Greenland

From the Paleo-Inuit hunters of the high Arctic, through Erik the Red's lost Norse colony and two centuries of Danish rule, to a self-governing Kalaallit nation with a recognised right to independence.

Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat, 'land of the Kalaallit') is the world's largest island and an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, not an independent state. Its human story is one of repeated Arctic migrations: successive Paleo-Inuit peoples, the Saqqaq and the Dorset, followed by the Thule whaling culture from whom today's Greenlandic Inuit descend, and a Norse colony founded by Erik the Red around 985 that flourished for four centuries before vanishing by the 15th. Recolonised from 1721 by the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede, Greenland was a Danish colony until 1953, when it became an integrated county of Denmark, and it acquired Home Rule in 1979. On 21 June 2009 the Act on Greenland Self-Government came into force, recognising the people of Greenland as a people under international law with the right to self-determination and setting out a path to full independence, even as resources and renewed great-power interest in the Arctic place the island's future at the centre of world attention.