LUTZ, Hartmut (ed.), 2005 The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab: Text and Context, Translated by Hartmut Lutz and students from the University of Greifswald, Germany, Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press, 100 pages.

In 1880, eight Inuit from Northern Labrador perished of smallpox while touring Europe in one of the then-popular Volkerschauen, or ethnic shows—cultural circuses where Europeans could marvel at the existence, appearance, and skills of other peoples. Their story, marked as it is by “economic greed and exploitation, by ignorance and prejudice, by scholarly and popular curiosity, and by callousness and racism” (Lutz 2005: xxvi), might have been lost to obscurity, were it not for the literary accomplishments of one of the adult males, Abraham, a 35-year-old Christian Inuk and member of the Moravian congregation at Hebron, Labrador. Abraham left behind a diary of his travels and several letters, which survive in a German translation done by one of the missionaries at Hebron (the Inuktitut originals have vanished). Abraham’s diary is significant for a number of reasons, but chiefly, as Thode-Arora (2002) pointed out recently, because it is the only extant account of a European ethnic show by one of the “ethnic” participants, and because, as Lutz says in this new work, it is the first known autobiographical text by an Inuk. It is fortunate that the diary exists at all. After the deaths of the Inuit, the show’s impressario sent several parcels of possessions back to Hebron—among which, presumably, was Abraham’s diary. In Hebron, the diary was translated into German and copied by missionary Brother Kretschmer. Thereafter it was forgotten, until J. Garth Taylor and Helga Taylor rediscovered the German copy in the Moravian archives in Bethlehem Pennsylvania, and duly published an article on it in Canadian Geographic (Taylor 1981). In 1991 and 2002, another scholar published an excellent article on the diary, in which he contextualized it with a contemporaneous diary kept by Jacobsen (Thode-Arora 2002). Lutz’s Diary is made up of a series of texts meant to surround, contextualize, and enrich our appreciation of Abraham’s diary. There are at least 15 different elements, from foreword to multiple appendices; these include several letters written by Abraham to a Moravian missionary, diaries and annual reports kept by the Moravian Church, contemporaneous press reports, and a racialist scientific article written by Dr. Rudolf Virchow. As Lutz points out, these were all available in German and his students took great pleasure in their discovery and rendering into English. The book is dedicated to “The Inuit People of Labrador,” and royalties go to the Marg and Howard Adams Scholarship. As Lutz explains: The unfortunate practice of importing exotic peoples from the edges of the colonial world for zoos and ethnic shows had been inaugurated by the impresario and menagerie owner Carl Hagenbeck a few years before the Labrador Inuit visited Europe. Hagenbeck’s agent, a Norwegian recruiter named Johan Adrien Jacobsen, had brought a group of Greenlanders in 1877 for one of Hagenbeck’s shows. The Inuit had returned to Greenland after much success before great audiences, and soon Hagenbeck was eager to mount another show. Jacobsen set out in the spring of 1880 in his newly christened Eisbar (Polar Bear) to recruit Greenlanders for Hagenbeck. However, after repeated frustrations dealing with the Danish authorities, Jacobsen ended up cruising the Baffin and Labrador straits all summer looking for Inuit to recruit. He eventually found them on the northern coast of Labrador. The recruits consisted of two families, each slightly different in association and identity. One family was made up of non-Christian Inuit from the region North of Hebron, who traded with the HBC depot at Nachvak—Terrianiak, about 40, his wife Paingo, perhaps 50, and their teenage daughter Noggasuk. The other family consisted of Abraham, 35, his wife Ulrikab, 24, four-year-old daughter Sara and the …