed with Indigenous people of Kalaallit Nunaat and people from the West Indies, but they protested on the basis of racism. Also in the context of the Paris exhibition in 1900 Icelandic people living in Copenhagen—the display was set up briefly there—protested as they felt that Iceland was not presented as a modern nation (Loftsdóttir 2019, p. 32).

At the World Fair in New York in 1939, times were different, with the Icelandic people gaining stronger recognition internationally. Iceland’s contribution to the exhibition sought to underscore that Icelandic people were the first to “find” America, not the Norwegians. In the US, Leifur had been celebrated since the late 19th century as a more appropriate ancestor than Columbus, due to his Nordic ancestry, which correlated with stricter immigration laws targeting migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe (Björnsdóttir 2001, p. 222). Leifur was still never able to become as popular with the public as Columbus, and Columbus’s nationality, as from the Southern part of Europe, became increasingly erased from these narratives, with non-ethnic white Columbus becoming the key point of reference (Trouillot 1995, pp. 114–32).

In the World Fair in New York, Leifur Eiríkson’s statue was placed in a prominent place, next to the pavilion’s main entrance, but as I will come back to later, this was a replica of a statue given by the US government to Iceland in the early 1930s. This statue had been created by the American sculpture Alexander Stirling Calder and was displayed at the fair along with another one of Þorfinnur Karlsefni. Þorfinnur had traveled as well to North America, staying there for a few years before going back to Kalaallit Nunaat, where a group of Nordic people had recently settled. Þorfinnur’s statue was also a cast of a work made earlier by Einar Jónsson (Crocker 2023, p. 2). Ásmundur Sveinsson’s statue of Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir was made especially for the occasion. It was three meters high and stood next to the Temple of Religion, bearing the title “The First White Mother in America.” Guðríður is standing proudly in a small ship looking ahead, with a small child standing on her shoulder. This is Snorri, the son that she had with Þorfinnur, and according to the Icelandic Sagas, who was born during their years in North America.

As is pointed out by Crocker’s (2023) detailed analysis of Guðríður’s statue, Guðríður’s historical framing has consistently placed her in the context of later European colonialization of the Americas, in celebration of Columbus, where across different mediums, the word “first” appears over and over (pp. 13–14). As Crocker (2023) points out, the narrative of Viking migration to North America (from Kalaallit Nunaat, actually, as they had settled there) appears at first sight perhaps to disrupt the traditional Columbus narrative. Still, it does in fact only replace it with another emphasis on “firsting” in O’Brien’s sense (2010). The discussion in Iceland prior to the fair celebrated the selection of the Guðríður statue by the World Fair selection committee and it is clearly seen by both Ásmundur and the Icelandic journalists as not only Ásmundur’s personal victory but also as important for Iceland as a country that Guðríður is recognized as the “first white” woman in the Americas (Bjarnadóttir and Pavlović 2022).

While the location of the three-meter-high statue of Guðríður is not known or if it still exists, several small replicas were made from the 92 cm original. Those are today displayed in various settings (Crocker 2023, p. 6). Leifur Eiríksson is celebrated in various ways in Iceland, which also has partly been shaped by political atmosphere and especially the relationship with the US, as pointed out by Björnsdóttir (2001). Stirling Calder’s statue stands as well, as previously mentioned, in front of Reykjavík’s main church, Hallgrímskirkja, which is today a site of intense tourism (Crocker 2023, p. 2). The international airport has carried Leifur’s name since 1987. At the airport, all passengers pass a monument with an image of Leifur with the engraving in Icelandic and English “Leifur Eiríksson, Explorer, son of Iceland, discoverer of North America, 1000 AD” before entering the security control. Recent schoolbooks have also repeated the narrative of Leifur as the Icelander who “found” America, as can be seen in a workbook, accompanying a schoolbook that is for the most part a retelling of the old Saga’s but still emphasizes, “We are proud of the Icelander Leifur Eiríksson, who found America and have made him monuments in few places” (Karlsdóttir 2001, p. 38).

The art installation entitled “Carry-On: First White Mother in America [Farangursheimild: Fyrsta hvíta móðirin í nýja heiminum]” by the two Icelandic artists Bryndís Björnsdóttir and Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir, in 2022, had the key point that this kind of white supremacy—after all still publicly displayed and uncontested—did not belong in Iceland and should be taken all the way to space. They stressed that their criticism is not directed at the historical figure of Guðríður or the artist Ásmundur but the emphasis of the birth of her child as the first “white” child in America and that this “white” child was Icelandic (Guðjónsson and Þórðarson 2022; Gunnarsson 2023). Their emphasis on that through their intervention with the cast is put into a more public place than previously in front of the Marshall house in downtown Reykjavík, which gives people the “opportunity to think about its racist undertones” (Guðjónsson and Þórðarson 2022), indicating their desires to bring Iceland’s historical racism out in the open to be seen and critically reflected on in the present. The placement of Guðríður’s statue in the spaceship indicates both the symbolic displacement of the ideology into space but can also be read through the title “Carry-on,” as she is about to colonize space.

Several of those criticizing the art intervention said that it belittled Guðríður and her extensive travels as a woman, which the display of Ásmundur’s work in the present was intended to celebrate (see discussion in Bjarnadóttir and Pavlović 2022). As argued by Bjarnadóttir and Pavlović (2022), the work itself, however, does not highlight this part of Guðríður’s life but primarily her role as the first “white” mother. Thus, the work gives primacy to, they point out, the “finding” of America as an event to be celebrated, and Icelandic people as champions in that regard. Also looking at it through the eyes of O’Brian’s concept “firsting,” through an emphasis on “first,” the sculpture becomes a part of wider narratives of erasure of the Indigenous population in North America. The intentions of contemporary individuals who selected this work as representing women’s mobility could certainly be quite different, but the work itself must be situated in a long tradition in which women have been glorified as mothers and reproducers of the nation and have often had little role beyond that. As the previous narratives indicate, civilization is the key marker that is usually seen as produced by the arrival of European people to America, rather than by a particular nation-state. As Crocker (2023) points out, Columbus becomes the “primary historical reference point” for understanding Guðríður’s story (p. 18). The Icelandic narratives, however, insert Iceland into these stories and thus into Europe’s grand story of civilization, exploration, and imperialism. As the historical figure of Guðríður is so entangled with ideas of white supremacy in the American continent and “firsting,” it would be particularly important in celebrating her life to address these issues critically rather than condemning those who seek to open a space to engage with such criticism. In fact, the two artists especially explain that the cast and its context reduce “the story of Guðríður’s eventful life to white body that gives birth in a land where pagan people with dark skin color lived—people who were later killed by the millions in the second wave of settlement” (Skora á Lögreglu Að Skila Verkinu Óbreyttu 2022).3 Thus, the two artists’ intervention could have been welcomed in today’s Iceland and seen as helping to think about new ways to celebrate Guðríður’s lifespan and story and detangle her from legacies of white supremacy. Scholar M. S. Jónsson (2025), for example, positions it as an important intervention into the current “populist challenge” (p. 258), drawing attention to the present as characterized by a white supremacist movement that seeks precisely to mobilize various monuments and ideas of the past that were not necessarily intended to become mobilized in such ways.

Some voices claimed that the artwork had been damaged, but Bjarnadóttir and Pavlović (2022) point out that the damage that was done was probably primarily “emotional and ideological,” drawing attention to how the intervention destabilized the narrative of racism as not belonging to Iceland’s past. As pointed out earlier, the discussion around the work “Carry-on” carries resemblance to discussions around racism in Iceland, where there have been heated debates when other cultural artifacts have been connected to racism, including any acknowledgement that the authors could have been shaped by racism, and attempts to hold on to visions of Iceland’s innocent past (Loftsdóttir 2013). Acknowledging these artifacts or incidents as embedded in the history of racism is to acknowledge racism as part of Iceland’s past as a nation. In Iceland, white supremacy has not been dismantled in the present but through various actions such as tourism branding, the country probably becomes more strongly cemented as a space of Nordic whiteness. The artwork “Carry-on” can be seen as contributing to a growing resistance in Iceland to white supremacy in various sections of society by anti-racist groups and individuals that have sought to bring these issues from the shadows into the spotlight (Loftsdóttir 2025b).

The problem with the Guðríður narrative and its emphasis on “firstness” is not the act of remembering Guðríður’s history (as the two artists also clarified in the statements to the press), but rather the lack of historical context to these narratives, creating silences that become inherent to the narrative (see Trouillot 1995, p. 27).

Trouillot (1995) points out how the celebration of Columbus has become a celebration of a single moment of history, emptied out of all content (as he phrases it, who would celebrate “Castilian invasion of the Bahamas?” p. 114), and as such can be easily marketed and sold in its pre-packaged form. The installation of Leifur Eiríksson’s monument in downtown Reykjavík clarifies even more clearly that it is not about remembering the past, but about a particular framing of the past in the present, as well as about supremacy, even though we are speaking about different kinds of supremacy in relation to that monument.

The monument was a gift from the US government to the Icelandic nation due to the 1930 parliamentary festival. The US government demanded that the monument would be raised on top of Skólavörðuholt, which the city council of Reykjavík objected to for various reasons. The future planning of the area had already been decided, and the area had a strong sentimental value for Reykavík’s inhabitants. No other placement was, however, acceptable to the US government and a cairn that had been standing there for two centuries (in different forms, the last one as a squire building) had to be demolished to make place for the monument (Ómarsson 2015). A poem in an Icelandic newspaper mourns the demolition of the cairn, describing the town’s most beautiful site as destroyed and that the Leifur monument will teach the country new ways (Á. Jónsson 1932, p. 4), thus hinting that the different relationship with the past signals also a different future. Furthermore, the task of getting the monument in its place was almost impossible for people living in Iceland at the time due to its size and weight (Morgunblaðið 1997, p. 7), which must have created a sense of humiliation as stressed by Ómarsson (2015, p. 64). Ómarsson (2015), furthermore, points out that US demands can be seen as an expression of cultural colonialization strategically conducted when Iceland is trying to break free from its colonial power, Denmark (p. 70). This can be seen as extremely salient since the gift was given during the 1930 parliamentary festival, celebrating 1000 years of parliament in Iceland. People living in Iceland were at the time hoping to show its wide array of international guests, and themselves, that Iceland was ready for a modern future—a sovereign nation—highlighting the festival even as the “test of the nation” (Rastrick 2013, p. 234), which was also embedded with rhetoric of civilization and coloniality (Loftsdóttir 2019). Here we see a different form of supremacy, with the replacement of the “cairn” with Leifur’s grand monument being more than symbolic, since it constituted the erasure of people’s lived history with the canonical history of Leifur, with memorials being “sites that remind us of particular histories and ask us to remember” (Smith 2023, p. 29).

The first years after Leifur Eiríksson’s monument was raised, people living in Reykjavík showed their displeasure through informal acts of resistance, apparently regularly peeing on the monument to the extent that US citizens were finally so appalled by this treatment that a guard was eventually placed next to it (Morgunblaðið 1997; Ómarsson 2015, p. 78). This does not change that fact that for many Icelanders, the statue was a recognition that the Icelandic Leifur Eiríksson was the first to “first” America (Vísir 1932, p. 2; Alþýðublaðið 1932, p. 2), firmly positioning Iceland within “firstness” narratives, but also giving them increased hegemonic power.

These dreams of “firstness” to the American continent intersect to some extent with lingering speculations regarding whether Iceland had claims to Kalaallit Nunaat because, after all, they had been the “first” to colonize it. These speculations were vivid in the early twentieth century, and in 1925, the Icelandic parliament established a committee that had the goal of investigating possible claims to Kalaallit Nunaat. Ironically, as these were often centered on resources in Denmark, for some, this revolved around the possibility of full independence from Denmark. As pointed out by Sveinsson (1994), it is striking that most of these congressmen seem to have forgotten that people were already living there and had the right to the country where they lived (p. 183).

2.3. Kalallit Nunaat—Erasure

The film Orsugiak—The White Gold of Greenland [Orsugiak—Grönlands hvide guld] was shown on the TV station DR—the public Danish Broadcasting Service—in early February 2025 (Pilehave and Rosing 2025). Shortly after, the film was censored, or as it was phrased in the Danish media, “unpublished” due to “large mistakes” that were claimed to be in the film (Meesenburg 2025). The goal here is to contextualize the ban of the film in the wider context of white supremacy, regarding entitlement to Kalaallit Nunaat. It raises questions regarding what kind of space it is and who can be authorized to speak about Kalaallit Nunaat in the present and past and when. I use the cryolite mine that is at the center of the film as a lens to gain a sense of coloniality in the Kalaallit context. I was extremely interested in seeing the film due to its focus on cryolite mining in Kalaallit Nunaat, which had come up in a research project that I had been engaged in. My research revolved around an 1856 expedition from France to the Northern Sea, which included a visit to Kalaallit Nunaat. When trying to familiarize myself with this period in Kalaallit Nunaat society and history, I thought about the words of the Kalaallit artist Inuuteq Storch, when he points out that through his photographs, he tries to speak into the history of Kalaallit Nunaat, emphasizing that the written and visual history of Kalaallit Nunaat has long been primarily narrated by non-Kalaallit people, underscoring the need for a greater diversity of voices (Interview from Modern Art Museum Louisiana n.d.). Boassen et al. (2022), furthermore, point out that non-Kalaallit authors writing about Kalaallit experiences and lives often lack critical self-positionality.

When Jerome Napóleon Bonaparte—the son of the younger brother of Emperor Napoleon—arrived at Paamiut in the southwestern part of Kalaallit Nunaat in 1856, Kalaallit Nunaat was then the only place in the world where cryolite was known to exist. The Austrian scientist Karl Ludwig Giesecke, credited as the “first” to discover the material in the early 19th century, challenged this title, noting that Indigenous peoples had discovered it long before him (Hale and Ali 2025). The French expedition’s goal was to visit a site of cryolite, whose exploitation was beginning, to evaluate whether France could participate in its mining. The different geological excursions in Kalaallit Nunaat at this time by different imperial powers and their agents (Danish, British, Austrian, French, as a few examples) give insight into how this area was already an object of resource speculation and potential extraction—an object to imprint different desires of riches and power—completely disregarding the people who lived there. When discussing the mines in this international context, a publication describing Napóleon’s expedition states that “Danish signifies privilege and possession of the land” (Edmond 1857, p. 357).

The Danish government had a monopoly on trade and investment, which was given to the state-operated Royal Greenland Trading Company. Henrick J. Rink, an extremely influential inspector and later governor of South Kalaallit Nunaat, emphasized the benevolence of the Danish colonial rule, which he saw as differentiating Denmark from other European colonial rulers (Hatt 2020), firmly folding Denmark within future ideas of Nordic exceptionalism (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012). The title of Rink’s book, Danish Greenland: Its people and its products, published in 1877, reflects clearly the appropriation of the country and its people as belonging to Denmark. Rink emphasized that Danish authorities needed to decide for the Kalaallit population how their society should evolve, justifying the excessive control through what he saw as Kalaallit people’s childish nature (Marquardt 1999). These racist ideas that infantilized Indigenous people living in Kalaallit Nunaat—and of course not exceptional to Kalaallit Nunaat—became important in shaping future policy, as well as a source of explanation when it failed (Marquardt 1999; Rud 2014; L. Jensen 2018).

When Prince Napoleon came to Kalaallit Nunaat, the Danish colonial government had sought to shape the society in radical ways, selecting what they felt worth preserving in Kalaallit social organization and material culture (see discussion in Graugaard 2018). They sought to govern not only what should be produced and how (Graugaard 2018), but also the most intimate parts of people’s lives, such as marriage (Marquardt 2004), and the number of people in each household (Petterson 2017, p. 67). Different processes of governmentality implanted politics of race and class, which were executed through systems of surveillance (Petterson 2017). Fur and blubber were extremely valuable as objects of extraction for the colonial government, generating revenues through export. Commercialization of seal hunting and products, however, made Kalaallit people and society vulnerable to market fluctuations, with drastic consequences later (Graugaard 2022; Marquardt 1999). In the end, the French decided not to seek a patent from the Danish state to mine the cryolite. Carl Frederik Tietgen obtained the rights in the fall the same year, whose principal objectives were to exploit the mineral for the newly developed method of aluminum production (Kragh 1995, p. 292). He sold the rights to a trading company that wanted to use it for soda production, established in Øresund (after one year in another place), called “Kryolithfabriken Øresund” (Kragh 1995, p. 295). A few years later, the Cryolite Mining and Trading Company was established, becoming responsible for the extraction and sale of cryolite, but other factories were also established in other European countries working in close collaboration with the Danish factory in Øresund, with the most important business relationship being established in 1865 with a US company called Pennsylvania Salt Manufactury Company (Kragh 1995, p. 298).

The film Orsugiak—The White Gold of Greenland, directed by Claus Pilehave and Otto Rosing, is a historical documentary focusing on the consequences of the mining of cryolite. The narrative provides insights into the history of the mine from its beginning until its closure, when the cryolite had been completely depleted. It works from historical sources, but also highlights the voices of people living in Kalaallit Nunaat in terms of the meaning and impact of the mines on their community and lives, as well as the effects of this massive enterprise on the local community in Kalaallit Nunaat and on the state of Denmark. The question of if Kalaallit Nunaat was a financial burden to Denmark is one of the key issues, becoming painfully relevant through the interviews with people who have been told all their lives that this is the case (or as phrased by L. Jensen (2008), perceived as “ungrateful” to Denmark p. 59). The documentary allows the viewer as well to follow the massive archival research conducted for the film, which brought together, apparently, for the first time, the prices of cryolite and the accumulated turnover the mines generated in Denmark, showing clearly the massive wealth that Kalaallit Nunaat brought Denmark. The lead protagonist of the film is Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, Associate Professor at Copenhagen University, but extensive archival and research work underpins the film. Graugaard gives the viewer insights into parts of her personal history as it touches on the theme, offering differently positioned viewers insight into both the intimate sense of the place of mining in Kalaallit Nunaat and its global positioning.

After it was shown at the TV station DRTV (Danish Broadcasting Cooperation) in early February 2025, the film became the center of a major media event in Denmark. As stated earlier, it was withdrawn from the station after only ten days and, thus in fact, banned in Denmark, in addition to the responsible editor-in-chief being fired. Furthermore, Graugaard, a Danish–Kalaaleq scholar, was harshly criticized in the Danish media in a very personal way, for example, in a short parody produced at the same station (Danish Broadcasting Cooperation). The reason given for the withdrawal of the documentary was that the numbers were misleading regarding how much Denmark had earned from Kalaallit Nunaat (Jepsen et al. 2025). While the massive enterprise of calculating the film’s revenues could naturally be disputed as part of academic conversations in general and, notably, constitutes only a part of the film’s narrative, claims of misleading calculations make a particularly unconvincing justification for withdrawing the documentary. The main criticism was that the film implied it focused on profit rather than total sales, thereby giving a misleading impression of the scope of the benefits related to the mining operation. The Icelandic economist, Mixa (2025), pointed out that if it did produce such low earnings as some Danish economists implied, then this must have been one of the worst-run companies in the world. Additionally, the film clearly emphasized several times that the focus was on total sales, with further discussion that estimating earnings was too complicated. The film was first shown in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat, but in the wake of the criticism, it was shown again there at the end of February 2025 with Kalaallisut subtitles, indicating well the extensive interest it received there (Reimer-Johansen 2025).

The banning of the film ensured that the Danish media discussion revolved around “how much” or “how little” Denmark had earned from cryolite, diverting attention from various other issues the film resurrects in the present. The ban can thus be understood as a part of a broader pattern of erasure that has marked the history of Indigenous people, seeking to produce silences through an endless repetition of numbers that make other issues invisible or push them out of sight. One point of silence attempted is how this rare, non-renewable material could have been completely depleted. Who has the right to do that? Who has the right to leave people with nothing, but a hole filled with water? The hole stands as not a symbolic but a literal reminder of the extractive industries’ ability to hollow out entire worlds, until nothing is left. What kind of uneasy reminders does the film also carry for the present regarding the enclave of “little Denmark,” that visually looks like a scene from science fiction where a piece of Denmark has been transplanted in Kalaallit Nunaat? Even though Kalaallit Nunaat is not classified as a settler colony like the Americas, the technologies used in the colonialization of space necessary for the extraction of the resource were, in this case, the creation of a closed enclave, restricted to the wider Kalaallit society, with workers and staff being almost entirely Danish (Hale and Ali 2025). The film shows white bodies playing tennis and luxurious plants and furniture, all of which speak to white possession in Moreton-Robinson’s (2015) sense. And here it is important to remember, as Moreton-Robinson (2015) stresses, how the state executes white possession through legal means, and how white possession often is invisible to those who are within the fold of whiteness. The creation of mini-Denmark within this enclosed space shows one way that racist policies continued in the 20th century. Thus, white possession can be invisible to white people, while having high visibility for Indigenous people (Moreton-Robinson 2015, p. xiiii).

The criticism centering on a “correct” number Denmark earned from the mine can also be analyzed as drawing attention to two aspects. First, how historically Indigenous people’s use of land has been seen as irrelevant, unproductive, making it natural and justifiable that others—usually settlers—would use the land in ways they saw as more suitable and make decisions, regardless of the needs or desires of those who already lived there. In settler colonial studies, making land productive, often through privatization and removal of Indigenous people, is one of the key parts of the definition of settler colonialism, as previously discussed (Bonds and Inwood 2016, p. 721). Jensen (2022) has asked what entitled these people to rule over Greenland at different points in time (p. 10), and as we can specify in the context of the mine, to build infrastructure and extract resources.

Secondly, it also draws attention to the right to frame what questions are the most important to ask. The practice of erasure that we see once again manifested by the reaction to the film in Denmark rests uneasily with this past and rather current history. Here, white supremacy is at play in deciding what is best, what is suitable, and this erasure of the film whose primary aim was to provide Kalaallit voices space, is even more troublesome, seen in the light of the words by artist Inuuteq Storch, mentioned earlier, that the history of Kalaallit Nunaat has been narrated through both text and images by non-Kalaallit people (Interview from Modern Art Museum Louisiana n.d.). Based on Wolfe’s (2006) famous “logic of elimination” in terms of settler colonialism, Wesley Y. Leonard (Leonard 2021) points out that the elimination can consist of different types of erasures, one in which the legitimacies of Indigenous orientations are undermined (p. 223)

The banning of the film needs, furthermore, to be contextualized within histories of Denmark–Kalaallit Nunaat relations, where Kalaallit people and ways of life were seen as inferior at different moments in history, articulated in different ways as I have touched upon here, but where erasure has appeared consistently. Measures such as the forced and imposed sterilizations discussed earlier, the removal of children from their families (Prattes and Myong 2025), and in general systematic attempts by the Danish state to radically transform Kalaallit culture and society highlight the state’s attempts at erasure. For some of these actions, we can perhaps use the concept “righteous violence”, but the concept has been used for violence that is carried out in the name of the settler state and legitimatized in moral terms (Inwood 2018). As Lars Jensen (2022) has said in relation to Kalaallit Nunaat, it has been approached as an exceptional case in Denmark where “imperial-colonial power was driven by altruism” (p. 10).

The film was also criticized for being shown at a “critical moment,” or right before the elections in Kalaallit Nunaat, and thus for seeking, according to one economic advisor, to “contribute to poisoning the relationship between Greenland and Denmark” (Bødker 2025). Putting aside that it is highly unlikely that the producers of the film could have controlled its timing so well, such comments are reminders of Rink’s early paternalistic views of Kalaallit people as unable to make decisions on their own, but have to be under surveillance by Danish powers regarding what they should be allowed to know and not know.

The parody at DRTV places Graugaard at the center, where it is indicated that the issue revolves around ice-cream instead of cryolite. In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement, created—as in many other places—increased demand for decolonialization in Kalaallit Nunaat, leading, for example, to an appeal to rename the Danish Kæmpe Eskimo ice-cream stick (L. Jensen 2022, p. 17). The replacement of the cryolite with the ice-cream thus refers to an object whose branding has been called out by Kalaallit people as racist, thus both belittling the issue at stake and ridiculing the appeal call for justice. Even though the parody was reported to the police for racism (“Satire reported to the police for racism about Greenland” 2025), it was not unpublished by the station. Importantly, this reflects that in Denmark, it is not necessary to silence or ban those who express racism—they are protected by free speech, or their intervention is not recognized as racism, but it is justifiable or natural to silence those who speak about colonialism and extraction. It is difficult to see this reaction to the film as anything other than white supremacy in its attempt to silence those who speak “truth to power”—to use the phrase uttered by Fay Harrison, anthropologist and decolonial scholar, talking about those who speak about the past and present of racism and particular manifestations of white supremacy in settler society (Harrison 2025) being disqualified and the matter at hand diffused.

I started with that long introduction on Kalaallit Nunaat at the time when Napoleon came to inspect the cryolite mines, partly because this positions my own knowledge about this area but also because it gives insight into Kalaallit Nunaat as a place of extraction for Denmark for a long time, and the way in which Danish officials have sought to shape the society through different governmental practices, that are still having consequences today and are echoed in the reaction to the film. Møller (2022) uses DiAngelo’s concept of white fragility to explain the reaction that Kalaallit people often receive from Danes when the issue of colonialism is brought up, characterized by persistent denial. She takes as an example a tweet from a Danish Politician, talking about if Kalaallit Nunaat had been the colony of Denmark or not: “It’s debatable and I do not like that word [colony] because it sounds like we went out and subjugated a country to which we had no right. And that was not the case” (Møller 2022, p. 16; see also Hansen 2023).

3. Discussion

There is much to say about white supremacy in the Nordic countries, and this article has only skimmed the surface of some of the issues that relate to Indigenous people in the Nordic countries. Beliso-De Jesús and Pierre (2020) draw attention to that by moving the lens from racialization and race to white supremacy, which we are naming whiteness (p. 3), and thus drawing attention to the fact that racialization involves white people’s dominant role and supremacy in interpreting, giving legitimacy, and normalizing categorizations and truths about the world. In the discussion about the film and about the Guðríður’s monument, it becomes necessary to draw attention to the fact that the Nordic countries have also invested in ideas of white supremacy, that the Nordic countries have been far from innocent in the history of racism. In the parody that intended to make fun of the documentary, we see clearly the unmasking of racism and coloniality in Denmark, with the researcher and narrator of the film–importantly a Kalaallit person–reduced to the figure of “the Eskimo” in old racial typologies. It can be signaled in the clothing, tattoos, and facial expressions. This figure of the parody has nothing to do with the “real” individual that is supposed to be portrayed, rather these are reflections of old and new white supremacy depictions of what it means to be Indigenous. In the case of Iceland, familiar narratives of Nordic exceptionalism are enacted where the issue is repositioned as being about particular individuals, and the Indigenous present and past are not engaged with at all. The video in the Danish case reflects as well how these discussions are entangled with hostilities toward critical analytical research in humanities and social sciences—which we also see in Iceland—that have exploded in the last few years, such as through the creation of a strawman in the idea of “woke” (i.e., by anti-woke movements) (Samaras 2025), even though having indeed older roots (Lagerspetz 2021). These hostilities toward critical scholarships are beyond the scope of this paper but need to be constantly critically addressed. It is, furthermore, necessary to go beyond white supremacy as an exception in the Nordic countries and investigate how white supremacy ideas are part of various expressions and policies that include Indigenous people within and outside the Nordic countries but are not limited to them. We see past and present colliding painfully in US discussions unfolding in early 2026 on their “necessity” in acquiring Kalaallit Nunaat due to its rare minerals on the claims that they “need them,” with complete disregard for those who live there and their rights. This both recalls US historical dealings with Indigenous people in present–past and speculations of European powers over the cryolite—leaving less than nothing behind.

The two cases I have presented are distinctive, and I have not attempted to analyze them in the same way. When the movie was banned in Denmark, I was shocked, probably due to my position as a white scholar, even though it should not have shocked me, as the overview of the treatment of Indigenous people more broadly in the Nordic countries shows erasure and white supremacy. As Indigenous scholars have pointed out, when white supremacy is expressed openly, it creates often a sense of continuity for those who live daily with racism but a shock (Ramirez 2025) for people like myself. The reaction to the work “Carry-On” was less surprising to me, probably because it took place in my own society, where I have actively criticized and researched racism and coloniality for a long time. The reaction to their artwork centered firmly on Ásmundur and Guðríður as persons rather than engaging with the critical but constructive questions it asked, questions that ultimately revolved around dismantling white supremacy.

4. Materials and Methods

This discussion is based primarily on a literature review of published sources. Its analysis of the two contemporary events uses the events as a platform to discuss more broadly the historical relationship between different Nordic countries and the ways that Indigenous people have been positioned and referred to in the Nordic countries. The discussion benefits from my diverse analysis of different materials in other projects throughout the years. All sources used are referred to in the text and are accessible.