| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik the New York Eskimo. By Kenn Harper. (South Royalton: Steerforth, 2000. xviii, 277 pp. $24.00, ISBN 1-883642-53-1.)

Originally published in 1986, this is the sad story of Minik, the Polar Eskimo boy from Smith Sound, Greenland, who was brought (with his father, Qisuk, and four others) to New York City by Robert Peary in 1897. Having delivered his human specimens to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) for study and totally obsessed with his quest for the North Pole, Peary showed no further interest in them. Within a few months four of the six, including Minik's father, had succumbed to illness; the other surviving boy was sent back to Greenland, but the orphan Minik stayed on, became "adopted" by the museum's superintendent of buildings, William Wallace, and spent the remainder of his boyhood in the environs of New York City. Only several years later did Minik discover that the museum staff, including the curator of ethnology, Franz Boas, and his student Alfred Kroeber, had held a mock funeral for his father on the museum grounds in order to observe the son's behavior at his father's "burial"—and that in fact his father's bones, having been bleached clean in Wallace's upstate boneyard for the museum, may have been on display in a glass case. . . .

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