Greenland and (Not so) Best Practices
President Trump has declared his interest in acquiring the country of Greenland for strategic defense purposes. Not a bad idea when it comes to defense but Denmark has expressed its commitment to keep Greenland as part of their territory. The Danish government believes they know what is best for Greenland, and President Trump believes they want to be part of the United States.
But has anyone asked the people of Greenland what they want?
Being a curious sort, I like to read a lot of different news articles and I found one on the BBC News about how the people living in Greenland are descendants of an Inuit tribe. They were there when the Danish took over and are still a good portion of the population. According to BBC News, they would like to be independent. They don’t find the Danish government all that benevolent because of the history of European-based colonial “best practices.”
Let’s keep in mind that a best practice is not “best” simply because everyone else is doing it. But “doing things like all the other colonialists” seems to be what happened in colonial times, whether it was the British Empire, Western Europeans, Northern Europeans, or Americans pushing to the Western horizon. It seems there was a lot of baby stealing going on in these practices, meaning that the colonialists thought it would be better for the children of the native population to be educated “like them” and to forget their own heritage.
Not a good thing for anyone. It is wrong to steal babies first of all, and it’s even worse to lie to their parents about where these children are going. Children were taken and put in special schools and babies were given away to adopted families and their real parents never saw them again in some instances. The parents were told the children were getting an education or health care. When it came to the babies, the government would say that they were going to “better families” which is code for they would be raised outside their own culture.
The Danish used this practice in Greenland. The British did it all over the world. Western Europeans that migrated to Australia did it with the aborigine tribes, and the Americans used this practice with the native tribes of North America. Whatever happened to an open exchange of ideas and traditions?
In reading the article about Greenland, I shook my head because you could insert different group names from around the world into that article, and you see the very obvious pattern. This is a prime example of copying what everybody else is doing and not thinking about the consequences. And don’t think that the governments were not watching what the other governments were doing. They were – and that’s why the colonial era was so competitive. Everybody else is doing it so it must be “Best.”
Nonprofit organizations make this mistake on a regular basis – the other groups are doing it so we should too. That makes it a “best” practice, right? While it’s good to get information and input from a variety of sources, it doesn’t mean that someone else’s way will work for you. And it could mean that others are copying a bad practice – like baby stealing.
In the end, what everyone else is doing is not always best. And it may not work for you anyway. Find your own path and what’s best for you and your organization will become apparent.
