Arctic Justice: On Trial for Murder, Pond Inlet, 1923

Kerry Abel is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History, co-editor of Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, and co-editor of Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History.

In 1919–20, the Canadian government was still feeling its way through
the dark toward some sort of Arctic policy, and the Inuit were still
trying to make out just what the qallunaat (white men) were up to. When
Newfoundland trader Robert Janes began acting strangely and threatening
harm to the people and dogs of a camp on North Baffin Island, the
leading men agreed that Janes had to be killed to eliminate the danger
to the very survival of their families. Three years later, Ottawa
officials decided that the “murderers” had to be brought to justice,
to demonstrate to the Inuit that they were obliged to obey Canadian law
and to demonstrate to the world that Canada was, indeed, exercising its
sovereignty over lands being eyed by other nations.

The case, one of several similar causes célиbres of the day, has been
noted before, but in this excellent study, historian Shelagh Grant
successfully combines Inuit oral history with the archival record to
provide a sensible, well-balanced, and even emotionally riveting
account. She not only sees the trial as a window into the mechanisms of
Canadian colonialism in the 1920s, but also makes a convincing case for
seeing it as “a much broader story about human response to an alien
culture.” Again and again, cultural differences shaped the dynamics of
the North Baffin encounter, not only in the killing of Robert Janes, but
in the subsequent interaction between Inuit and qallunaat before,
during, and after the trial. Yet the ultimate human tragedy,
particularly in the case of Nuqallaq,who was sent to Stony Mountain
Penitentiary, where he contracted tuberculosis, is never lost in the
telling of the larger story.

This book will be of interest not only to scholars, but to all readers
(north and south) with an interest in Inuit history, Canadian history,
or the story of human interaction itself. It was awarded the Canadian
Historical Association’s Clio Prize in 2003 for the best book on the
Canadian North.