whatilearned
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minik_Wallace
TIL of Minik Wallace, a Greenlandic child brought to New York in 1897 and studied by a museum, who held custody. After many of his companions died of tuberculosis, the museum faked a burial of his father and secretly put his skeleton on display. 20 years later, Minik would die in 1918 of influenza.
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fyi: Minik eventually realized they lied, and his father’s remains were returned home…after Minik died.
“Thanks to the collective conscious pricked by the book’s initial publication in 1986 and by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, Minik’s father and the three other Eskimos now rest in their homeland. Give Me My Father’s Body nonetheless retains all its original poignance in this timely new edition. Amidst confrontations over artifacts and remains, Harper reminds us that these political symbols hold intensely personal significance. His book will evoke indignation, disgust, guilt, and sometimes amusement-but also unconsolable sorrow”
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https://www.archaeologybulletin.org/articles/10.5334/bha.11104/galley/273/download/
Sounds about right for turn of the century Americans.
How do you secretly put a skeleton on display? Tell everyone you think is a cop that it’s just a novelty coat rack?
That was a pretty bad flu year.
You see greenlanders in Denmark… I saw some in Copenhagen. I didn’t know this history of the gross kind of anthropological studies against them. Thanks for sharing!
I think this might be one of the most unintentionally poorly worded titles in quite a while. I understand the difficulty of trying to compress a number of interesting details into three short sentences, but this one had my parser working overtime to come up with all the possible combinations until I arrived at the most likely one. I then had to open up the link and read the article because it was interesting, and I wanted to see if I guessed right.