Nanook and His Contemporaries: Imagining Eskimos in American Culture, 1897-1922 Author(S): Shari M

Nanook and His Contemporaries: Imagining Eskimos in American Culture, 1897-1922 Author(s): Shari M. Huhndorf Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 122-148 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344230 Accessed: 05/10/2008 12:03 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry. http://www.jstor.org Nanook and His Contemporaries: Imagining Eskimos in American Culture, 1897-1922 ShariM. Huhndorf In the fall of 1897, a ship called Hope docked in New York City harbor; its arrival changed forever the lives of its passengers and captivated an entire nation. On board were six Polar Eskimos'-one woman (Atan- gana), three men (Qisuk, Nuktaq, and Uisaakassak), and two children (Minik and Aviaq)-brought by Arctic explorer Robert Peary at the be- hest of anthropologist Franz Boas and other officials of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Encouraged by the stunning popu- Several friends and colleagues generously read and commented on this essay. Of these, I am particularly grateful to Patricia Penn Hilden, Karen J. Ford, and Elizabeth Wheeler. 1. I should like to note at the outset the reasons for my use of the term Eskimo, as opposed to Inuit, throughout most of this essay. In 1977, participants in the Inuit Circum- polar Conference officially rejected Eskimo and adopted the Native term Inuit as the pre- ferred designation for all Eskimo peoples. This decision was both a recognition of the politics of naming and part of a political platform aimed at self-determination. Eskimo,it is widely believed, carries pejorative connotations and in any case is a designation initially used by hostile outsiders. In spite of this, I have opted to use Eskimoin this essay for two reasons. First, when not employing the more specific designations of Yup'ikor Inupiat, Native Alaskans continue to use Eskimo to identify themselves. In addition, this essay is concerned with images; the term Eskimo,which has been used for centuries, evokes images and carries associations con- ventionally (though often erroneously) associated with Eskimo peoples which Inuit does not. For a brief etymology of the term Eskimo,see David Damas, introduction, TheArtic, ed. Damas, vol. 5 of Handbookof North AmericanIndians, ed. William E. Sturtevant (Washington, D.C., 1984), pp. 1-7. CriticalInquiry 27 (Autumn 2000) Reprinted from Shari M. Huhndorf, "Nanook and His Contemporaries," from Going Native: Indians in the AmericanCul- tural Imagination. 2000 ? by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. 122 CriticalInquiry Autumn2000 123 larity of the live human exhibits on the World's Columbian Exposition's Midway exhibit in Chicago four years earlier and undeterred by the high mortality rate of the people exhibited for fair goers' amusement, Boas had asked the explorer to bring back an Eskimo for scientific study on his next journey North. But not even Boas could have foreseen the public sensation these Eskimos caused. On a single day following the Hope's arrival, twenty thousand people visited the ship, anxious to glimpse the Native Greenlanders who, despite the stifling heat, were dressed in the elaborate furs expected by curiosity seekers. Nor did New Yorkers' atten- tion soon wane. Housed in the museum's basement, the Eskimos drew throngs of eager visitors who crowded around a ceiling grate installed above their living quarters. Both the exhibition and the scientists' investigations were ill-fated. Like virtually all Natives displayed for viewing throughout the centuries of conquest, these quickly fell sick. Yet even this turn of events proved a source of entertainment, as one journalist reported: "One of the most amusing forms of entertainment consisted in an illustration of the man- ner in which the Eskimos attempt to conjure away illness. This in their opinion can only be accomplished by rubbing the sides of the body and singing a weird sort of a lullaby that with all its peculiarities is not abso- lutely discordant."2 Within months, four of the Eskimos died of pneumo- nia, and even in death they endured prying Western eyes. Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber painstakingly documented the intimate displays of grief and the death rituals of the survivors as one by one their companions and family members perished.3 The museum then removed the brains of the 2. Quoted in Kenn Harper, Give Me My Father'sBody: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo (Iqaluit, NWT, 1986), p. 37; hereafter abbreviated G. Harper has written a detailed and moving account of these events focusing on the tragic life of Minik, the only child survivor. Reconstructed from press reports and oral histories, Harper's is the only book- length account of Minik's story. 3. Like Boas, Alfred Kroeber was apparently inured to the tragic results of these ex- periments in studying and displaying live humans. Kroeber is widely known for his later involvement with Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe. Alone and starving, Ishi wandered into a slaughterhouse in a small California town in 1911. The police soon placed him in the care of University of California anthropologists, a team eventually headed by Kroeber. Ishi lived out the remainder of his days as a resident of the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum on the Berkeley campus where he frequently served as a live exhibit. He, too, quickly succumbed to disease. The best-known (but utterly uncritical) account of these Shari Huhndorf is assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon and author of the forthcoming book Going Native: Indians in the AmericanCultural Imagination. She is currently working on a collection of essays coedited with Patricia Penn Hilden entitled Topographiesof Race and Gender:Mapping CulturalRepresentations. 124 Shari M. Huhndorf Nanook and His Contemporaries dead for study and retained their bones for display despite the vociferous protests of the remaining few. Eventually, embarrassed by the death of four Eskimos, museum officials returned the sole surviving adult, Uisaa- kassak, to Greenland in July 1898. Nevertheless, they opted to keep the eight-year-old Minik, placing him in the care of an Anglo-American family as an experiment in cultural assimilation. Since he was no longer quaint or "primitive," the public soon lost interest in his plight. Not until many years later did another side to this story emerge when the adult Minik expressed sharp criticism of Peary, Boas, and the museum itself. His accounts of these events challenge the conventional colonial perspec- tives on such encounters. After exploring the ways these and other Eski- mos' stories unfolded in modern American culture, I shall return to his saga, nearly lost to history. Despite (or perhaps in part because of) their tragic fates, the arrival of these Polar Eskimos rekindled America's long-time fascination with Arctic Natives, an interest that soon manifested itself in both high and low culture and grew in intensity through the 1930s. Peary's 1897 journey north was one of several voyages he made to the Arctic during that and the following decade in his quest to be the first white man to reach the Pole. He frequently returned with objects that further ignited the public's interest and supplied him with funding for future ventures: Eskimo corpses and bones, artifacts, animal specimens, and, on this particular voyage, the famed Cape York meteorite. In the 1900s and 1910s, the Polar controversy captivated the nation. Both Peary and his archrival, Frederick Cook, claimed the distinction of "capturing" the Pole, and the ensuing debate, which was often heated, drew in such luminaries as The- odore Roosevelt, the National Geographic Society, the New York Explor- er's Club, and a host of other political and scientific figures. World's fair exhibits, frequent throughout these boastful years of Western expansion, also underscored the importance of the Arctic by staging live exhibits. The 1904 St. Louis-Louisiana Purchase Exposition and Seattle's 1909 Alaska-Pacific-Yukon Exposition featured popular Eskimo villages which took the form of faux ice structures inhabited by fur-clad Natives and their sled dogs. By the time Robert Flaherty released his widely ac- claimed and now classic documentary Nanook of the North in 1922, the American public was hooked on tales of Eskimos and Arctic life. Nanook of the North became a kind of watershed, the point after which no imagining of the Far North was without the full panoply of stereotypes born in the later nineteenth century, developed in the 1900s and 1910s, and brought to fruition in Flaherty's work.

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