Kalanguak Absalonsen was born in Greenland in 1971 and adopted a few years later by a Danish family without her mother’s informed consent, cutting her off from her Inuit culture for more than 50 years.
Now she wants Denmark to compensate her for her wrongful adoption.
“My mother didn’t know what it meant when she signed the paper, that she wouldn’t be allowed to have any contact with me,” the 53-year-old said in her Copenhagen apartment.
Photo: AFP
In 1975, her mother was a young widow with five children, struggling to make ends meet in Greenland at a time when Denmark had a strategy of cultural assimilation for its former arctic colony, today an autonomous territory.
Her mother’s employer, a Dane, suggested she consider putting some of her offspring up for adoption.
The employer’s brother, who was temporarily living in Greenland with his wife and children, ended up adopting Kalanguak, whose name was changed to the more Danish-sounding Karen.
“When she was told: ‘You can give them to a Danish family,’ my mother didn’t say ‘no,’ but she didn’t say ‘yes’ either,” Absalonsen said.
Her mother gave four of her five children up for adoption.
“After I arrived in Denmark, she wanted to see me, but they said: ‘No, you’re not allowed to have any contact with Kalanguak,’” Absalonsen said.
Anthropologist Gitte Reimer said that the misunderstanding was probably the result of a vast difference between Denmark’s adoption legislation and culture, and the Inuit tradition of open adoptions.
Among Inuits, adopted children maintain regular contact with their biological parents. Absalonsen grew up in a village in Jutland, in continental Denmark, raised as a Dane with very little insight into her Inuit heritage.
“My parents closed the door to Greenland,” she said.
She first saw photographs of her hometown, Sisimiut, when she was 14 years old.
“I grew up with the mentality of the colonized... With the idea that I should be really grateful, because if they hadn’t helped me, I would have ended up like the other Inuits, drinking on a bench in the street,” said Absalonsen, now a mother of three and a nursery school teacher.
As an adult, she pulled away from her adoptive family. She never met her biological mother, but has had sporadic contact with her biological brother and sisters since the mid-1990s, following their mother’s death at the age of 49.
Initially, Absalonsen would not let herself embrace her roots.
However, a documentary about Denmark’s Inuits and contacts with the Danish national newspaper Politiken in 2019 prompted her to start digging into her past.
Since then, she has taken back the name Kalanguak, learned more about her story and officially annulled her adoption.
She has also learned more about the system that — according to Reimer — allowed at least 257 Greenlandic children to be adopted by Danes under murky circumstances.
Absalonsen is now one of four Greenlanders seeking compensation from Denmark for wrongful adoption.
If the state refuses their request, they would take their case to court, their lawyer Mads Pramming said.
He has already helped six Greenlandic Inuits receive apologies and reparations more than 50 years after they were separated from their birth families and taken to Denmark, in an experiment aimed at cultivating a Danish elite on the vast arctic island.
To support his case, Pramming has dozens of old newspaper clippings of advertisements from Danish couples seeking to adopt Inuit children.
Alfred Dam, a former social worker in Greenland, told Danish daily Information that Danes in the 1960s viewed Greenland as a “self-service” bar.
That led to a “Western mentality of the white man who thinks he’s saving children,” which was the predominant belief at the time, sociologist Steven Arnfjord said.
That was not at all the view held by Inuits.
“If you listen to the indigenous people, you realize that ... [the adoption process] was not at all transparent. This was kidnapping” in some cases, Arnfjord said.
Absalonsen is adamant. “We were stolen from Greenland,” she said.
“To finalize and authorize an adoption, the government has to verify that there is consent, that this is what the family wants. And that, that was absolutely not done systematically,” Pramming said.
In addition, in the case of Absalonsen, her adoptive father had a criminal record, which should have barred him from adopting a child.
Some of her family and friends have questioned her need for justice.
“Not everybody understands the nature of the narrative” Denmark has had about the adoption of Greenlandic children, she said.
“Maybe some people still believe I was helped, that it was a good thing that I came to Denmark,” she said, adding that now she wants a clean slate.
“I don’t believe this adoption narrative that I grew up with. That’s why I annulled my adoption,” she said.
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