Nancy Helena Columbia Eneutseak was born on the Chicago World’s Fair grounds in 1893, among white stucco palaces and plaster igloos. By opening day, the 50 Inuits who’d traveled to the Columbian Exposition from Labrador sued in protest of the living conditions and set up their own Eskimo Village outside the grounds. When the fair closed, the Eneutseaks stayed in America, traveling the show-biz circuit, including the Pike at the 1904 World’s Fair. They were part of the “United States Attractions,” down the midway from a glass-weaving display, a re-creation of the Galveston Flood of 1900, and the Temple of Palmistry.
Here, 11-year-old Columbia, as she was known then, sits for a studio portrait shot by Emme and Mayme Gerhard, the sisters who also photographed Geronimo and Ota Benga. Her husky, which is not named, might have been one of the animal actors from the “fight between Esquimaux and wild dogs” staged inside a multilevel faux-polar landscape. Live reindeer roamed there; so did a tame polar bear named Mac. Inuit men glided kayaks across an artificial lake and ran dog sleds down a fake snow hill. The families wore sealskin pants and caribou coats, even in August, and every day they had a wedding, burial rituals, and the chance to pan for gold in a replica Klondike River.
Five years later, Columbia was a celebrity, crowned Queen of the Carnival at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. She traveled to Europe and Africa and starred in silent films, including 1911’s The Way of the Eskimo (which she also wrote). Caught in the world’s gaze, here and later, she looked into the lens with a wry half-smile, knowing that no matter who held the cabinet card, she was nobody’s caught bird; she belonged to no one but herself.
