OTTAWA REPORT

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"Give Me My Father's Body" is the title of a fascinating new book that should be required reading for Native people everywhere. The book reads like the script from an unbelievable Hollywood movie - but it's all true.

The story begins in 1897. The American explorer Robert Peary was on one of his many trips searching for a route to the North Pole. He stopped at an Inuit village on the northwest coast of Greenland. The Inuit there were not like the Inuit in southern Greenland. They still lived as their ancestors had thousands of years before. They had almost no contact with whites or other Inuit.

Robert Peary took six of the Inuit with him when he returned to America. They were Minik, a seven year old boy, his father Qisuk and four others.

When the ship docked in New York harbour, 30,000 people turned out to see

the Inuit dressed in their furs. Peary and company charged admission. Putting the Inuit on exhibit was one way Peary raised money for his expeditions. He also robbed Inuit graves and sold the bodies to the American Museum of Natural History.

Peary brought the six Inuit to New York at the request of the museum. When they arrived, the museum took control of the Inuit and kept them in the building's basement. In less than a month all six were in the hospital with pneumonia. Four of them died. Minik's father was the first. Minik, a tearful eight year old orphan watched the staff bury his father's body on the museum grounds.

One month later, Peary headed back to the Arctic. He took the remaining Inuit survivors with him but he abandoned Minik in New York. One of the museum employees took Minik in and raised him in an upper-middle class environment. Minik went to school, learned English and forgot his own language. He excelled at sports ... football, golf and swimming. His foster family wanted him to become a teacher or a missionary and return to his people. Minik, though, had other ideas. He wanted to get into farming or real estate.

Eventually Minik discovered the secret that was to haunt him for the rest of his life. His father wasn't buried on the museum grounds. Minik had witnessed a phony funeral. The museum staff had taken a log the size of a man, covered it with a blanket

and buried it to hide what they really did with Qisuk's body. They removed the flesh from his bones, put the brain in a jar, put the skeleton in a display case and put it on exhibit. The museum did the same thing with the other three Inuit who had died with Minik's father.

When he was 17, Minik told a New York newspaper, "It makes me cry every time I think of his poor bones up there in a glass case where everybody can look at them. Our people are brought up to love their parents. Even the poorest of them up in Greenland can bury their father and mother in a grave covered with stones. But I can't...I can never be happy till I can bury my father in a grave."

The museum refused to give Minik his father's body. The year was 1907. Minik had lived in New York for 10 years. He had successfully adapted himself to a new environment but he resented the way others still regarded him as an exotic curiosity. He wanted to go home.

For years Robert Peary had refused to take Minik back to the North. After the publicity over the fake funeral and Minik's complaints, though, Peary did take Minik back home. Minik returned to his village with little more than the street clothes on his back. He was 17 year old. He didn't know anyone there. He couldn't speak Inuktitut. He had forgotten long before the traditional skills and customs of his people.

Things changed, though. He quickly relearned his language and he became an excellent hunter. But he wasn't happy.

He wanted to go back to New York, After nine years in the igloos of Greenland, he returned to the skyscrapers of Manhattan in 1916. He tried and failed to sell his story to the newspapers. He began working at odd jobs as he drifted from town to town. His last stop was a lumber mill in New Hampsire. He died in an influenza epidemic in 1918 at the age of 28. He's buried there today.

The author of this incredible saga is Kenn Harper, a storekeeper in Frobisher Bay. He says the bones of Minik's father are still in storage in the American Museum of Natural History.

Kenn Harper has told a flabbergasting and maddening story. I think his book is more than just ancient history because right now Minik's ghost inhabits the cities of America and Canada. Thousands of Native people like Minik are walking the streets, cut off from their people and traditions, unable to fit into the rest of society. Kenn Harper has given us a close up look at the sad and tragic life of one of the first of those walking ghosts. "Give Me My Father's Body" is one hell of a story. Check it out.