Performance and Protest

In the summer of 1892, an American company chartered a schooner to coastal Labrador to recruit Inuit for an ethnological exhibit to be presented the following year at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Promised wages, room and board, medical care, and a supply of hunting provisions on their return, sixty Inuit boarded the Evelena that fall, bound for Chicago.

Trading on the popular accounts of early Arctic explorers, the American exhibitors presented them as “Arctic primitives,” living in ice houses year-round, “untouched by the hand of civilization.”

But the Inuit were from Labrador, not the Arctic, and they were far from primitive. Their unique histories in Labrador meant they were among the earliest North American Indigenous people to have contact with Europeans, and this had resulted in long-established relationships with European colonial agencies. This experience meant they were neither ignorant of Euro-American culture nor helpless in the face of injustice and exploitation.

Subjected to poor living conditions and chafing under the authoritarian dictates of their employers, Inuit at the exposition shattered stereotypes by taking their employers to court seeking to assert their individual rights and freedoms under the law. The highly publicized case challenged false public perceptions of Inuit.

Performance and Protest documents the trials and challenges of Inuit from Labrador as they negotiated their way through the prejudices of the time in an alien and often hostile environment. By unraveling the complexities of their representations and experiences, this volume offers valuable insight into Inuit resilience and agency in the late-nineteenth century.