Minik, The Lost Eskimo

In April 1897, six polar Eskimos arrived in New York City. Far removed from the home they had known in Greenland, where their Inuit community numbered just 234 people, they found themselves in the heart of a teeming metropolis. The youngest of the band was seven-year-old Minik, who remembered his first impression of the city as "a land we thought must be heaven". The Eskimos were the exotic cargo of explorer Robert Peary, whose ambitious quest to reach the North Pole would leave him unable to oversee the Eskimos' care once he left them in New York. Within months, four of the Eskimos died and one returned home to Greenland, leaving Minik an orphan. For more than a decade, Robert Peary would persist in his efforts to reach the North Pole, while Minik struggled to create a home and an identity thousands of miles from his native land.