In Canada’s Yukon, a narrow lake threads for nearly six miles though boreal forest and granite hills. The southern shore is only fifty miles from the northern end of a deep Pacific Ocean fjord: a finger of saltwater reaching toward fresh, their touch thwarted by the Coast Mountains. Tlingit who made their homes near the sea made trails across this range, climbing nearly four thousand feet before descending to meet with inland Tagish peoples, along a lake known as Mén Chó in Tagish, Ch’akúx Anax Ðul.adi Yé in Tlingit. Their stories go back thousands of years, telling of a home that has always changed under the pressures of glaciers and volcanoes and alliances that sometimes broke.
Some of these stories tell of a year when a stream of people, pale and burdened, churned the Tlingit trade paths into mud on their way to Mén Chó. These newcomers, mostly men, called it Boat Lake or Lake Bennett. They knew the lake was a headwater of the Yukon River, and that with luck and a raft, a man could float more than five hundred miles downstream to the Klondike, where newspapers reported “stacks of yellow metal” had been mined in summer of 1896. By the following spring, more than 18,000 prospectors established a tent city at Lake Bennett, building their boats in a part of North America where prior colonial presence had been only a few scattered fur traders, missionaries, and miners hoping that the geological riches of California and British Columbia continued north. It was those early miners, already in the country and able to stake claims before headlines of “Gold gold gold!” made their way around the world, who had any chance of making a fortune in Klondike. The men arriving at Lake Bennett were more likely to suffer scurvy.
In my work as an Arctic historian, I have been to Lake Bennett many times. During my last visit, on a piercingly cold day in January 2026, it was less the mountain trails and old stories on my mind than a particular man—one of the many who “mined the miners,” as the prospectors put it, by turning their desperate need for tools and food into profit. Slight and dark-haired, he came to the lake in 1897 as recent immigrant from Germany. He saw in the throngs growing on Mén Chó’s banks a better opportunity than panning for gold. Out of a canvas wall tent, Frederick Trump sold miners fried meat, his supply augmented by butchering the horses that miners worked to death by the hundreds.
Hawking salvaged horseflesh to desperate men on land seized without pay from its Indigenous residents was lucrative. By 1898, the canvas tent had become Bennettown’s two-story New Arctic Hotel and Restaurant, built with milled timber rather than logs and furnished with real beds. The hotel soon offered an expanded menu of local game—salmon, ptarmigan, rabbit, caribou—and an even more remunerative commodity: sex. When Trump began buying real estate in New York City in 1908, seven years after Klondike rush and his time in Canada had ended, the profits from Lake Bennett seeded a family empire that now peddles its wares from the Oval Office.
My interests as a historian don’t usually trend toward small-time brothel owners, no matter the surname. But I was at Mén Chó just as Frederick Trump’s grandson was rekindling plans to buy Kalaallit Nunaat, the “big beautiful piece of ice” he and most maps call Greenland. Standing a few dozen miles from where the New Arctic Hotel once peddled flesh of all kinds, soon parlayed into the beginnings of the Trump family fortune, it was hard not to feel a sense of imperial déjà vu, especially as the return of barely repressed ideas of power was met publicly with a very American kind of amnesia about its exercise.
Like most arrivals in Bennettown, Frederick Trump’s journey to Mén Chó began on the other side of the Coast Mountains, on land he understood as belonging to the United States because Secretary of State William Seward bought it—Alaska—from the Russian Empire in 1867. That Russia claimed Alaska at all was the result of landing a few ships on the western coast of North America in 1741 and, in 1825, negotiating a border at the 141st Meridian with the British Empire, which at the time claimed Arctic and subarctic land stretching eastward all the way to the Atlantic. Russia did not ask the Tlingit, or any other community living in Alaska, if they wished to live under tsarist rule in the 1700s, any more than the United States asked if the Tlingit wanted to be American in the 1800s, or the British Empire consulted the peoples living along Lake Bennett on becoming subjects of the Crown.
The Alaska purchase came in the middle of a century-long expansionist spending spree: Louisiana, bought in 1803; Florida, exchanged for Spanish debt relief in 1819; an attempt by Seward to buy Greenland in 1868, thwarted by lack of domestic interest; and the successful purchase of the US Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917. Purchasing land was a complement to raw force, from the violence the army unleashed against Indigenous nations on the Great Plains to the seizure of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War. In 1946, while Frederick Trump’s son (Donald’s father) was making millions selling homes in military boomtowns, the United States tried to acquire Greenland and its new archipelago of American military bases from Denmark again, in exchange for Alaskan oil and gold rights. By then, 40 percent of US territory had been acquired with cash. The idea of buying Greenland in 2026 is less a historical deviation than a revival of a longstanding practice of buying sovereignty, one that goes hand in hand with the expropriation of land by force.
This history was not generally part of the public response to Trump’s Greenland plans, which instead tended toward the incredulous—as Jimmy Kimmel put it, “Who even thinks about buying Greenland? Who has thoughts like that?” Even Fox News emphasized Trumpish idiosyncrasy over American imperialism, calling the acquisition of Greenland “the #1 real estate deal of Trump’s career.” While the press spun through possible motives—national security? rare earth minerals? distraction from the Epstein Files?—and the future of NATO looked as shaky as the stock market, Trump recycled the whole imperial rhetorical playbook. Maybe the US would take Greenland by force. Or maybe, he speciously proposed, no one owned Greenland at all. “Why,” the president texted Norwegian prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre, does Denmark “have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.”
Trump’s statements were often taken as violating the rules of international order. More accurately, they proclaimed them: Modern sovereignty is established by force that pretends to be anything but, most often disguising itself as right—natural, historical, divine. An AI-generated image posted by the White House on X underscored this point: President Trump and a penguin walk side by side through a snowy landscape toward mountains that looks like the Alps, except for a haphazard Greenlandic flag on a far peak. Penguin and president are alone. In rhetoric and image, the administration cast Kalaallit Nunaat as terrus nullius—the legal term meaning “territory without master,” free to be claimed by the first to arrive. Empire-as-meme may be a new form, but the content is old: the Doctrine of Discovery reanimated as a penguin holding an American flag in its flipper.
In Greenland, as in Alaska and most of the northern lands that empires have claimed over the past five hundred years, the terrus was far from nullius—except where penguins are concerned, as they only live in the Southern Hemisphere. Inuit have called Greenland’s mossy hillsides and iceberg-studded bays home for some 4,500 years, arriving millennia before Viking ships in 985. When those early Norse settlements faded five centuries later, Inuit stayed; Inuit remained when the Danish government monopolized trade and sent missionaries to the island in the 18th century and through the buildup of American military bases during the cold war. Greenlanders, nearly 90 percent of whom identify as Inuit or of Inuit-Danish decent, have pushed for increasing autonomy from Denmark, gaining home rule in 1979 and drafting a constitution in 2023; Denmark’s primary responsibility on the island is now in foreign affairs and defense.
The gradual return of sovereignty means that the United States could not legally acquire Greenland without the consent of both the Danish government and Greenland’s democratically elected, self-ruling parliament. In January, that parliament was unequivocal that “the future of Greenland must be decided by the Greenlandic people.” In Nuuk, where almost 20,000 of the island’s 57,000 people live, the streets filled with Greenlanders despite the winter cold, many in red “Make America Go Away” hats, making their rejection of US rule clear. So were their reasons. “Not repeating the wrongdoings of past imperialism is important,” Sara Olsvig, former leader of the pro-independence Inuit Ataqatigiit party told the Guardian. “There is no such thing as a better colonizer.” Or, as Aleqatsiaq Peary, a 42-year-old Inuit hunter explained to the BBC, becoming part of the US “would be switching from one master to another, from one occupier to another.”
After William Seward purchased Alaska in 1867, he was regularly mocked in the American press. Headlines about “Seward’s folly” and “Seward’s icebox” questioned why the US should own “a country where seed will produce nothing.” What could be done with land no settlers would farm? Prudhoe Bay oil was a century in the future; even the Nome gold rush, which came just two years after the Klondike and drew many of the same miners to Alaska’s western coast, was decades off. But Seward had other wealth in mind, knowing that the North Pacific’s runs of salmon needed only canneries to turn a profit, and that there were still valuable beaver, fox, and seal pelts waiting for hunters.
But alongside resources, Seward saw geopolitics. Buying Alaska hemmed in the British presence in the North Pacific—particularly desirable after their quiet support of the Confederacy during the Civil War—and helped make the US a transoceanic empire. Seward’s 1868 designs on Greenland had similar motives. As a report by his State Department argued, in addition to whales, fish, coal, and cryolite ore, the island was a mere “1,500 miles to Alaska, extending, also, through Behring’s straits to China or Japan, or southward to Sitka, Puget sound, the Oregon river, San Francisco, etc., etc.,” enabling transit and “an independent line of interoceanic telegraph.” Together, Alaska and Greenland would put the United States astride the Atlantic and Pacific, an aspiration dating back to President James Monroe and his 1823 doctrine of hemispheric control.
By the time Seward made his proposal, formal Danish colonization of Greenland was over a century old. Hans Egede, a Lutheran missionary, arrived in Greenland in 1721 intending to convert the Catholic descendants of Vikings to Protestantism. Finding that the Norse were long gone, Egede stayed to evangelize among the Inuit communities on the island’s southwest coast. Governmental support soon followed, as Denmark claimed the Inuit were too childlike to master their land or futures and required “protection” from economic exploitation, achieved by forming a monopoly that encouraged the Inuit to trade whalebone and furs only with Danes. Such paternalism became a fundamental part of Denmark’s self-image as it lost its colonies in India and Africa in the 19th century, its imperial identity burnished by perceived benevolence rather territorial expansiveness.
The doctrine of discovery was not always in the Danes’ favor. In the 1880s and 1890s, expeditions led by Americans Robert Peary and A. W. Greeley to uncolonized areas of northern Greenland raised the possibility that the US had rights to part of the island. Relinquishing these claims was, along with $25 million in gold, how the US secured its purchase of the Virgin Islands in 1917—at a time when the opening of the Panama Canal and the need to secure it against German naval presence pivoted US interests south rather than north. Peary was disappointed. “Greenland’s possession by us,” he wrote, “will be in line with the Monroe Doctrine. Will turning Greenland over mean our repurchase of it later?”
Instead, the US returned to the island without repurchasing it. In 1941, with the permission of the Danish government in exile, the US stationed troops in Greenland to guard against a Nazi incursion into North America. When the world war became cold war, President Harry Truman again offered to buy the island. Denmark again demurred, but in 1951 signed a treaty that allowed the US to build over a dozen military bases across Greenland, including the nuclear-powered Camp Century. Millions of tons of Greenland cryolite fed the US Air Force’s appetite for aluminum. In exchange, the US left a legacy of environmental contamination: abandoned diesel fuel barrels, toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and radioactive waste.
The 1951 treaty still allows for a substantial US military presence in Greenland, one that in May the Trump administration indicated they wished to expand with three new bases, each designated sovereign US territory. But the Donroe Doctrine, as Trump and others have begun calling his own hemispheric ambitions, requires more than airbases. If the US does not claim full sovereignty, then as Trump put it, “Russia or China will take over.” He has denied that Greenland’s substantial rare earth mineral deposits—the eighth-largest in the world—are a motive. Yet included in the administration’s negotiations with Denmark at Davos in late January were provisions for US mineral rights. When empires look north, control is never far from extraction.
The most novel aspect of Trump’s Greenland plan is not its imperialism, but the world that empires now inhabit. Seward was premature in imagining a navigable Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but that same route now grows more passable by the year as the sea ice, so hazardous to ships, melts away. Increasingly warm summers reveal mineral deposits once made inaccessible by Greenland’s massive glaciers. The earth’s climate has warmed so much so quickly that the island itself is rising a third of an inch per year, the landmass freed as 262 gigatons of once-frozen glacier sloughs annually into our rising seas.
That Trump—a man whose family fortune first came from claiming someone else’s land and skimming wealth from it by exploiting basic human needs and desires—is indifferent to the wants of Greenlanders or the prerogatives of his ostensible NATO allies is not surprising. But as the White House spun through options, from buying to seizing to taking Greenland under threat of tariffs, public debate revealed a kind of calculated forgetting that went far beyond the president.
Take Stanford historian Stephen Press, writing in the Wall Street Journal: “the people of Greenland could gain from a deal with Mr. Trump,” he argued, as “inhabitants of Alaska wouldn’t be better off under Russian sovereignty.” Lawmakers’ skepticism almost exclusively focused on the disruptions to NATO and violations of the postwar international order, not on trampled Greenlandic self-determination. In a New York Times piece sharply critical of the plan, Peter Baker warned that “never in the past century has America gone forth to seize other counties’ land and subjugate its citizens against their will,” actions that would thrust “America into the category of conquerors.”
What struck me in this coverage was its squeamishness around naming the origins of US territory, the impulse to keep “hiding the empire,” in historian Daniel Immerwahr’s formulation. Denying that history could have been otherwise—Press’s argument, which elides Indigenous sovereignty altogether—or making conquest subject to some unwritten statute of limitations, as Baker does, are both ways of cloaking not just the US’s imperial past but its continuation into the present, with or without Kalaallit Nunaat. Buying Greenland was more than a threat to NATO, it was a threat to make American empire visible again. After all, America has yet to ask the Tlingit—or any of the other Indigenous people under its rule—if they want to be American in a way that allows for the answer to be no.
The flurry of talk over Greenland has revealed an unwillingness among the political mainstream to even name the remedy for seizing sovereignty: its return. Today, no ruin marks Frederick Trump’s brothel on the shores of Lake Bennett. In 1899, after the construction of the White Pass Railroad changed most miners’ routes over the coastal range, he loaded his hotel onto a flat-bottomed boat and floated it downriver to Whitehorse, now Yukon’s main city. The place known briefly as Bennettown has mostly faded into the moss and brush around Mén Chó. When I visit the lake now, it is usually at the hamlet of Carcross on the northern shore. In summer, the town hums with tourists born over the mountains from Alaska on the railroad to eat ice cream and wander among shops that sell equal parts gold-rush nostalgia and contemporary Tlingit and Tagish art. January is quieter. Year-round residents, mostly citizens of the Carcross Tagish First Nation, are sensibly indoors stoking their woodstoves against the -20°F cold while I walk back from the frozen lake.
Three years after Frederick Trump moved his hotel downriver, a Tagish leader named Kashxóot sent a letter to Canada’s Superintendent General of Indian Affairs asserting “the right of the Yukon Indians to compensation because of the taking possession of their lands and hunting grounds by the white people.” Writing from the midst of the gold rush, Kashxóot called a robbery a robbery, denying the theft of his people’s land the cloak of legitimacy the imperial project so often lends it—the veneer of economic progress or a civilizing mission. Kashxóot’s intellectual heirs never ceased advocating for Indigenous rights, and in the late 20th century negotiated land claims agreements with the Canadian state that give the present-day Carcross Tagish First Nation government considerable autonomy, if not full sovereignty. Greenlanders are likewise in the process of determining new sovereign relations with Denmark.
These moves toward restoring Indigenous self-determination are neither perfect nor complete, and they cannot reverse the robberies of the past. Where they start, however, is with the recognition of empire, of its past dimensions and present continuance. The political culture of the 21st century United States still struggles with even this most basic step. Such sovereign returns also indicate how the future need not look like the present. Much as Bennettown has faded, nothing on this landscape must be permanent, or even can be, as the long histories of ice sheets and volcanic turmoil make clear. The transience of empire could be even more brief—a human choice, not a geological event.
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