Flesh-Eating Beetles and The Secret Art & Taxidermy

Abstract

Abstract Collecting and Displaying natural history specimens is a more complex and dramatic activity than most museum visitors appreciate. The specimens themselves, for example, have intriguing and elaborate histories that largely go untold, because, unlike fine art objects, their individuality must be subjugated to the needs of scientific pedagogy. Generations of visitors at the American Museum of Natural History, for example, examined an Inuit skeleton as part of a general anthropology exhibit, unaware of the skeleton’s own peculiar history. In 1993 the American Museum of Natural History finally returned this particular skeleton, the remains of an Inuit man named Qisuk, to his descendants in western Greenland. Qisuk and other Inuits, including his six-year-old son, Minik, had been “acquired” as living specimens during an Arctic expedition in 1897. After polar explorer Robert Peary convinced the Inuits to return with him, the new emigrants found themselves housed in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History. Shortly after arriving, Qisuk died of tuberculosis, and unbeknownst to Minik, the museum staff removed Qisuk’s flesh, cleaned his bones, and put him on display for New York audiences. Some time later Minik, who originally had been told that his father’s bones had been returned home for proper burial, stumbled across his own father in an exhibit display case.