Unraveling the Knot of Acculturation and Resistance in Anthony Thrasher’s Skid Row Eskimo

At the age of six, Thrasher was sent by parental authority rather than legislative coercion (as would have been the case in the contemporary south), to the Roman Catholic residential school in Aklivik. Because residential school policy was not officially extended to the Inuit-who persisted outside the domain of Indian Affairs-until 1955, the Aklivik school presented somewhat of a northern anomaly. Because both Thrasher and his audience are in on the joke, rather than signaling personal evaluation according to divine hierarchies, Thrasher's use of the term "holiness" overturns those hierarchies themselves. [...]while recognizing the beauty of a traditional Inuit familial existence, Thrasher abandoned his own children, perpetuating the cycle of neglect initiated for him in Aklivik Residential School. Skid Row Eskimo remains an enormously important (albeit sadly neglected) text because it both argues against colonial imposition and embodies the effects of such imposition within the texture of its narrative. [...]Thrasher's impassioned allegorical and ironic pleas against residential schooling's criminal violation of Inuit family and culture remain undiminished by the misery of his incapacity to parent, connect, and love-in fact, this incapacity itself constitutes the most powerful form of evidence.