Minik Wallace

Minik Wallace (c1890 ? October 29, 1918) was an Inuit who was brought to the US from Greenland along with five other Inuit in 1897 by Robert Peary

The Scandal of Minik's Father's Body

The adult Inuit soon all became ill with Tuberculosis which they were ill prepared to fight off and all eventually died. One of the first to die was Minik's father, Qisuk, and the boy was inconsolable with grief. Minik pleaded for his father's body to receive proper burial, with traditional rites that only he (Minik) could administer. Yet already there were plans to preserve Qisuk's body for study - study impossible were he to be buried. The Museum's curatorial staff decided to stage a fake burial for Qisuk. They filled a coffin with stones, atop which a stuffed "body" was hidden under a cloth, and buried the box by lantern-light with Minik attending.

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Following the death of all the adult Inuit, Minik was left a virtual orphan and was eventually adopted by William Wallace, the Museum's Chief Curator. Qisuk's body was sent to Wallace's own estate, where he operated a workshop for processing the skeletons of biological specimens, and there it was de-fleshed and mounted on an armature. In this form Qisuk's body was returned to the Museum for display as the skeleton of a Polar Eskimo. Minik was yet unaware of this fact, and his adoptive father kept it well hidden from him. Despite this, after a space of a few years, the New York papers picked up on the irony of Minik's father's bones being on deposit in the museum, and stories about it were widely circulated.

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Minik's pleading with the museum authorities and the publicity that the case had garnered were to be fruitless, his father's body was never released.

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