Give Me My Father's Body: the Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo. . - Book reviews: "a hopeless condition of exile" - book review

Civil Rights Journal, Fall, 2000 by Margaret Meltzer

Review of Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo, by Kenn Harper

Unlike other Eskimos, the Polar Eskimos of northwestern Greenland enjoyed the benefits of a source of iron. According to Eskimo legend, the meteorites that supplied the iron were once a woman, her dog, and her tent, all thrown from the sky by a god. Kenn Harper relates the story of how a group of Eskimos had become determined to transport the meteorites closer to their village since they found the trip to "the place where one finds metal" so exhausting. However, their efforts met with disaster: the overloaded sled, the chunk of meteorite they were moving, and their dogs slid beneath the surface of thawing ice. To the Eskimos, "it was a punishment exacted by the spirit of the iron woman on the hunters." According to their belief system, "the iron lady had never begrudged them the small fragments they had chipped from her scarred body over the centuries, but one must not be greedy."

In sharp contrast, when the American Arctic explorer Robert Peary reached the meteor site in 1894, he immediately claimed the rocks that had been part of the Eskimo world for centuries as his own: "I scratched a rough `P' on the surface of the metal, as an indisputable proof of my having found the meteorite." Not only did Peary assert his "discovery" of the meteorites, but he managed to load "the three-ton woman and her thousand-pound dog" on his ship when he returned to America.

In this telling incident, which he relates early in Give Me My Father's Body, Kenn Harper sets up a paradigm for the conflicts and complex interaction of cultures that make his story of the Eskimo boy Minik such compelling reading. We see the high-minded hubris of the "scientist" Peary against the more folkloric (and more pragmatic and sometimes even passive) Eskimos. We see Peary's sense of expansiveness and limitless possibilities played out against the Eskimos' very real sense of limits. Finally, we see Peary's absolute confidence in the rightness of his actions, which would directly determine "the too short, too sad" story of Minik.

When Peary sailed back to the United States in 1897, he took with him two adult Eskimo men and their families. Given the disastrous outcome of this decision, it is not surprising that in retrospect the reasons given for why this was done varied. Though Peary would later claim that the Eskimos had wanted to come with him, Harper believes that for Peary, these men, women, and children were essentially "specimens." One of the scientists at the American Museum of Natural History had apparently suggested that bringing one Eskimo back for one year could provide an invaluable opportunity for ethnographic study. Harper mentions "the Arctic explorer's tradition of exhibiting Eskimos before audiences as a means of securing funds for the continuation of his explorations." In any event, Peary referred to the Eskimos as he did to the meteorites--as "mine." Whatever Peary's exact motives, the experiment seemed doomed from the start. One can imagine the confusion and discomfort the Eskimos must have felt when they arrived in New York and were viewed by 30,000 visitors in their first two days in the United States: "No amount of forewarning could have prepared them-whose tribe, indeed whose whole world, numbered only 234 people-for such incredible numbers of human beings."

Housed in the overheated basement of the American Museum of Natural History, and later at a farm in upstate New York, four of the Eskimos soon died. One of the adult men, Nuktaq, was taken back to the Arctic, but the six-year-old boy Minik was left to live as an orphan, increasingly caught between two worlds, and never fully at home in either.

In telling the story of Minik, who would return briefly to the Arctic as a young man, and then die in New Hampshire in 1918, a victim of the influenza epidemic, Harper raises important and compelling questions about culture and identity, about how one's sense of self is constructed. Though Harper is writing revisionist history, especially in his depiction of the scientific "heroes" of the early 20th century, the strength of his book lies in his ability to see how situations and people were neither all good nor all bad, but intriguingly, and even tragically, complex. Robert Peary and Morris Ketchum Jesup, a much-lauded philanthropist who provided funding for the museum, can only be seen as "villains" in their failure to provide for Minik's physical and emotional needs. In a sense, they represent the historic failures of the "white race" in its treatment of non-white peoples. However, Minik found the only real childhood home he ever knew with a white family. And though Minik vowed to return to the Arctic, and finally did so, Harper emphasizes his romantic attitudes about exploring the Arctic, attitudes that clearly resulted from his American education, and that set him apart from the other, more pragmatic Eskimos in the village where he had been born. One contemporary newspaper account called Minik's "a hopeless condition of exile."