Free Republic

Recently uncovered government emails reveal that the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), led by Dr. Theresa Tam, subjected Inuit babies to experimental drug trials without their, or their parents' consent. The email correspondence, part of a massive 450,000-page disclosure made possible by Bret Sears, exposes a failed pharmaceutical program that ignored ethical standards, raising serious questions about accountability within Canada's public health system. The experimental drug in question, an RSV monoclonal antibody program, was administered to Inuit infants in Nunavik, an Inuit territory in Quebec, without proper consent or transparency. Despite concerns raised by healthcare workers about the lack...

President-elect Trump made quite the buzz over the weekend when he expressed a strong interest in acquiring the Danish-controlled autonomous territory of Greenland, a land that is both immensely resource-rich and strategically a high priority to the interests of all major powers. In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump announced the nomination of PayPal co-founder Ken Howery to serve as the next U.S. Ambassador to Denmark, writing: “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” Greenland is incredibly resource-rich,...

Georgia Representative Mike Collins, a staunch ally of President-elect Donald Trump, has appeared to float the idea of the United States once again trying to purchase Greenland. On Thursday, Collins posted an image on X (formerly Twitter) of Trump's winning 2024 Electoral College map with the addition of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. The island was colored in red, appearing to suggest it would vote Republican if admitted to the union. "Project 2029," he wrote in the caption, potentially suggesting such a purchase could be achieved if Republicans win again in 2028. Representative Collins frequently shares memes on social...

Ivory Package 1 (Natural History Museum Denmark) Credit: Mikkel Høegh A new genetic analysis of ivory artifacts from across Europe suggests that early Norse hunters ventured far into North American waters and likely interacted with indigenous North Americans as early as 985 CE, or over 500 years before Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas. The scientists behind the potential historical discovery’s genetic and isotopic analysis show that the ivory was harvested from the tusks of Walruses that lived in the North Atlantic waters off of present-day Canada. Their study also found that the long distances and extreme weather that Norse...

A Canadian woman was sentenced to prison for falsely claiming her daughters were Inuit to get scholarships and business grants. Karima Manji was given three years behind bars on Thursday after pleading guilty in February to one count of fraud over $5,000, reported The Canadian Press. The woman fraudulently filed out forms claiming her twin daughters, Amira and Nadya Gill, were Inuit children so they could receive benefits from the Nunavut land claim through Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. Manji's sentence is the first of its kind in Canada for a 'Pretendian' - a person who has falsely claimed Indigenous identity. 'This...

A native woman kidnapped by the Vikings may have been the first American to arrive in Europe around 1,000 years ago, according to a startling new study. The discovery of a gene found in just 80 Icelanders links them with early Americans who may have been brought back to Iceland by Viking raiders. The discovery means that the female slave was in Europe five centuries before Christopher Columbus first paraded American Indians through the streets in Spain after his epic voyage of discovery in 1492...

New research and technologies may end up changing the way we think about early Arctic history, upending the assumption that the ancient ancestors of today's Inuit people learned how to spin yarn from Viking settlers. It has long been assumed that the ancient Dorset and Thule people learned how to spin yarn from Norse settlers who arrived in Newfoundland some 1,000 years ago, according to the Canadian press. “There’s a lot we don’t know,” said Michele Hayeur Smith of Brown University in Rhode Island and lead author of a recent paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Hayeur Smith and...

Pope Francis issued a historic apology Monday for the Catholic Church's cooperation with Canada's 'catastrophic' policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations. 'I am deeply sorry,' Francis said to applause from school survivors and Indigenous community members gathered at a former residential school south of Edmonton, Alberta. The visit, part of a greater tour across the country for the pontiff, marks a radical rethink of the Catholic Church's missionary legacy in the Americas, and was spurred by Francis and the discovery of hundreds of...

A newly discovered gene defect among people of Inuit ancestry in Greenland, Canada and Alaska will possibly lead to screening of all newborn Inuits as they will otherwise be at risk of dying from child vaccines or simple viral infections. For several weeks, medical doctors at Rigshospitalet had difficulty diagnosing a very ill 22-month-old Greenlandic child. The child showed signs of meningitis, and there was also a suspicion of tuberculosis, which is relatively common in Greenland. The treatment did not work as intended and the child's condition was serious. "A whole genome sequencing was carried out and this revealed a...

Voters in Greenland have given an opposition party its first-ever chance to form a government after a campaign that sought to define the limits of development on the Arctic island. The Inuit Ataqatigiit party won 37% of the vote, compared with 29% for the ruling social-democratic Siumut party, according to official results reported by Reuters. The vote totals should allow Inuit Ataqatigiit to grab 12 seats in the 31-member unicameral legislature, known as the Inatsisartut, meaning it will likely need to form a coalition with support from one of the smaller parties. At the center of Tuesday's election was the...

....It was in 1951 when Danish authorities decided that one way to modernise Greenland would be to create a new type of Greenlander. Teachers and priests were asked to identify children who could be re-educated and given a "better life" in mainland Denmark, and then return to be role models for Greenland-Denmark relations. Many families were reluctant but some gave way, and in May 1951, the ship MS Disko set sail from Nuuk with 22 children on board. Helene Thiesen, now in her 70s but seven at the time, said that her mother, who had been left alone with three...

The maker of Eskimo Pies will change the 99-year-old brand name of the ice cream treat, the company said Friday — becoming the latest organization to overhaul the marketing of a product with a racially tinged moniker in recent weeks. The owner of the Eskimo Pie, Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, said in a statement they had been considering renaming the chocolate-covered ice cream bar and popsicle for some time. “We are committed to being a part of the solution on racial equality, and recognize the term is derogatory,” the company’s head of marketing said in a statement. “This move is...

The surprising ‘belwhal’ DNA reveals beluga-narwhal hybrid by Philip Robinson This article is from Creation 41(4):19, October 2019 Three unusual-looking whales were caught in Greenland by Inuit hunters in the late 1980s—unlike any the Inuit had ever seen. Each was an even grey colour, with flippers like those of belugas, and tails like those of narwhals. One of their skulls was preserved; a DNA study has now identified it as a first-generation hybrid between a male beluga and a female narwhal—a ‘belwhal’. One of their skulls was preserved; a DNA study has now identified it as a first-generation hybrid between...

About 74,000 years ago, the Toba volcano on the Indonesian island of Sumatra erupted with catastrophic force. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, it is believed to be the largest volcanic event on Earth in the last 2 million years. Toba spewed enough lava to build two Mount Everests, it produced huge clouds of ash that blocked sunlight for years, and it the left behind a crater 31 miles (50 kilometers) across. The volcano even sent enough sulphuric acid into the atmosphere to create acid rain downpours in the Earth's polar regions,...

Greenland's early Viking settlers were subjected to rapidly changing climate. Temperatures plunged several degrees in a span of decades, according to research from Brown University. A reconstruction of 5,600 years of climate history from lakes near the Norse settlement in western Greenland also shows how climate affected the Dorset and Saqqaq cultures. Results appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The end of the Norse settlements on Greenland likely will remain shrouded in mystery. While there is scant written evidence of the colony’s demise in the 14th and early 15th centuries, archaeological remains can...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists have sequenced the DNA from four frozen hairs of a Greenlander who died 4,000 years ago in a study they say takes genetic technology into several new realms. Surprisingly, the long-dead man appears to have originated in Siberia and is unrelated to modern Greenlanders, Morten Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues found. "This provides evidence for a migration from Siberia into the New World some 5,500 years ago, independent of that giving rise to the modern Native Americans and Inuit," the researchers wrote in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. Not only can...

A few tufts of hair frozen in the permafrost of Greenland for more than 4,000 years have allowed scientists to sequence the genome of an ancient human for the first time. The hairs belonged to a member of the ancient Saqqaq culture of Greenland, the first humans known to inhabit the icy island. Scientists have long wondered where the Saqqaq came from and whether or not they were the ancestors of today's modern Inuit and Greenlanders. The new findings, detailed in the Feb. 11 issue of the journal Nature, have helped to settle that question. The hairs also tell about...

600-Year-Old American Indian Historical Account Has Old Norse WordsBy Larry Stroud, Guard Associate EditorPublished on Thursday March 15, 2007 Vikings and Algonquins. The first American multi-culturalists? BIG BAY, Mich. — Two experts on ancient America may have solved not only the mysterious disappearance of Norse from the Western Settlement of Greenland in the 1300s, but also are deciphering Delaware (Lenape) Indian history, which they’re finding is written in the Old Norse language. The history tells how some of the Delaware’s ancestors migrated west to America across a frozen sea and intermarried with the Delaware and other Algonquin Indians. Myron Paine,...

Colleen Cardinal often wondered why her parents turned bright red in the sun but she grew dark along with her sisters. The puzzle was solved when she was a young teen, and the woman she had thought of as her mother disclosed that she had been picked out of a catalog of native children available for adoption. Cardinal was one of thousands of indigenous children taken from their birth families from the 1960s to mid-1980s and sent to live with white families, who officials at the time insisted could give them better care. Many lost touch with their original culture...

The earliest people in the North American Arctic remained isolated from others in the region for millennia before vanishing around 700 years ago, a new genetic analysis shows. The study, published online Thursday, also reveals that today's Inuit and Native Americans of the Arctic are genetically distinct from the region's first settlers. Inuit hunters in the Canadian Arctic have long told stories about a mysterious ancient people known as the Tunit, who once inhabited the far north. Tunit men, they recalled, possessed powerful magic and were strong enough to crush the neck of a walrus and singlehandedly haul the massive...