Bring back a “live Eskimo specimen”. This was the order given to the American explorer, Robert Peary, in the late 1800s, by the American Museum of Natural History in New York; their objective was to ‘study’ the human Eskimo ‘specimen’ for research purposes. Give me my father’s body is an historical book written by Kenn Harper. Even if, like myself, you are completely clueless regarding Aboriginal knowledge and history, this is a deeply informative book. Its foreword was written by Kevin Spacey - a few extracts below from the foreword and the summary:
Perhaps the most astonishing and moving untold story from the golden age of Polar exploration is that of Minik Wallace, a Polar Eskimo boy from northwestern Greenland brought to New York in 1897 by the American explorer Robert Peary, who had been requested by his sponsors at the American Museum of Natural History to bring home a “live Eskimo specimen.” During his twelve years in America, Minik’s adoptive family went from riches to rags, and Minik’s own life was shattered by the trauma of finding his father’s skeleton on display in the American Museum of Natural History. Sent back to Greenland in 1909, Minik had to relearn his native language and the hunting skills needed for survival, and yet despite these disadvantages went on to work as interpreter and guide for the Crocker Land Expedition. Minik returned to America in 1916, but in 1918 fell victim to the Spanish flu and died in New Hampshire at the age of 28.
FOREWORD: …shining at the heart of this often dark tale, told with such care and restraint, is the spirit of Minik himself - cut off from his people, his language, and his sense of belonging in the world, he never surrendered his hope of going “home,” his demand for the return of his father’s body for a proper burial, or his belief that people would understand and come to his aid if only he succeeded in explaining himself. Eventually as a young man in his teens, Minik finally shamed a group of Peary’s backers into providing him with passage back to Greenland.
Once there he relearned his native language, became a skilled hunter, and hired himself out as a guide and interpreter to later explorers, but Minik found himself caught between two worlds. He longed to speak English, could communicate some of what he felt only to white men, and found that a part of him preferred the bright lights of Broadway to the Northern Lights. Inevitably, Minik began to dream of another trip “home” - this time back to New York City.
And there you have it - Minik had no home. Plucked from his own world, never wholly welcomed by another, he was condemned to look forever for what he had lost. The entire story is captured in the gaze of the child Minik in one of the photographs in this book - a small boy in spiffy cap and coat, holding a bicycle too big for him, looking directly into the heart and soul of whoever’s behind the camera for something warmer than curiosity.
This too short, too sad life, unfolding at the end of the great age of Arctic exploration, was pieced together in an amazing effort of research and writing by Kenn Harper, who has lived over thirty years among Inuit (as the descendants of history’s Eskimos prefer to be called today). Unlike most white men in today’s Arctic, he speaks Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit, and heard of Minik first-hand from Greenland Inuit in the mid-1970s. The tale had a mythic quality - the boy swept off to a magical land where fantastic adventures awaited him and a benefactor promised great wealth, his sudden return years later. But after Minik left Greenland the second time the polar Eskimos heard no more; none could tell Harper what happened to him, where he died or when. There was no end to his tale. Over a period of eight years Harper searched out the answers for himself in Greenland, in New York City, and in Denmark.
The story of Minik has the simplicity and resonance of myth. But Harper’s telling of it sketches in a whole age and world, bringing to life the bustling city of New York, the infant science of anthropology, America’s astonished discovery of the polar Eskimos, the American racism that treated people of color as “specimens,” the huckstering public entertainers who added Eskimos and other exotic peoples to their menagerie - there is not a page in this book without its horrors and its wonders.
When you get to the end of a great story there comes a moment of silence. The lights in the theater come up or you turn the last page in a book as good as this one, and you sit stunned. There is nothing to say. And then in the next heartbeat you think of a million things to say.
That was part of the foreword written by Kevin Spacey (just incase IF the name strikes you as being familiar, he’s that Hollywood actor).