Title: Give Me My Father’s Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo
Author: Kenn Harper
Publication date: 1986
Number of pages: 320
Genre: Biography
Geographical Setting: Greenland and New York
Time Period: late 19th Century and early 20th Century
Series: N/A
Plot Summary: Six-year-old Minik is one of six Eskimos brought from Greenland as “specimens” to New York City by Arctic explorer Robert Peary in 1897. Soon Minik is an orphan in a strange land. As he matures to adulthood, he is stranger in his homeland of Greenland and his adoptive home of the United States. Minik’s plight to claim his father’s body from the American Museum of Natural History for a proper burial and his wanderings and eventual death are traced in this biography of marginalized “curiosity.”
Subject Headings: Eskimo, Inuit, racism, prejudice, Arctic, North Pole, exploration, biography,
Appeal: biography of an orphan and exile, photographs included, written by Canadian Historian who has lived over thirty years in Inuit communities and speaks the language, the book helped to publicize the wrongs done to the Inuits by the American Museum of Natural History and led to the eventual return of their bodies to their homeland and people.
If you like Minik, you might enjoy: S. Allen Counter’s North Pole Legacy: Black, White and Eskimo, Jennifer Owings Dewey’s Minik’s Story, Robert M. Bryce’s Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy, Resolved.
