Product Description

The compelling and tragic story of the life of Minik, the New York Eskimo Minik, the lone survivor of six Inuit taken from their Greenland home to New York in 1897, lived a short, unhappy life. To famed Robert Peary, the Arctic explorer he was but a 'live specimen'. In New York the Eskimos were displayed to a paying public like freaks. Four of them, including Minik's father, soon died and Minik was set adrift. He found out his father's bones on display in the Natural History Museum. This makes morbidly fascinating reading. Much of the story is seen through Eskimo eyes. It's a gut-wrenching account of cultural imperialism and survival. Despite being cut off from his people, his language, and his sense of belonging, Minik never surrendered his hope of going home.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2164912 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

From Amazon.com
At last returning to print, Give Me My Father's Body is the thought-provoking tale of Minik, a young Inuit boy brought to New York by Robert Peary around the turn of the 20th century. Told simply and interspersed with personal letters and newspaper clippings, the book examines Minik's life both as a cross-cultural meeting place and a deeply personal search for a place to call "home." Photographs throughout of Minik give a glimpse into the incredible differences between the multiple worlds he inhabited, and how impossible it must have been to live in these worlds successfully. The title derives from one of Minik's more harrowing experiences--finding his father's bones displayed in a natural-history museum as a "curiosity"--and his attempts to retrieve the bones for a more respectful burial. Author Kenn Harper, while including many facts and articles about Arctic exploration, refrains from sharing opinions about the various explorers or their methods, choosing to share this story--and his years of research--plainly. From the death of Minik's birth father to the financial ruin of his American foster family, the events of Minik's childhood seem like one disaster after another, and his adulthood--the successful return to Greenland, followed by disappointment and a subsequent return to New York--is an unhappy struggle to find some kind of personal fulfillment. Questions of racial and cultural differences make an inescapable larger framework for Minik's life, and the emotions brought forward in answering those questions make reading this book a powerful experience. --Jill Lightner

From Publishers Weekly
When six-year-old Minik was chosen as one of six Eskimos from Qaanaaq, Greenland, to accompany explorer Robert Peary to New York City in 1897, he expected a brief adventure. Instead, he became an orphan and an exile. Treated as scientific curiosities, Minik's father and three others quickly succumbed to pneumonia, leaving the boy alone after the only other survivor returned to Greenland. Adopted by a middle-class family, Minik enjoyed a few relatively happy years until the family suffered financial disgrace. Peary refused to help support the boy or finance his return to Greenland, and Minik languished in poverty for several years. The horrific climax to his ordeal came when Minik learned that his father's body had been put on display at the American Museum of Natural History. Though his efforts to claim the body launched a media frenzy, they ultimately failed. Minik eventually returned to Greenland, where he had to relearn his native language and customs. Feeling marginalized among his people, he returned to the U.S. in 1916 only to die here two years later. Harper, who has lived for more than 30 years in the Arctic and is fluent in the Canadian Eskimo language, tells Minik's story straightforwardly and with sympathy. Yet he adheres so scrupulously to Minik's letters and other written accounts that his narrative is sometimes dry. As a tale of scientific arrogance, however, the book is chilling; as a portrait of an exploited, charming, intelligent, needy, sometimes vengeful and culturally ambivalent individual, it is truly unforgettable. B&w photographs. (Apr.) BOMC selection; rights sold in England, France, Germany and Spain; film rights optioned by Kevin Spacey.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Originally self-published in Greenland in 1986, this affecting work details the short, sad life of Minik, an orphaned Eskimo raised in America at the turn of the 20th century. On the surface, it is a tragic tale of a boy caught between two cultures, but more than that it is an expos? of the intellectual arrogance that permeated the race to explore the Arctic region during this period. In 1897, explorer Robert Peary brought Minik and five other Greenland Eskimos to New York to be studied as live "specimens" by the American Museum of Natural History. When four of them died, including Minik's father, Qisuk, their bodies were used for scientific research and kept for exhibit at the museum. Minik's accidental discovery of his father's remains, his unsuccessful attempts to have them returned to him, and the museum's refusal to acknowledge the truth or relinquish the bones reveal the inherent racism and pettiness of the scientific community. (Pressure created by the publication of this book finally caused the museum to release the remains in 1993.) Told in unembellished prose with heartbreaking excerpts from Minik's own writings, this powerful book is recommended for all public and academic libraries. [A foreword by Kevin Spacey is included.--Ed.]--Rose M. Cichy, Osterhout Free Lib., Wilkes-Barre, P.
---Rose M. Cichy, Osterhout Free Lib., Wilkes-Barre, PA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.