While attending a Nancy Drew conference this weekend, I heard the strangest story. In discussing the influence of orientalism on early Nancy Drew cover art (really), one speaker related an anecdote the cover artist used to tell. Apparently a group of Eskimos were brought to a New York City museum in the 1930s. They were cruelly put on display so that visitors could feed them raw fish for a small charge. It gets worse. Apparently said Eskimos died (I’m not clear on how), and the proprietors had them stuffed and put back on display. Relatives in Alaska, wondering what had happened, made the journey to New York to find their family members taxidermed. Naturally, in true Nancy Drew fashion, members of the audience were skeptical and asked for evidence, but the speaker insisted that it was so and said he’d read editorials from the New York papers at the time expressing outrage. Is there–could there possibly be–any truth to this story? –Stefan Petrucha, via e-mail
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Tragic and senseless? Sure, but up to that point more indicative of stupidity on Peary and Boas’s part than racism. Not to worry. The American Museum of Natural History decided that the bodies of the dead Inuit were museum property, to be disposed of as management saw fit. Officials turned the cadavers over to a medical school for dissection, then sent what was left to an upstate “bone-house,” a rendering plant of sorts used to prepare animals for display. There’s no indication the bodies were stuffed; the bones were “cleaned” of any remaining flesh and returned to Manhattan, where they were filed away among the museum’s artifacts. All this was done without the consent or even the knowledge of the decedents’ next of kin–in fact, the museum arranged for a fake burial to fool the survivors.
