Minik Wallace

Minik Wallace ( * 1887, † October 29, 1918 ) was an Inuk, which housed with his father and four other relatives in 1897 abducted by the polar explorer Robert Peary to New York and in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History to anthropological research on living objects was conducted by the local curator Franz Boas.

When his father died Qisuk after relatives of tuberculosis, you deceived the boy a funeral before. William Wallace, a senior staff member of the Museum, took the orphan into his family. Although the boy was henceforth conducted in public documents as Minik Peary Wallace, there is no clear evidence for its adoption. As a 16 - year-old he had to realize that his father's skeleton was on display in the museum and thus lost all confidence. Minik returned in 1909 to Greenland back, there was no longer at home, however, had her brought back to New York in 1916 and died on 29 October 1918 as a forest worker in North Stratford, New Hampshire, at the Spanish flu. He is buried there.

The Canadian characteristic Harper published in the late 1980s a documentary about these operations. The American Museum of Natural History felt itself forced to transfer the bones of the deceased in New York Inuit in their home where they were buried in 1993. The operation may served as a precedent for the repatriation of the remains of Sarah Baartman from Paris's Musée de l' Homme to South Africa and is an example of ethnocentrism and the American human sciences still around the turn of the century.

The novel Minik by Ralf Isau is about Miniks life story.