The boy who found his father on a shelf
In 1897 Robert Peary brought six Inuit from northern Greenland to New York. Franz Boas, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, had asked for one man to study. Peary brought six. Among them were a widower named Qisuk and his small son, Minik.
Within months all of them had tuberculosis. Four died. Qisuk died on February 17, 1898. His son, then about seven, asked for a proper burial, the rites only his people could give.
The museum wanted the body for study. So the staff staged a funeral. They filled a coffin with stones and buried it where the boy could watch. His father's skeleton stayed behind, to be prepared and kept.
Minik was taken in by William Wallace, the museum's building superintendent, and raised in New York. He was bright, he went to school, and journalists wrote about him as a curiosity. Then around 1906 a newspaper story ran, and classmates told him. His father's bones were on display at the museum. He learned it the way you learn most things that should have been said to your face: from other people.
Wallace helped him ask for the remains. The museum director dodged, and at points denied even holding the skeleton. Boas, by then at Columbia, admitted the old deception and did almost nothing about it. Minik never got his father back.
He was sent to Greenland in 1909, to a place he no longer fit, having forgotten his first language. He became a good hunter and a guide. He came back to the United States and took odd jobs. In January 1917, applying for citizenship, he wrote himself down as white. He died in the flu pandemic on October 29, 1918, in New Hampshire, and is buried there.
In 1986 the writer Kenn Harper tracked the story down and wrote a book about him. It took until 1993 to get the museum to give back the bones of Qisuk and the three other Inuit. They were flown home and buried at Qaanaaq, with the rites Minik had asked for ninety-five years earlier.
The record kept the bones. For a long time, it did not keep the man.
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