reblogged from June 26th, 2012 – German version here.
The Old Cemetery in Darmstadt, Germany, had an unusual visit a few weeks ago. An Inuk from far-away Labrador (Canada), had a very special occasion to lay down a flower there.
Only a few inhabitants of Darmstadt know that a group of Inuit (then called Eskimo) performed in a „human zoo“ in the city in December 1880. Back then, the animal park entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck from Hamburg has initiated such events, where exotic people from far-away countries presented themselves in their traditional clothes and way of life and thus brought impressions from the wide world into Europeans cities. At that time, such international ethnographic shows enjoyed great popularity among the people of all social classes – adults as well as children – and thus filled the pockets of the operators, which most often could close out with substantial gains – although the expenses of bringing people together with their traditional equipment from Africa, America, Oceania, India or Greenland to Europe were rather large.
The Inuit who came to Darmstadt had been recruited for a fee by the boat owner Adrian Jacobsen on behalf of Hagenbeck. They left their homeland on the northern coast of what is now Canada and sailed to Hamburg with him, in order to start a one-year tour through Europe. Abraham and his wife Ulrike, with their two small daughters, and the young man Tobias were baptized Christians from Hebron, the mission settlement of the Moravian Church; Terrianiak and his wife Paingo with their 15-year old daughter Noggasak were „Pagan“ nomads from the Nachvak Fjord.
But the following day, the newspapers reported the sudden death of the girl Noggasak and her burial. This was just the beginning; a few days later two other Inuit died in Krefeld, Germany; they all had been infected with smallpox. None of the eight Inuit reached their distant home ever again: the remaining five got only as far as Paris, France, where – after a few days of performing in the Jardin d‘Acclimatation – death claimed them, too, in January 1881.
At that time, local newspapers reported the tragic fate of the Inuit group. Later, also the „Missionsblatt“ of the Moravian Church wrote about the case, but it was forgotten soon after. Only a hundred years later, the Canadian ethnologist J. Garth Taylor, working in a Moravian archive, came across some handwritten papers; it turned out that these were the transcript of a translation into German of a diary containing impressions from the trip of the Inuit which Abraham had kept in his native Inuktitut. 15 years later a book “The diary of Abraham Ulrikab” containing Abraham’s text as well as photos and historic documents was published in English in Canada in 2005 (an enhanced German version was released in 2007).
In 2009, Zippora Nochasak came across that book. When she learned of the fate of her compatriots and saw the photograph of her namesake Noggasak (a different spelling of her own last name which is not common anymore), she was deeply moved. The story captured her and finally made her work with us – a team of authors who have done in-depth research on the topic and are preparing a documentary and a book containing the latest results of our research on the 1880 journey of the Labrador Inuit in Europe.
Dieser Beitrag wurde unter Arktis, Geschichte, Inuit, Labrador abgelegt und mit Hebron, Moravian Church, Nochasak, Noggasak, Völkerschau verschlagwortet. Setze ein Lesezeichen auf den Permalink.