Curatorial intervention. 2024. Painted black rectangle on wall in lieu of the photograph ‘Alnayah’ (c. 1909) in the Peary-MacMillan archives. 20 x 30 cm

Mountains heard her voice Bolatta Silis-Høegh. 2024. Gouache on wall. Ownership of the artist.

At the end of the long nineteenth century, exploration of the Arctic and the so-called ‘race for the pole’ left indelible marks on the land and the people. The Inughuit women of Kalaallit Nunaat were no exception. The men who came to their land relied on women’s labour for many things, and their bodies were made objects of desire. Among the texts and images produced by Arctic adventurers, the photographs taken by Robert Peary and his men are perhaps the most famous, including many photographs of Inughuit women in the nude. As these photographs record, women were exploited and abused by the Peary expedition’s social organization which. As Lyle Dick (1995, 23) has shown they placed women ‘at the bottom of a strict hierarchy organized along racial and gender lines’. 

‘Alnayah’ or ‘Ahlnayah’ is the name attached to one of the most disturbing images in the photographic record of Robert Peary’s expeditions to Greenland. The image is labelled ‘Alnayah having “Piblock-to” (Arctic hysteria)’ (listed as Photograph No. NP-26, held in the collection of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic 67 

Museum and Arctic Studies Center at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine) (Dick 2001, 385). Was it the name of the woman pictured? We do not know. Photographs taken in the long nineteenth century usually do not provide accurate descriptions or name the Indigenous people in them. We also know that Peary’s men gave nicknames to Inughuit and transcribed words in Inuktun using phonetic spellings. In this case, the photograph records the forcible restraint and physical abuse of a person called Alnayah under the guise of treatment for what was called piblock-to and translated as ‘Arctic hysteria’. In the sequence of photos taken in 1909 at Cape Sheridan on Ellesmere Island, Alnayah is depicted twice: in one image, she is tied up and lashed to a mast, the putative ‘cure’ for pibloktoq, and in another, she may be the Inughuit ‘woman in distress, naked from the waist up, held by two smiling males as they pose for the camera’ (Dick 1995, 384). In the latter photo, she is denied a name in the caption. 

Bolatta Silis-Høegh’s aesthetic response to the trauma Peary and his men afflicted on to Alnayah and her people is a poem that comes from a position of care. In her words, ‘Alnayah was a woman who was not seen or heard. I want to meet her with a loving image’. Painted in sky blue, using her own language of Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), Bolatta’s painted poem, Mountains heard her voice, is about a summer day with Alnayah.

Essay by Renée Hulan

References

Dick, Lyle. 1995. ‘”Pibloktoq” (Arctic Hysteria): A Construction of 

European-Inuit Relations?’. Arctic Anthropology, 32 (2), 1-42.

Dick, Lyle. 2001. Muskox Land: Ellesmere Island in the Age of 

Contact. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.

Further reading

Renée Hulan. 2023. ‘Alnayah’s People: Archival Photographs from 

West Greenland, 1908–1909’. Interventions, 25(8), 1088–1109. https://

doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2023.2169621