GIVE ME MY FATHER'S BODY

A strange, well-recounted tale of scientific arrogance and cultural misunderstanding.

In 1897 the fame-hungry Arctic explorer Robert Peary arrived in northwestern Greenland, the domain of supposedly “wild— Eskimos, to reconnoiter the country and recruit talented hunters to guide him to the North Pole. He carried with him a note from the anthropologist Franz Boas, a leading scientist at the American Museum of Natural History, that implored Peary to “bring a middle-aged Eskimo to stay here over the winter. This would enable us to obtain leisurely certain information which will be of the greatest scientific importance.” Peary satisfied Boas’s request, returning to New York with six “live Eskimo specimens”: five adults, along with a young boy named Minik. Four of the adults, including Minik’s father, soon died of colds that had turned into pneumonia. Minik remained in New York for the next 12 years, a pet of high society, isolated from his culture and possessed of a terrible knowledge: that his father’s body had been carefully dismembered, analyzed, and then put on display in a skeleton case in the museum’s exhibit hall. Boas, Harper writes, then staged a fake burial “to appease the boy, and keep him from discovering that his father’s body had been chopped up,” an act of deception in which he saw “nothing particularly deserving severe criticism.” Minik finally was allowed to return to Greenland, but, having forgotten much of his people’s customs and language, was as much an outsider there as in New York. He eventually returned to the US, where he died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Harper, a writer and teacher who has lived in Eskimo country for more than 30 years, writes sympathetically but unsentimentally, although his disgust is abundant. He has done his homework well in ferreting out this forgotten episode, however, one that will likely turn a few readers” stomachs as well.

A moving account of science devastatingly and thoughtlessly misapplied, one of the countless tragedies visited on Native America.