On a hot summer day in 1897, Robert E. Peary - the most famed explorer of his day - docked in Brooklyn with cargo so outrageous that it would soon become one of the most heart-wrenching stories of the cost of American expansionism. What Peary had brought, for his financiers at the American Museum of Natural History, were six, live Polar Eskimos.

The tabloid press ate it up, and over the course of the next several months, thousands of New Yorkers flocked to the museum to catch a glimpse of the "savages". Unfortunately, the Eskimos were unfamiliar with the city's exotic germs, and most of them soon perished. The last Eskimo to remain was a boy named Minik, just 6-years old.

Thus began a strange, twenty-year saga as Minik's life became inextricably intertwined with Peary's, and Polar Eskimo culture became intermingled with the American dream.