Tuesday 16 October 2012

THE RIGHT TO EXPERIMENT ON THE OTHER / MINIK : I WANT TO BURY MY FATHER


The scientific research is another myth and another trip that the European predators are taking us to . How can researches of this kind serve humanity when they are built on the victimization of the other , how many people and animals and creatures were victims of these researches . The following passage related by Munir Akesh is but one example. This happened at the beginning of the previous century.


Franz Boaz might has been among those who tried to save the anthropology of God's chosen people from racism by relying on culture instead of race. But despite this daring new turn, he remained faithful to the myth of the whites’ monopoly of civilization in comparison with the savagery and predation of other people.

So, when Boaz was in charge of the National History Museum in Washington, he took the decision to capture some human specimens among Eskimos to conduct a research study, because the Eskimo man -according to him- was a 'living fossil' that represented the hunter in the European Ice Age .

This is how he endowed with this noble scientific mission the discoverer called Robert Peary. This is how Peary sailed to the north pole seeking the Eskimos on the ship called 'Hope', and he was able -due to his long military experience in the US navy- to abduct eight samples of Eskimos among them a child.

He first shipped them to New York to show them to an audience of 30 thousand people against a quarter of a dollar from each seer before taking them to the basement of the Natural Museum in Washington for study.

Hardly eight months after their abduction, six of the human specimens were dead after contracting Tuberculosis , and one of them was sent to Greenland to make it back home on his own. As for the 8th, who was a child called Minik, the son of one of the six victims who died in the museum, he was kept by Boaz and by the manager of the museum called William Wallace, for further 'scientific research' .

The child had asked the permission to bury his father in his homeland according to the Eskimo rituals, and he was told that this had been done. But the child knew later that Boaz and Wallace had lied to him because they had kept the remains of his father in the museum's cellar with the remains of other extinct animals and colored people.

In his book entitled 'Skull Wars', David Hurst Thomas, the anthropoligical expert in the museum explains Boaz's attitude, saying : ' When I insisted on asking him why the museum is keeping the dead body of Qisuk -the father of the Eskimo child- against the wish of his family and the traditions of his people, Boaz answered me that this was a legally fully justified action because there was no one to bury the corpse and the museum has full right to it more than his people or any other institution'.

This is how Canadian historian and linguist, Ken Harper, documented the tragedy of this racist scientific anthropological study in a book entitled : 'Give Me My Father's Body : The Life of Minik' in which he says the following :
'They were confined to the cellar in a small depressing room that proved heavy on their souls . There, they contracted Tuberculosis and did not show any immunity against it. Franz Boaz and his smart student Alfred Krober were carrying on their study and experimentations on them even while they were on their death bed'.



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1 comment:

northierthanthou said...

the age of exploration certainly does seem to have its share of crimes.