After adopting a proposal in Inatsisartut, the Greenland parliament, to build a new parliament building, a quite intensive public discussion have taken place during 2014 about where to build the new parliament in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. The speaker of the parliament issued via the bureau of the parliament a twenty pages brochure with a very instrumental “history of parliamentarism in Greenland” with the clear purpose of arguing for placing the new building at the square where the first local council met in 1857. However, the local councils from the 1850s have never been mentioned as “parliaments”. Before the so-called home rule was introduced in 1979, the term “parlimentarism” was not used about any governance institution in Greenland. The paper will analyse the parliamentary minutes of the Inatsisartut, from its constitutive meeting in May 1979 and further down the road, to establish the history of the usage of ‘parliamentarism’.
