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Iron Mountain29/12/08
An audio visual exploration of the life of Minik “The New York Eskimo”.
Visuals by Metal Dragon.
www.metaldragon.com
Music by Alan Lambert.
www.metaldragon.net/downloads/music/Qaanaaq_1_2_3.mp3
The Iron Mountain & Minik The Eskimo
In the 1890s a group of American explorers befriended a group of Polar Eskimos, a community of people who had never made contact with the outside world before, who had only ever seen snow, water and sealions. The American explorers were searching for the Iron Mountain— three huge meteorites believed to have impacted on the polar ice cap. The Eskimos knew where the meteorites were, and worshipped them as “the woman hurled from the sky”, with her dog and her tent.
Once found, in the summer of 1897, the Iron Mountain was prepared for shipping back to New York. The American explorers decided to bring back a small group of Eskimos with the meteorites, to corroborate their stories, and for anthropological research. Within months of arriving in Manhattan the eskimos died of pneumonia, their systems unprepared for the humidity. Only the youngest child, the eight year old boy Minik, survived. The American explorers and their museum refused to take responsibility for Minik and he was abandoned, cast out onto the streets of nineteenth century New York.
Several years later Minik returned to the museum to find his father, Qisuk, and the other eskimos, alongside the “Woman hurled from the sky”, on dislpay in a glass case. He began campaigning to have their remians returned to Greenland for a respectable burial. Qisuk, Nuktaq, Atangana and Aviaq were finally buried in their hometown of Qaanaaq in 1993, a hundred years after they first encountered the Americans.
“The Iron Mountain” is a musical reflection on the journey of the boy Minik — The New York Eskimo — and of the “Woman hurled from the sky”.
