Inuit Entertainers in the United States: From the Chicago World's Fair through the Birth of Hollywood
by Jim Zwick

Introduction

The first attraction to open at the first world's fair held in the United States was an Eskimo Village featuring twelve Inuit families from Labrador. Because the coast of Labrador was inaccessible from fall through spring, they were brought to the United States in October 1892 for the World's Columbian Exposition that would open in Chicago the following May. The Eskimo Village became one of the most celebrated and most influential attractions at the World's Fair. Before the exposition officially opened, the Inuit produced four nationally celebrated "World's Fair babies," brought the Eskimo Village concessionaires to court, and formed a new company to establish an independent Eskimo Village outside the fairgrounds. It wasn't the performance they were expected to give, and Americans took notice. Eskimo Villages would become a staple attraction on the midways of later world's fairs and expositions. Inuit from Labrador appeared at every world's fair and most other major expositions held in the United States and Europe through 1915. At one they missed, the Cotton States and International Exposition held in Atlanta in 1895, a group of Inuit from Port Clarence, Alaska, was exhibited.

Esther Eneutseak and her daughter Columbia, one of the Inuit babies born at Chicago, became entertainment pioneers. Spanning an important period in the development of American mass entertainment, from the country's first world's fair through the first feature-length films, their careers may be unparalleled in the number and diversity of iconic entertainment venues in which they appeared. They performed at or visited at least eight later world's fairs and expositions, from the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900 through the Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915. Between expositions they performed with Barnum & Bailey's Circus, at dime museums, at city, state and regional fairs, and at Coney Island and other amusement parks. Eventually settling in Southern California, they developed successful careers working in the film industry, both on screen and behind the scenes, throughout the first decade of the Hollywood studios.

Their diverse careers illuminate connections between a number of prominent entertainment venues and forms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Midway Plaisance at the Chicago World's Fair included the first major ethnological display mounted in the United States. Its combination of ethnic villages with other amusements, including the original Ferris Wheel, set a new standard for future expositions and for a wide range of other entertainment venues. After the World's Fair, ethnic cultural performances became an important feature at dime museums, circuses, amusement parks and in motion pictures. From her birth in the Eskimo Village at the Chicago World's Fair to becoming the first Inuit actress to star in a Hollywood film, Columbia's remarkable career spanned them all. Her career demonstrates not only continuities in how cultures were represented in different venues and forms, but how ethnic performers could use the availability of multiple venues to forge viable careers as cultural performers.

A great deal has been written about the ethnic villages at world's fairs and expositions held in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but we still know very little about the people who performed in them. Most studies of the various expositions have treated ethnic village performers much as they were treated at the time -- as "objects on display." We know a great deal about how they were presented and perceived, but almost nothing about their experiences as performers. With little evidence to draw upon, scholars have usually assumed that exposition performers were passive and powerless victims of exploitation.

In a 1998 essay about world's fair postcards, Robert W. Rydell, a leading authority on world's fairs, highlighted the need for basic research about the experiences of ethnic performers at world's fairs and inadvertently demonstrated the dangers of making assumptions of passivity and powerlessness. He suggested that "reactions to being on display, whether angry, fearful, defiant, or embarrassed, would have been tempered by the amount of relative control that the 'villagers' had over the conditions of their exhibition." He then listed a few very basic questions that were as yet unanswered: "Were they free to leave their villages? Did they have any privacy? Could they maintain some semblance of human dignity?" Suggesting in the same essay that Columbia might not have been entirely powerless, Rydell seemed to be breaking new ground. He wrote that her smile in a postcard published during the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition might be interpreted as a subtle form of resistance: "Columbia looks squarely into the photographer's camera lens. Conceding that she was posed as a type, a gem of the frozen tundra, her smile can also be read as a 'weapon of the weak.' Her welcoming expression is so disarming that it forces the viewer to acknowledge the presence of another -- not merely an 'other' -- human being."

Columbia seems to have had that effect throughout her life, but she had many other resources to draw upon besides her smile. As a professional cultural performer, her racial identity -- her ability to pose as a racial type -- was among the most valuable. Instead of being victimized or oppressed by society's interest in anthropological displays and fascination with Eskimos, Esther Eneutseak turned it into an asset, something the Inuit could draw upon to develop successful careers as entertainers. Columbia was far from powerless. Her parents were running the Labrador Eskimo Village at the exposition, and she was at the height of her celebrity as an exposition performer. Captioned "Columbia, Eskimo Queen," the postcard commemorated her election as Queen of the Pay Streak, the midway or amusement section of the exposition. With that honor, she won a building lot in a residential district of Seattle and became the most celebrated performer at the exposition. During the exposition, the Inuit also spoke with the press and staged a very public demonstration to protest the way the public was ignoring Inuit contributions to Arctic exploration while celebrating the discovery of the North Pole. Columbia had a voice as well as a smile, and she could reach millions.