Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo
by Kenn Harper
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kenn HarperEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2001-02-27
ISBN: 074341005X
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Book Reviews of Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo
Book Review: Minik Of The North
Summary: 4 Stars
Poor Minik, captured by white traders and brought to Manhattan to be a freak! It was the age of freaks, when everyone who was different was first taken away from their home, and then put on display. Minik found out that his beloved father had been stuffed and mounted for all to jeer at the New York Museum of Natural History.
Author Harper has been through the files of the Museum and what he has come up with will convince even people who love the Museum, that reparations are in order. Eskimo people are not the only ones outraged at the long ago disposition of native relics. It is still worthy of outrage. What puzzles me is actor Kevin Spacey's interest in this affair. His preface to the book is well-written, not that I believe he actually put pen to paper to write it up, but clearly he has an emotional investment in this material and, from what I understand, he is planning to play Minik himself once his duties as Lex Luthor are finished in the new Superman movie. But why not let a native actor play the part? My in-laws who know Kenn Harper by reputation, and who have seen him speak in public, say that Spacey is part Inuit and hgas had a long interest in Peary's expeditions.
Peary himself emerges from Harper's well-researched book as a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand he showed true courage in surmounting obstacles and sub zero temperatures. On the other hand he was not particular gifted in solving human personnel difficulties, and seems to have grown impatient if his will was crossed by others (or by the hand of God). We have all known men like Peary--impetuous, self-assured, and gifted. But few of us have known the crushing tragedy of Minik of Qaanaaq, of Greenland's icy shores.
Summary of Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo
In his search for the North Pole at the turn of the twentieth century, the renowned Robert E. Peary, long celebrated as an icon of modern exploration, used the Eskimos of northwestern Greenland as the human resources for his expeditions. Sailing aboard a ship called Hope in 1897, Peary entered New York harbor with six Eskimos as his cargo. Depositing them with the American Museum of Natural History as live "specimens" to be poked, measured, and observed by the paying public, Peary abruptly abandoned any responsibility for their care. Four of the Eskimos died within a year. One managed to gain passage back to Greenland. Only the sixth, a boy of six or seven with a precociously solemn smile, remained, orphaned and adrift in a bewildering metropolis. His name was Minik. Here, a century after the fact, is his story.A searing true tale of extraordinary darkness told with intensity and vigilance, Give Me My Father's Body is Kenn Harper's absorbing, intricately documented account of ruthless imperialism in the name of science, of cruel deceptions and false burials, and of the short, strange, and tragic life of the boy known as the New York Eskimo.
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
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