Performance and Protest: Inuit of Labrador and the World's Columbian Exposition, 1893

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.

Nigel Markham received his MA in History from Memorial University in 2021. He has previously published in the Journal of Newfoundland and Labrador Studies as well as several articles in Them Days Magazine.

Nigel has worked in the film and television industry in the Atlantic Region as a cinematographer, director and producer for over 40 year in both documentary and dramatic format. He has a background in television journalism as a result of his years with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and has worked as cinematographer on numerous award winning documentary projects with the National Film Board of Canada including Pelts; Politics of the Fur Trade, The Okimah, Place of the Boss, Tommy: A Family Portrait, Passage and Drummer’s Dream. He has had the opportunity of working on projects with many of the region’s leading independent documentary directors and producers. He has also worked as Camera Operator on a number of TV series shot in Newfoundland including Republic of Doyle, Hudson and Rex and Nice People. He recently received the award for Best Atlantic Cinematographer for his work on the independent feature film Skeet. A resident of St. John’s, Nigel is a long-time member of the Newfoundland Independent Filmmaker’s Co-operative and past President of the Atlantic Studios Co-operative.