Most people have never heard that right now, Inuit families in Greenland and Denmark are still fighting a child welfare system that feels a lot like colonialism dressed up as “protection.”
Recently, a Greenlandic Inuk mother in Denmark, Keira Alexandra Kronvold, had her newborn daughter removed shortly after birth on the basis of a “parenting competency” test. That test; known as FKU; has been heavily criticized for being culturally biased and discriminatory against Inuit women, measuring their parenting through a Danish lens and ignoring Inuit language, family structures, and ways of caring.
For years, these tests helped drive a pattern where Greenlandic children in Denmark were removed from their families at much higher rates than ethnic Danish children, and raised in systems where they risked losing their language, identity, and connection to Inuit culture.
For many Inuit, this isn’t happening in a vacuum. In the 1960s and 70s, Denmark sterilized thousands of Greenlandic Inuit women; many of them minors; without proper consent, and in 1951 it ran the “Little Danes” experiment, taking 22 Inuit children from Greenland to be remade as Danish-speaking “model” Greenlanders. Most of those children never lived with their families again, lost their language, and half struggled with serious mental health issues or died young.
In 2020, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen finally apologized to the surviving “Little Danes,” acknowledging that they had been used in an experiment to build a Danish-speaking elite.
The FKU saga is part of that same story. After years of pressure from Inuit advocates and cases like Kronvold’s drawing international attention, the Danish government announced a ban on the use of FKU tests for Greenlandic people, which came into force on May 1, 2025. It’s a step in the right direction; but the fact that such tests were ever used to justify newborn removals shows how deep the problem runs.
Legal battles continue, and families are still trying to reunite with children removed under a system many see as racist and culturally blind.
When you zoom out, you see a pattern shared across the Arctic, the U.S., and Canada: child welfare systems weaponized to “save” Indigenous children from their own people, often by erasing language, culture, and kinship in the process. Until Inuit and other Indigenous Peoples have real power over their own child welfare systems; and are recognized in law as having that right; these stories will keep repeating.
Child protection should keep kids safe, not continue the work of assimilation. For Inuit in Greenland and Denmark today, the fight is to make sure that any system claiming to care for their children is built with Inuit language, knowledge, and rights at the center; not as an afterthought.
