From Greenland to New York

The Forgotten Inughuit: A Tale of Exploitation and Loss at the American Museum of Natural History”

Inside the American Museum of Natural History in New York, there is a massive iron meteorite. It crashed into Earth around 10,000 years ago in Northwest Greenland, arriving as a piece of space debris. For centuries, this meteorite was used by a small tribe of indigenous Greenlanders, the Inughuit, to craft metal-tipped tools and weapons. However, in 1897, an American explorer, driven by the pursuit of fame and fortune, transported the meteorite across the Arctic and sailed it to New York, where he sold it to the museum. Yet, this enormous piece of iron wasn’t the only thing that made the journey on that ship; six Inughuit people were also taken along, after being promised they would return home within the year, enriched with weapons and tools, in exchange for allowing themselves to be studied by the museum. Most of them would never see their homeland again. This is a story of broken promises, grand ambitions, and one small boy who grew up to challenge the museum that took everything from him.

At the time, iron could only be obtained if it fell from the sky in the form of meteorites. This was the case with 19 iron pieces, including a dagger, found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, which was sealed centuries before smelting technology developed in Egypt. The ancient Egyptians even had a hieroglyphic symbol for meteoric iron, translating literally to “metal of the sky.” Similarly, the Inughuit, sometimes referred to as Polar Inuit, relied on meteoric iron. The ancestors of the Inughuit first arrived in this part of Greenland around 1000 AD, and the fortunate existence of meteoric iron here was crucial for making the region habitable. North of the Arctic Circle, this area has always been harsh and extremely remote. During the Little Ice Age, from the 15th to the early 19th century, ocean access to the region was cut off, making it even more isolated. The Inughuit lived in virtual isolation for centuries until 1818, when an expedition led by British explorer John Ross arrived. Upon seeing the iron-tipped knives, spears, and harpoons, Ross initially assumed the metal must have come from a shipwreck. The Inughuit, however, informed him that it came from a nearby mountain, which Ross guessed was a crashed iron meteorite. Though bad weather prevented the expedition from finding it, Ross described it as “the most important mineral production of this country.” This marked the beginning of increased trade with European explorers. Throughout the 1800s, Northern expeditions continued, with many trying to locate the meteorite but failing.

By the 1890s, the Inughuit had become accustomed to trading with foreign ships for manufactured goods, metal tools, and weapons, relying less on the meteorite as their sole source of iron. This allowed an American explorer, hungry for fame and fortune, to justify taking it. The foreigner the Inughuit interacted with the most was Robert Peary, an explorer who had come to this remote part of Northwest Greenland with one goal: reaching the North Pole. Peary was part of an era of European and American exploration in the late 19th century, obsessed with the parts of the map yet to be reached by white people and, in the case of the North and South Poles, not known to have been reached by humans at all. Peary is considered to be the first non-Inuit to study Greenlandic Inuit culture and survival methods. Throughout his years of Arctic exploration, funded by his wealthy family and groups like the National Geographic Society and the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (now known as the Brooklyn Museum), the Inuit taught Peary how to survive Arctic conditions and travel over the ice using sled dogs. They also worked as expert guides, hunters, dog handlers, and laborers during his Arctic expeditions. While the relationship was mutually beneficial to the Inughuit, it was far more enriching for Peary. The Inuit received resources like guns, household items, and metal tools from Peary, while Peary acquired furs, ivory, and other cultural artifacts, which he sold in New York to support his efforts to reach the North Pole.

After his 1894 Arctic expedition failed, Peary knew he had to bring something back to keep his backers interested. He remembered stories dating back to John Ross in 1818 about the Inughuit having access to a rare iron meteorite, possibly a large one. In exchange for a gun, an Inughuit man who claimed to know the location of the Iron Mountain led Peary right to it. Much of this history has been lost, but it is known that Peary did not ask for permission to take what he did.

In the following years, Peary returned to Greenland with a larger ship and specialized equipment, including heavy-duty jacks and a custom-built railway, to excavate and drag the largest fragment of the meteorite across the Arctic landscape to the edge of the island. He then loaded it onto his ship, bound for New York. Careful to frame his interactions with the Inuit as nothing but benevolent, Peary staged photographs, including one where he described the Inuit as “happily doing all they could to put into my possession the Iron Mountain of their forefathers.” However, the meteorite wasn’t all Peary took.

An assistant curator from the American Museum of Natural History had requested that Peary bring back an Inuk to be studied. Peary convinced six Inughuit to come with him: a respected hunter named Qisuk, his wife Atangana, their 12-year-old daughter Aviaq, a young man named Wisha and another hunter named Kisuk, who had lost his wife to an epidemic brought on by one of Peary’s earlier expeditions. Kisuk brought his seven-year-old son, Minik. Peary promised them compensation and care during their stay in New York, but that was far from what happened.

When Peary’s ship arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in October 1897, it caused a sensation. Twenty thousand people paid to board the ship and see the people and the meteorite Peary had brought back, which he pocketed to fund his further expeditions. He then left on a lecture tour, promoting his adventures, leaving the Inughuit in New York to be studied at the American Museum of Natural History. They were forced to live in a damp, hot basement inside the museum. Within days, they were hospitalized with respiratory infections due to exposure to the warmer climate and their lack of immunity to American diseases. Minik’s father, Qisuk, was the first to die. The museum told Minik that his father was buried, but in reality, Qisuk’s body was dissected, and his remains were stored in the museum for further study. Soon after, Atangana, Aviaq, and Wisha died as well, leaving only Minik, alone, in New York City.

By 1899, Minik was 9 years old and had lost all contact with Peary, who never returned for the people he had convinced to come to New York. Peary had sold their meteorite to the museum for $40,000, the equivalent of more than a million dollars today. The museum took several years to find a way to remove the meteorite from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In 1905, they carefully dragged it through the streets of New York on wood rollers and then a giant truck pulled by a team of horses, all the way to the American Museum of Natural History, where it became a major attraction. There is no record that Peary shared his profits with Minik, the boy he brought to the museum and then abandoned.

After his father’s death, Minik was taken in by a museum official named William Wallace and grew up in New York City under Wallace’s care. He forgot his native language and started going by the name Minik Wallace. However, when his foster family fell on hard times, Minik began to ask questions about his father, and though the details are somewhat unclear, he discovered the truth: the museum had lied to him, and his father’s body had been desecrated without his knowledge and stored inside the museum.

Starting in 1907, Minik took to newspapers to tell his story and publicly demanded that the museum return his father’s remains so he could give him a proper burial. The museum ignored him. The following year, he called on Peary to help him return to Greenland, but Peary said there was no room on his ship. It wasn’t until 1909, when Minik was writing in American newspapers about how Peary had treated his people, that Peary found a spot for Minik on one of his ships bound for Greenland. Before Minik left, he wrote about his biggest regret: leaving America without his father’s body, which had been taken from him and subjected to cold-blooded scientific study. When Minik returned to Greenland, he had to relearn his native language and Inughuit customs. He was only around seven years old when Peary took him to the U.S. He eventually returned to the U.S. in 1916, working as a lumberjack in New Hampshire. He died there two years later, a victim of the 1918 pandemic.

The museum never responded to Minik’s repeated calls to return his father’s remains. They kept the bodies of all four Inughuit who died in their care for almost a century. It wasn’t until 1986, after a book by author Kenn Harper titled Give Me My Father’s Body drew attention to Minik’s story, that the museum finally returned the remains to Greenland in 1993.

When contacted for comment, the American Museum of Natural History acknowledged that their role in bringing Minik and the five other Inughuit to New York included a series of unethical and unjustifiable actions, especially the morally abhorrent actof misleading Minik and refusing to return his father’s remains. Only in October 2023 did the museum begin to reckon with the more than 12,000 human remains it has kept since the 1800s and commit to removing all human remains from its displays. Yet, the meteorite that Peary took still remains in the museum, a signature exhibit described as the largest meteorite in captivity. A plaque in front of the meteorite mentions that it was brought to the museum by Robert Peary, but nowhere in the exhibit is there any mention of Minik, Qisuk, or the other five Inughuit who were taken to New York.