Since the 1950s, the Danish public school has been a central institution of the Danish welfare state explicitly linked to the development of welfare and democracy through the formation of future citizens - today, with declared goals of pursuing “freedom of thought, equality, and democracy” (BUVM 2024). In the same historical period as ideas of democracy and equity gained centrality in Danish school policy, the Danish state executed an extensive modernization project that instituted racially based systems (Petterson 2012), forced displacements of Inuit children (Hermann 2021) and forced population control (Graugaard et al. 2025) amounting to what has been characterized as a silenced genocide (Graugaard et al. 2023). While research on these colonial trajectories is growing the majority of the Danish population remains largely unaware of Greenland's history with Denmark (STUK 2019).

In June 2022 the governments of Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat initiated a historical investigation of the “post-colonial” relationship from the period after World War II until today, acknowledging the need to shed further light on the consequences (Naalakkersuisut & Statsministeriet 2022). Responding to the well-documented contemporary prejudice, discrimination and racism towards Kalaallit in Danish society (UN 2023; DIHR 2023) the Danish government has recently highlighted the importance of including the North Atlantic and the Danish Commonwealth (Rigsfællesskabet) as a mandatory topic in school curriculum (Regeringen 2025).

Based on the insights of existing research, I argue that such curriculum-political initiatives must be rooted in a critical awareness about the institutional knowledge that historically has been available and how this knowledge might shape contemporary concepts and self-perceptions.

The connection between Danish discrimination and prejudice towards Kalaallit on the one hand and the well-documented lack of knowledge about Kalaallit Nunaat and the Danish/Greenlandic relation on the other, has been made in multiple reports (UVM 2019, DIHR 2023, DUF 2024). However, understanding prejudice and discrimination towards Kalaallit as a matter of not-knowing, I argue, runs the risk of overlooking the type of knowledge that informed these practices to begin with. Taking as point of departure that social patterns of human action cannot be separated from knowledge, and that knowledge does not appear in a vacuum but is socially, culturally and historically situated, the question of discriminatory tendencies within a population, can be understood not just as a lack of knowledge, but rather, as a presence of certain type of shared knowledge that informs collective patterns of thinking about Kalaallit Nunaat.

This form of collective knowledge might be understood considering scholarly contributions highlighting that the colonial injustices of the Danish welfare state, especially in regard to Kalaallit Nunaat, are often denied, contested or presented as benevolent and well-intended (Graugaard 2022; Lofsdottór & Jensen 2016; Boassen et al. 2022). In this paper I investigate this through the concept of implicit collective memory (Erll 2022); an often unconscious, but none the less powerful, cultural remembering-imagining system, passed from generation to generation, through narrative schemata and patterns of framing that informs perceptions and actions of the present. Since collective implicit memory is often considered a long-term effect of an active memory culture and its key processes, such as remediation, canonization and institutionalization, I investigate how the social injustices of the Danish welfare state’s modernization program might have been incorporated in the collective memory in the same historical period as they were carried out. Based on a concept of schooling as a state process that concentrates, unifies and universalizes values (Bourdieu and 2006) the research question underpinning this paper is:How have the social policies of the Danish ‘modernization’ project in Kalaallit Nunaat historically been narrated in Danish school books from 1950-1989?

This paper is founded on material consisting of schoolbooks published from 1950-1989 gathered through a systematic literature search through the Danish Royal Library. The systematic literature search supplemented by a method of snowballing and archival search in the historical collection of teaching materials located at the Danish Pedagogical University. The historical collection of publications from before 1974 is located in the library’s “remote magazine” next to the collection “DK2” consisting of materials from 1975-1989. At the time I began my search, the library was in the process of registering all the historical materials in their digital database, this was of great help to my research process. However up until recently, materials from before 1986 were only sporadically registered in the library database. To limit the risk of overlooking unregistered important historical sources I extended my search method to include archival searches in the library through their physical card index. Here, I have searched the shelves of history, geography and social studies in the remote magazine and in DK2. This enabled me to include passages from books that were not limited to the topic of ‘Greenland’ in their titles. My selection does not include passages that exclusively describe the colonial period before World War II, texts and tables consisting only of geographical data such as climate, weather, landscape and demographics, texts that only outline years and events without further explanations or accounts. Due to my interest in texts with a high level of detail and complexity I have limited my selection to material aimed at the highest stages of Danish public school from 7th-10th grade. Guided by my research interest, a method of thematic analysis will be applied to identify themes and patterns across the material (Nowell et. al. 2017) describing how the modernization efforts of the Danish welfare state were contextualized, rationalized, justified, described, represented, explained, defended, criticized, discussed in the selected materials. Through these readings I will identify patterns in the framing of events enabling condensed descriptive analyses of the identified themes to investigate how the materials constructs meaning by narratively weaving together disparate events and plots into a meaningful whole (Czarniawska 2010; ). Addressing what has been described as colonial amnesia in the Danish context, in the literature also described as systemic practices of forgetfulness (Stoler 2008; 2011), a method of reading for silences in the material will be employed.

The paper is expected to provide empirical knowledge on the specificities of the Danish case, thereby advancing the understanding of how colonial relations are reproduced within educational structures to advance the theoretical development of the field, and the understanding of coloniality in the educational structures in the Nordic region and the politics of national identity and memory. The analysis will take into consideration “colonial amnesia that exceptionalist and explanatory approaches to Danish colonial history tend to produce” (Graugaard & Ambrosius Høgfeldt 2023, p. 162) by paying attention to how histories might be fragmented, misremembered, or unarticulated through systemic practices of forgetfulness; normalized in common-sensical assumptions about colonial relations that underpin everyday understandings (Stoler, 2022: 6). To do this, I will pay attention to descriptions of events that have been brought forward by Kalaallit as examples of historical injustices committed by the Danish welfare state such as forced population control, forced displacements and racially differentiated salary systems between Danes and Kalaallit or, in the vocabulary of the Danish state; ‘the IUI-programme’, ‘the centralization policies’ and the ‘birthplace criterion’. My preliminary analysis reveals narratives of Danish benevolence, supporting existing research about Danish exceptionalism. Connected to this narrative is a recurring theme in which the above-mentioned examples are narrated as benevolent solutions to a variety of identified problems in Kalaallit Nunaat, while the Danish involvement in creating these problems in the first place is left out of the narrative. These narrative representations I aim to conceptualize as amputational practices.

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