Minik Wallace

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Minik in New York shortly after his arrival

Minik Wallace (* 1887 ; † October 29, 1918 ) was an Inuk who, along with his father and four other relatives, was abducted by the polar explorer Robert Peary to New York in 1897 and housed in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History for anthropological research on living objects which was carried out by the local curator Franz Boas .

When his father Qisuk died of tuberculosis after the relatives , the boy was faked to be buried . William Wallace, a senior museum officer, took the orphan into his family. Although the boy was henceforth listed as Minik Peary Wallace in public documents, there is no clear evidence of his adoption. As a 16-year-old, he discovered that his father's skeleton was on display in the museum and lost all confidence as a result. Minik returned to Greenland in 1909 , but did not live there anymore, was brought back to New York in 1916 and died on October 29, 1918 as a forest worker in North Stratford, New Hampshire , of the Spanish flu . He is buried there.

The Canadian Kenn Harper published a documentary on these processes in the late 1980s. The American Museum of Natural History was then forced to have the bones of the Inuit who died in New York returned to their homeland, where they were buried in 1993. The event may have set a precedent for the return of the remains of Sarah Baartman from the Musée de l'Homme in Paris to South Africa and is an example of the ethnocentrism of American human sciences around the turn of the century.

The novel Minik by Ralf Isau is about Minik's life story.

literature

  • Know Harper: My father's soul. Minik - the Eskimo of New York . Diana Verlag, Munich / Zurich 2001, ISBN 3-453-19143-9 (With a foreword by: Kevin Spacey)
  • Know Harper: Minik - the Eskimo of New York . Edition Temmen , Bremen 1999, ISBN 3-86108-743-X . (With an introduction by: Jutta Steffen-Schrade; translation from the American by: Fee Engelmann; English original title: Give me my father's body )

Web links

Commons : Minik Wallace  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Minik - The Lost Eskimo , short biography of Minik Wallace on the website of the US television station PBS . Retrieved June 3, 2013.
  2. ↑ Ralf Isau: Minik: at the sources of the night Roman, Thienemann, Stuttgart / Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-522-17873-0 (book for young people)
personal data
SURNAME Wallace, Minik
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wallace, Minik Peary; Wallace, Minik P.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Inuk
DATE OF BIRTH around 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Greenland
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 1918
Place of death North Stratford , New Hampshire