coolthingoftheday: coolthingoftheday: coolthingoftheday: This is Peter Freuchen. He was an arctic ex
coolthingoftheday:coolthingoftheday:coolthingoftheday:This is Peter Freuchen. He was an arctic explorer, journalist, author and anthropologist who, during his lifetime, took a 1000-mile dogsled trip around Greenland, starred in an Oscar-winning film, wrote more than a dozen books, amputated his own gangrenous toes himself (and thereafter wore a peg leg), was involved in the Danish resistance against Germany, was imprisoned and sentenced to death by Nazis before escaping to Sweden, was friends with Jean Harlow and Mae West, won $64,000 on the TV show The $64,000 Question, and once escaped from a blizzard shelter by cutting his way out of it using a knife fashioned from his own frozen feces. (Source)I just found out some more really cool facts about Peter Freuchen (who I think may be a serious contender for Literally Most Badass Person Who Has Ever Lived™), so I wanted to repost this with more information. Peter Freuchen was notoriously well-known for being extremely egalitarian. His first wife, Mekupaluk, was an Inuit woman from Greenland. When she died, he wanted her buried in a church courtyard in Upernavik, the northernmost town in Greenland. The church refused to perform the burial because of the fact that she wasn’t baptized. So what did Peter Freuchen do? He simply buried her himself. Being strongly anti-racism, Freuchen also decided to join the Danish resistance against Germany during World War II, despite the fact that he only had one foot at that point (the other having been amputated by his own hand when his foot froze solid and became gangrenous due to frostbite). He was several times overhead pretending to be Jewish whenever he heard somebody expressing anti-Semitic sentiments. He also gave several lectures about Inuit culture in an attempt to curb discrimination against Indigenous populations, and strongly criticized the Christian practice of sending missionaries among Inuit populations without understanding their culture and traditions. He later worked in the film industry as a consultant specializing in Arctic-related scripts to make sure that depictions of northern Indigenous populations were accurate and not based on racist stereotypes.#bringbackfreuchen -- source link
#reblogs#peter freuchen#history