Give me my father’s body / by Kenn Harper. Imagine that a tall, mysterious sandy-complected man with steel-blue eyes and moustache were to invite you, your father and four friends to sail with him on a ship across the ocean for an adventure in an exotic, foreign country. You all accept, and when you arrive there, you’re asked to don unusual clothes, eat overly sweet food, endure the land’s oppressive heat, and live in the basement of a museum…then, one-by-one, your father and other friends grow sick with pneumonia and die. Suddeny you’re orphaned in an unfamiliar land with neither parent nor friend and with nobody who speaks your native tongue. Could something like this actually happen? Indeed it could and it did–to a seven-year-old boy from the snow-and-glacier-covered country of Greenland. Give Me My Father’s Body, by Kenn Harper, is the heart-rending story of Minik Wallace, a Greenlandic inuit boy brought to America by the infamous explorer Robert E. Peary (best known for his claim to be the first man to reach the North Pole) and Minik’s tragic life after becoming orphaned in America. Give Me My Father’s Body is a chilling account of America’s scientific arrogance and ethnic exploitation at the turn of the 20th century–epitomized by Minik’s harrowing discovery that his father’s burial had been faked, the body dissected, and his bones accessioned into a box for scientific study at the American Museum of Natural History. It is also a sympathetic tale of a boy struggling to find an identity as he grows into young manhood. -Russ
Check out this video of Greenland, the country where Minik was born:
