Cultural
Perhaps the most important consequence of the colonists’ conversion to Christianity involved how they viewed themselves. The outcome reminds me of how Australians, long after the founding of Britain’s Australian colonies in 1788, continued to think of themselves not as an Asian and Pacific people but as overseas British, still prepared to die in 1915 at far-off Gallipoli fighting with the British against Turks irrelevant to Australia’s national interests. In the same way, Viking colonists on the North Atlantic islands thought of themselves as European Christians. They kept in step with mainland changes in church architecture, burial customs, and units of measurement. That shared identity enabled a few thousand Greenlanders to cooperate with each other, withstand hardships, and maintain their existence in a harsh environment for four centuries. As we shall see, it also prevented them from learning from the Inuit, and from modifying their identity in ways that might have permitted them to survive beyond four centuries.
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