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

Himself a man who has lived in and known two worlds, Kenn Harper seems an ideal person to tell the story of Minik. Harper is married to a Polar Eskimo, and had the opportunity to talk with people who had remembered Minik from their childhoods. Living in two worlds, Harper does seem to understand that any good story has at least two sides. He arouses deep sympathy for Minik, and effectively describes the boy's sense of forlorn loss, but Harper also admits that not everyone felt pity for this strange young man, who never quite fit in. One of the people with whom Minik worked when he returned to the Arctic--described him as "a great nuisance to us all, an unhappy lad with a bad disposition."

Harper concludes his story with one last statement that again goes past the easiest or most obvious observations. Though the provisions of the Native American Grave and Burial Protection Act might suggest that Minik should be taken from his burial site in New Hampshire and reburied in Greenland, Harper counters this view:

      I am often asked, should Minik be disinterred and taken also to Qaanaaq
   for reburial? The answer must be an unequivocal no. Minik lived a tortured
   and lonely life. Out of place in New York, he felt no more at home when he
   returned to northern Greenland. In the fall of 1917 he arrived in northern
   New Hampshire. He died among friends, the Hall family, perhaps the truest
   friends he ever had. Minik died among friends. Let him remain there.

The cover photograph of Give Me My Father's Body reveals Minik's whole story in one effective image: an obviously Native child, wearing ill-fitting western clothes, looks at the camera with an expression of confusion and loss. Kenn Harper fills in the details behind this image with empathy and grace.

Margaret Meltzer is an independent scholar of contemporary Judaism.