In September 1897, the Arctic explorer Robert E. Peary sailed into New York harbor aboard the Hope with six Greenland Eskimos to be studied at the American Museum of Natural History at the request of the anthropologist Franz Boas. Among the Eskimos were Minik, 6 or 7 years old, a merry boy with a mischievous expression, and his widowed father, Qisuk.
The next day 20,000 people visited the Hope, paying Peary 25 cents to see the Eskimos, who were still in their Arctic furs. Eventually they were taken to the museum, where visitors were also allowed to view them. They lived in the basement, where Minik seemed happiest playing amid the familiar objects in the Arctic exhibit.
But the Eskimos, who commonly refer to themselves as Inuit today, had no resistance to the germs in New York. Four, including Qisuk, died of tuberculosis and another returned to the Arctic, leaving only Minik.
To appease the grieving boy, Boas staged a funeral for his father in the garden of the museum on Central Park West. It was a mock ceremony, with a log wrapped in furs to simulate a body. In fact the Eskimos had been sent to Bellevue Hospital for dissection. The flesh was stripped from their bones, which were then bleached and stored in the museum. Eventually Minik discovered the ruse and began a lifelong effort to retrieve his father's remains, only to be rebuffed by the museum at every turn.
Minik's story is told in "Give Me My Father's Body," a book by Kenn Harper, an Arctic historian and businessman, that is to be published for the first time in the United States next month by Steerforth Press. Mr. Harper, 55, initially published the book himself in 1986, selling copies from his general store in Iqaluit on Baffin Island to the west of Greenland.
The book reveals new details about Minik's life, including Minik's account of what happened to him. Mr. Harper contends that until the 1960's the museum lied about still having the remains of Minik's father and the other Eskimos. Mr. Harper portrays Peary, whose claim to be the first man to reach the Arctic has been disputed, as egotistical and duplicitous. The Eskimo deaths were a public relations disaster for Peary, who washed his hands of Minik.
Mr. Harper provides new information about Peary's business dealings with the museum. Peary said his explorations were done "in the interests of science." But Mr. Harper says that the Peary family papers and the museum's archives reveal that Peary grew rich selling artifacts to support his expeditions, passing the sales off as donations with the complicity of the museum's president, Morris K. Jesup, a wealthy railroader and banker. With Jesup's knowledge, Mr. Harper contends, Peary also illegally imported duty-free furs and ivory.
"He had also felt a morbid affinity for the bodies of other Eskimos he knew by name," Mr. Harper writes of Peary. The year before Minik arrived, Peary sold the museum the bones of an Eskimo family he had befriended, Qujaukitsoq, his wife and little girl. Peary had uncovered their bodies from their graves after they died.
To Mr. Harper, who is married to an Inuit and speaks the Eskimo language Inuktitut, Minik's story "shows the arrogance and greed and lack of respect for native people and their culture that was rampant in the Golden Age of Arctic exploration."
"The Museum of Natural History was complicit in all of this, in sponsoring and subsidizing the explorers and in pretending to show respect for the cultures and native peoples it studied," he said.
The museum counters that the injustices done to Minik and the other Eskimos were a result of the beliefs of an earlier time. Ian Tattersall, a curator in the department of anthropology at the museum, said recently: "To judge what went on in that time by the values of today is not very productive. All we could do was take whatever action we could to put things right."
"Give Me My Father's Body" is being published as hundreds of American museums are cataloging their aboriginal remains to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, which provides for the return of skeletal remains and objects to native groups. Canadian and Greenlandic Eskimos are not covered by the act, although Canadian native groups have lobbied for the return of remains that were taken at the turn of the century.
The American Museum of Natural History is involved in a dispute with the Clackamas Indians over ownership of the 15-ton Willamette Meteorite in the new Rose Center for Earth and Space. The meteorite was donated to the museum after it was bought from an iron company near Portland, Ore. The Clackamas, who are part of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community, have asked that it be returned, arguing that it is a sacred object. Last month the museum filed suit in Federal District Court in Manhattan in an effort to keep the meteorite, saying that it had been part of the landscape of the area from which it was taken.
Years after Minik arrived in New York, he told a newspaper reporter from The World about the day he first spotted Peary's ship sail around Cape York in Greenland: "I had never seen anything bigger than my father's kayak. The big ship brought to our little village more white men than we had ever seen. I lived in a little igloo with my father. My mother was dead, and I had no brothers or sisters. And so I loved my dear father very much."
He told The San Francisco Examiner: "He was dearer to me than anything else in the world, especially when we were brought to New York, strangers in a strange land. You can imagine how closely that brought us together; how our disease and suffering and lack of understanding of all the strange things around us . . . made us sit tremblingly waiting our turn to go, more and more lonesome and alone, hopelessly far from home."
After his father's death, Minik was put in the care of William Wallace, the museum's superintendent of buildings, who lived in the Highbridge section of the Bronx and also had a home in Cobleskill, N.Y. Then in 1901, Wallace resigned in a scandal over missing money. Though impoverished, he continued to care for Minik, appealing unsuccessfully to Jesup for help in feeding, educating and clothing him.
Under Wallace's care, Minik learned English and attended a Bronx high school. He caught pneumonia repeatedly but nonetheless excelled at baseball. He was dogged by an ineluctable sorrow, the feeling always of being an outsider. When he enrolled at Manhattan College, he wrote, he felt he was "a freak to those about me."
In 1907 Minik discovered that his father had never been buried and that his bones were in the museum. "His coffin is a showcase, his shroud a piece of glass," an article in The World said.
"I can never be happy till I can bury my father in a grave," the article quoted Minik as saying. "It makes me cry every time I think of his poor bones up there in the museum in a glass case, where everybody can look at them. Just because I am a poor Esquimau boy, why can't I bury my father in a grave the way he would want to be buried?"
For the rest of his life, Minik begged the museum for the return of his father's body but was always rebuffed. The museum said it knew nothing about the bones and told employees to deny that they were there. Finally Minik, through an intermediary, petitioned President Theodore Roosevelt to get back the remains. Peary persuaded the White House to disregard his pleas.
In 1909 Peary, apparently afraid that Minik might reveal that Peary, a married man, had fathered two children with an Eskimo woman, allowed Minik, then about 18, to accompany him back to the Arctic.
Minik relearned his native language and was a guide and translator. He hoped to lead an Inuit expedition to the North Pole. He married an Eskimo, but the marriage failed.
He grew homesick for the United States and in 1916 he returned. For some time he was unable to find work, but eventually he became a lumberjack in Pittsburg, N.H. There he befriended Afton Hall, another lumberjack, and was taken in by Hall's family. It was perhaps the happiest period of his life. But in 1918 the Spanish flu swept the camp, and Minik died and was buried there. He was believed to be 27 or 28.
In 1977 Mr. Harper, the author of an Eskimo dictionary, began hearing about Minik in Qaanaaq, a coastal village in northwestern Greenland. A former mother-in-law of Mr. Harper's from a previous marriage had known Minik when she was a child. He began researching Minik's life in newspaper accounts and in the Danish Royal Archives, the United States National Archives and the American Museum of Natural History's files. In 1992 a reporter for The Toronto Globe and Mail and a retired Canadian correspondent for The Washington Post discovered Mr. Harper's self-published book and reported that the remains of Qisuk and the others were still in the museum.
That year the museum sent an emissary, Edmund Carpenter, a wealthy donor and collector of aboriginal artifacts, to Greenland to find someone to request the bones' return. Eventually a Lutheran pastor in Qaanaaq did, and in 1993 they were interred in a church cemetery at Qaanaaq. Mr. Harper describes the laying of a plaque above the grave by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and her husband, Prince Henrik, in 1997. The plaque says in the Eskimo language, "They have come home."
The museum denied that it returned the bones because of press accounts about Mr. Harper's book. "I don't think I knew about the book when this thing arose," Mr. Tattersall, the curator said. "We did an audit of our collection and found that we did have some materials that would not be appropriate."
The museum says that Minik's father's bones were never on display. "You can tell that from the bones themselves," he said. "They have to be drilled to support the whole skeleton."
Minik's body remains buried in New Hampshire. He once said that the bright lights of Broadway had attracted him more than the northern lights, Mr. Harper writes. When he died in New Hampshire among friends, it may have been the happiest he had ever been.
Hundreds of aboriginal skeletons are still stored in American museums. For example, the remains of Qujaukitsoq, his wife and little girl, which Peary sold to the natural history museum in 1896, are still there, Mr. Harper points out, filed under Accession No. 99/105-111.
Anne Canty, a museum spokeswoman, acknowledged that the bones of seven people were stored in the museum under that number. "There's no specific information in the accession file about these individuals," she said. "Obviously we would seriously consider returning them if we had information about them. There does need to be someone who has requested them and who will see that they are properly cared for once they are returned."
GRAPHIC: Photos: Minik, left, in his Eskimo clothes shortly after arriving in New York in 1897. At right, Minik with his foster brother, Willie Wallace, who is seated. Inset below, a 1909 San Francisco Examiner article about Minik's plight.. (Photographs from "Give Me My Father's Body" by Kenn Harper Steerforth Press )