Nancy tells the incredible true story of Nancy Columbia Eneutseak Palmer, a Nunatsiavut Inuk woman from Labrador, Canada, who was born in a human zoo at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. As part of an "ethnographic exhibition" known as the "Eskimo Village", Nancy became its star attraction when news broke that her mother had given birth inside an imitation igloo on the fairgrounds. Nancy's name was bestowed not by traditional Inuit naming ceremony but by public spectacle, yet nothing could ever erase her identity nor her connection to a homeland she'd never seen but always known.

 

Born into the industrial age of progress by science. Nancy felt its growing pains: an uneasy mix of conquest and convention; oppression and fascination; righteousness and rationalization. The dominant culture viewed Nancy (and the civilization she represented) as both an inconcvenient impediment to be overcome and an exotic curiosity to be enjoyed. It sought more than mere quantifible extraction; of land, resources, and livelihood; now it craved validation from the victims of colonial violence themselves. Complicity. Titillation. Nancy, and colonized Peoples generally, needed to remain othered: studied, fetishized, assimilated,. Their objectification could now be justified -- and their conscience assuaged -- by scientific method, increased wealth,  and the ostensible acknowledgement by oppressed Peoples that they were inferior, thus positing their subjugation consensual and beneficial. This is why Indigenous Peoples' participation in the pantomime of shouldering the "colonizers' burden" of having to help them and performing their "strange rituals" in an enclosure while spectators gawked nd scientists took note, was such a powerful nostrum for the time.

 

Depicting colonized Peoples as grateful to be freed from the primitive Arctic way of life that had sustained their cilivization for millenia, only to have a foreign invader cut them off from their means of survival by diverting all resources to the empire defies all logical and ethical reasoning. But then on top of that be made to re-enact their traditional way of  life in a hollow simiulacrum devoid of purpose, athenticity, or context for the amusement of the oppressor who destroyed it, for the entertainment of the very system that had robbed their culture and society of the means to give meaningful effect to these acts of survival, livelihood, community, continuity, technologies, and systems of knowledge in the first place broaches somerthing darker.

 

In an era of colonial exploration, the Arctic was both final frontier and passing fancy. A race to be won. A flag to be planted. Its Peoples were irrelevant except as relics that reinforced the colonial-industrial mindset that Indigenous culture could not stand up to modernity. It now belonged behind glass --ossified, extinct -- a trophy case to be admired. To remind the colonial system of its inherent paramountcy, and the right to dominate it conferred. In reality, whether showcasing live re-enactments, Indigenous remains, or sacred items, or artefacts of culture, such displays were in fact reliquaries bearing the badges of mass extinction disguised as historical documentation, a glorified as triumph. 

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Their Ancestral lands were just a way station en route to a destination that would never be home to them, just another milestone, another windfall, and Nancy just another throwback to a bygone era. In the eyes, of dominator culture, even born in America and a pioneer of Cinema, Nancy would always be viewed as an oddity, never an equal. She couldn't be, for to do so would disrupt the arrogation of colonial power and undermine a system that depends on extraction, exploitation and inequality and forcibly dominates, subjugates, and expropriates resources from a group to produce and feed the unjust enrichment of the oppressors. So, while Nancy was nice to look at, best from a safe distance in a controlled environment. And without reciprocation, just erasure. Just as Nancy was not credited with having written The Way of the Eskimo, only for her acting. Because a silent Inuk woman, without voice or agency, without personhood, without property, and without the  presumption of entitlement to privacy and even basic human rights, existing only for the gratification of the subject, the viewer, to take his pleasure and give nothing in return, to define her, tell her who she is, confine her. That fit the colonial narrative a lot better . Assumed not to have ideas, indentify, stories, culture, the ability to write a script, see it through, the vision to create a film. Wasn't that the privilieged white man's purview. And if an 18-year old Inuk teenager can do it -- make two films simultaneously, actually (Lost in the Arctic) -- then what does that say about her? About them? About their belief system?

 

And she played her part well. But this time Nancy held their gaze, returned it, saw what lay behind concealed. In witnessing she showed herself and and they too were revealed. Call it wilful blindness with a pinch of mortal sin: Neither could they look away, nor could they look within. Explorers of every corner of Earth;   of borders, explored Explored from far and wide, the Earth they'd seen / but never thought to explore inside

In their eyes, Nancy would always be viewed as an oddity: nice to look at, but from a safe ditance in a controlled environment. And she played her part well. But this time Nancy held their gaze, returned it, saw what lay behind concealed. In witnessing she showed herself and and they too were revealed. Call it wilful blindness with a pinch of mortal sin: Neither could they look away, nor could they look within.

 

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