CHAPTER TEN

As in all great narratives, history, geography, personal adventure and mysteries intertwine. There are misadventures, murder, and starvation, to be sure, but spiritual powers and every kind of humor mean that even the worst is part of being in the best possible place, in one’s own land.

—HUGH BRODY, The Other Side of Eden

WITH SINNISIAK AND ULUKSUK IN CUSTODY IN EDMONTON, and Koeha, Ilavinik, and Patsy Klengenberg free to wander the city’s streets, the regional press had plenty of opportunities to observe these strange men at close hand. A reporter for the Calgary Daily Herald remarked on “these representatives of a pre-historic race” who were “clothed in their native habiliments of cariboo skin trimmed with rabbit skin.”¹

To the Eskimos, the city hosting the trial was unfathomably large. The seventeen-year-old Patsy said he had never dreamed that so many people could exist in one place. Where did they hunt enough food to feed all these people? Indeed, two days after they arrived, the Edmonton Morning Bulletin boasted in a headline that the local phone book now had eleven thousand names—fully six hundred more than the year before. Another front-page article quoted a local professor extolling the benefits of graded “earth roads,” made of clay mixed with ash and sand, which, he argued, would cost $150 per mile to build and $30 per year to maintain.²

The prisoners told their captors they were amazed by the white man’s technology. Police officers took them one day to see a “moving picture.” Another day, Ilavinik was taken to see a ballet at the Pantages Theater. Reporters focused their attention not on the performance but on the Eskimo’s reaction to it. Ilavinik “evinced a lively pleasure in the performance until the ballet came on, upon which he modestly put his head down on his arms,” one paper reported, “the sight of the naked limbs of the damsels offending his ideas of what a Christian Eskimo ought to look upon. Whether he did the Peeping Tom act or not can only be conjectured.”

Denny LaNauze, who by now was all of twenty-eight years old, could not help but notice the precipitous drop in the self-confidence of his charges. These were people who could survive months of thirty-below weather on little more than seal meat, and here they were in an urban center, surrounded by extravagant amounts of food and shelter, and they were virtually helpless. “It was almost pathetic how they would stick to the patrol as if it was their only connecting link between their past and present life,” he wrote. “Their confidence in us was childish; in us who had brought them so far on our stern errand of justice.”³

AS THE CITY prepared for the trial, newspaper reporters scoured the city looking for “experts” to help make sense of the Eskimos. “Death Is Only Penalty Eskimo Knows; Most Primitive of Races,” ran one headline. A man named William Thompson, credited as an author, traveler, and famous ethnologist, offered this: “More primitive than any race of people to be found in darkest Africa, less touched by civilization than any other humans, the Eskimos offer to ethnologists the most fertile subject for study. If treated well the white man is as safe with the Eskimo as he is anywhere on earth. But anyone who plays them false must expect to die. Death is the only penalty the Eskimo knows. One tribe decapitates its victims. Three such cases are known.”

Thompson went on to note that Eskimos brought into society did not do well on a white man’s diet. Eskimos, he said, had a particular aversion to pepper and salt. “Living perilously on nothing but fish and cariboo they soon got to like soup, potatoes, beans and bread, and I can hardly see how they will ever be content again with the food they existed on before.”

Moving quickly from his observations of the people of the north, Thompson then told the reporter—in apparent contradiction to what the Douglases had found—of the “limitless quantities” of copper near the Coppermine River. Thompson also said he was “enthusiastic about the great northland as a place for the tourist.”⁴

AT NINE A. M., on Tuesday, August 14, a full hour before the trial began, the corridors of the Edmonton courthouse were packed with crowds eager for a seat inside. At five minutes after ten, the doors to the oak-paneled courtroom opened. People streamed in, packing the benches to their limits. Spectators who couldn’t find seats squeezed onto window ledges. Prominent local attorneys lined up against the rear wall. Rex v. Sinnisiak was about to begin.

As soon as the principals in the case were led into the courtroom, the spectators knew they were in for some unusual theater. The players were all dressed in the outfits befitting their professions. Denny LaNauze wore a dark blue tunic and light blue breeches; his corporals wore scarlet tunics and blue breeches. In the audience, several Oblate priests wore long black cassocks with large silver crucifixes hanging from neck chains. The prisoners were dressed in caribou skins adorned with ptarmigan feathers and trimmed with white fur at the neck and waist, and sealskin boots. Lawyers for both sides wore black silk gowns and white socks. The jury wore drab gray business suits. Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, a reporter noted, had dark brown skin and eyes shaped like almonds. “The entire appearance reminds the observer immediately of that of a Japanese.”

As the trial progressed, the summer temperatures in the courtroom became plainly oppressive to the Eskimos. The court provided them with buckets of ice to keep their feet cool. Even the usually staid apparatus of the courtroom reflected the strangeness of the case. The lawyers’ tables were littered with books about Eskimo life, written by explorers and scientists, in case either side needed to corroborate the opposition’s anthropology. On the evidence table, the audience could also see a variety of priestly accoutrements: a bloodstained cassock, several breviaries, a surplice, a crucifix, a paten, an old yellow diary half weathered away. They could also see a rusted .44 Winchester rifle and the lower half of a human jawbone. Its teeth were intact. ⁵

The six members of the jury sat beyond the far end of the evidence table with their backs to the side wall. All of them were white. Their names—James E. Mould, R. B. Ferguson, John Kenwood, Alfred F. Fugl, John Harrold, H. Milton Martin—were printed in the newspaper the first day of the trial. Two prominent Catholics had been summoned for the jury, but were successfully challenged and excused. Both sides agreed that each court session should last just two hours, since, as one reporter noted, “the prisoners’ constitutions would not stand a more enforced stay in the hot courtroom.” ⁶

Over in the oak-paneled prisoner’s box, just behind the lawyer’s table, Sinnisiak sat alone. Clad in his caribou skins, he began sweating the moment he entered the courthouse. The spectators could not take their eyes off him. “The scant black beard on his chin and the close-cropped black hair accentuated the pallor of his erstwhile swarthy skin,” an observer named Edmund Broadus wrote. “His heavy bullet head, with its high cheek-bones, was tilted slightly forward. His narrow-set, protruberant eyes, with their small pupils and abnormally vivid whites, were fixed in an unblinking stare. What was he thinking of as he sat there, understanding no word of the lawyers’ pleas and counterpleas?”⁷

The chief justice of Alberta, the Honorable Horace Harvey, made his way to the bench. “Underneath a crown of white hair, his face showed round, smooth, without a wrinkle, delicately flushed, and remote, the face of a man who had spent his life in the serene contemplation of the law,” one observer reported. Here, indeed, was one of the Great White Fathers the Eskimos had heard so much about.

The prosecuting attorney was Counsel for the Crown Charles Coursolles McCaul. Denny LaNauze considered him “one of the most prominent men of the Alberta bar,” but in his way, C. C. McCaul had been almost as itinerant in his chosen profession as John Hornby had been in his. McCaul was the third son of the Reverend John McCaul, the president of University College in Toronto. After graduating from college and being admitted to the bar in Ontario, McCaul had left the East in 1883 and settled near Fort Macleod to help run the 100,000-acre North Fork Ranch, one of the biggest ranches in western Canada. An avid rider and fisherman, McCaul had reportedly developed a passion for climatology, geology, and other natural sciences.

McCaul moved to Calgary in 1891 and joined the city’s bar association, where he became heavily involved in revising the ordinances for the Northwest Territories. By the turn of the century, he had moved to the Yukon’s Dawson City, then to San Francisco, Europe, Vancouver, back to Europe, back to San Francisco, and back to tiny Fort Macleod. “Whether his restlessness was due to domestic difficulties, or to a latent desperate need for change, or to recurrent ill health, is a matter for conjecture,” a McCaul biographer wrote. “Suffice to say that on Sept. 16, 1907 he was admitted to the Law Society of Alberta and at the same time he settled down in Edmonton.” ⁸

BEFORE THE TRIAL began, McCaul had decided to file four separate murder charges: two against Sinnisiak for the murders of Rouvière and LeRoux, and two similiarly against Uluksuk. As the trial opened, however, and to the great surprise of the chief justice, McCaul decided to present only the charge against Sinnisiak for the murder of Father Rouvière. Sinnisiak, he argued, was both the instigator and the perpetrator of the crime. Plus, Father Rouvière was both unarmed and running away when Sinnisiak shot him. Though he didn’t explicitly say so, McCaul was also hedging his bet. If he somehow managed to lose this case—but how could he?—he’d simply present charges against the Eskimos for the murder of Father LeRoux and try again.

McCaul turned to face the accused. “The Big Chief of this country says that you, Sinnisiak, killed Father Rouvière at Bloody Fall in November, 1913 in the north country,” McCaul charged.

James Wallbridge and Frank Ford, the attorneys appointed by the Department of Indian Affairs to defend Sinnisiak, did not object to McCaul’s decision. They entered Sinnisiak’s plea.

Not guilty.⁹

As McCaul stood to begin his opening address to the court, the rumble of streetcars poured through the open courthouse windows. Taking the jury step by step through the massive police report compiled by Denny LaNauze and Wyndham Bruce, and gesturing at maps of the Barren Lands, McCaul tried to convince the jury that convicting Sinnisiak would strike a dramatic blow not only for justice but for the safety of all white men traveling through Eskimo country. Indeed, his sometimes operatic rhetoric seemed directed well beyond the walls of the courtroom. His opening statement would go on for two full hours, a performance that astonished even veterans of the Edmonton courthouse. During his address, particularly as he described the hardships the priests had suffered during their mission work, McCaul “was completely overcome by emotion,” a reporter covering the case wrote. “Tears furrowed their way down his face and he was obliged to stop for several minutes, wipe his eyes and gain control of himself before he could proceed.” ¹⁰

The jury would be asked to decide “a trial which is really historic, a trial which is absolutely unique in the history of North America,” McCaul said. “The long arm of British Justice has reached out to the shore of the Arctic Ocean, and made prisoners of two of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Arctic Shore.” Police officers had traveled nearly three thousand miles to bring the accused before a jury of Canadian citizens. He said, “You will have before you a thrilling story of travel and adventure in lands forlorn, and I am quite sure that after you have heard all the story you will agree with me that too much credit cannot be given to the young police officer who is here, Inspector LaNauze, for his discretion and for his splendid courage in effecting their arrest.”¹¹

LaNauze and his men had begun their trek across the Barren Lands at Fort Norman, then made their way to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, McCaul continued. Just three weeks after arriving at the coast, they not only learned the whole story of the murders but discovered the names of the Eskimos who had killed them, arrested these men, and had them committed for trial.

“I have said this is an extraordinary trial,” McCaul said.

It is extraordinary in this particular way: the arrest by two or three policemen—peace officers—not soldiers—peace officers— of the two particular individuals only out of the whole tribe of the Eskimo, among whom Father Rouvière and Father LeRoux had been working and extending their missionary efforts. Contrast that with what would have happened if white men elsewhere had been massacred by a tribe of savages: there would probably have been only one or two who had effected the actual killing—let us say in Central Africa, in Borneo, in the Philippines, or in Mexico or in (a few years ago) the Western States of America. Contrast the different methods, I say. Here, with us, British Justice reaches out to the shore of the Arctic Ocean and has picked out of the offending tribe two individual men. It says: You two men are responsible for these deaths; we do not want anything to do with the rest of the tribe; we have picked the two individuals who we hold to be responsible. What would have happened in the other cases I referred to? Retributory justice would have dispatched a military force, a punitive force, against the tribe. Retributory justice would have sent a punitive expedition and the tribe would have been decimated as a result, possibly exterminated. This appears to me an extraordinary instance of the fairness of British Justice and of the peaceful instead of the warlike methods in which it operates.

McCaul then praised the effectiveness of British justice in teaching the law to other natives in Canada: the Indians of the Plains, the Blackfeet, and the Crees, and the Chipewayans and the Sarcess and the Stoneys. “They have been educated to know that justice does not mean merely retribution, and that the justice which is administered in our Courts is not a justice of vengeance; it has got no particle of vengeance in it; it is an impartial justice by which the person who is charged with a crime is given a fair and impartial trial, and it is only after a judge—in this case, the Chief Justice—learned in the law, presiding, a jury chosen with care among representative citizens with expert counsel assigned to the prisoner, that we attempt to urge a conviction for the crime charged; and it is only after a conviction by such a trial that punishment can be awarded.”

Given the pioneering nature of both the priests’ missionary work and the police investigation that followed it, McCaul said, the court had little choice but to instill itself on the only remaining section of North America yet to feel the touch of British justice. His voice rising with emotion, and his eyes tearing, he moved on:

These remote savage, really cannibals, the Eskimo of the Arctic regions, have got to be taught to recognize the authority of the British Crown, and that the authority of the Crown and of the Dominion of Canada, of which these countries are a part, extends to the furthermost limits of the frozen North. It is necessary that they should understand that they are under the Law, just in the same way as it was necessary to teach the Indians of the Indian Territories and of the North West Territories that they were under the Law; that they must regulate their lives and dealings with their fellow men, of whatever race, white men or Indians, according to, at least, the main outstanding principles of that law, which is part of the law of civilization, and that this law must be respected on the barren lands of North America, and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and on the ice of the Polar Seas, even as far as the Pole itself. They have got to be taught to respect the principles of Justice—and not merely to submit to it, but to learn that they are entitled themselves to resort to it, to resort to the law, to resort to British Justice, and to take advantage of it, the same way as anybody else does.

The code of the savage, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life must be replaced among them by the code of civilization. They must learn to know, whether they are Eskimo or not, that death is not the only penalty for a push or a shove, or a swear-word, or for mere false dealing; that for these offenses our civilization and justice do not allow a man to be shot or to be stabbed, to be killed or murdered. They have got to learn that even if slight violence is used it will not justify murder, it will not justify killing, and they must be made to understand that Death is not ‘the only penalty that Eskimo know’ or have got to know. If that is their idea, their notion of justice, I hope when the result of this trial is brought back to the Arctic regions that all such savage notions will be effectively dispelled.¹²

Given the passion of his discourse, and the difficulty in translating it, much of what McCaul said was apparently lost on the prisoners. Both Sinnisiak and Uluksuk were by now fast asleep, whether from the heat of the courtroom or the length of McCaul’s discourse was hard to tell. They were shaken awake and admonished to pay attention.

Pointing to a large map, McCaul described the vastness of the Barren Lands. For reference, he also pointed out Hudson Bay and Greenland, then moved west, naming geographical features: Here is the Arctic Ocean. Here is Victoria Island. Here is Great Bear Lake. Here is Coronation Gulf. Here are the Dismal Lakes. Here is the Coppermine River. Here is Bloody Falls, scene of the gory spectacle Samuel Hearne witnessed in 1771, when his Indian guides slaughtered a group of Eskimos “to the last man, woman and child.” This, he said, is near where, 140 years later, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk murdered the priests. “It was whilst struggling to extend the Gospel to these Eskimos that these priests, Roman Catholic missionaries, Father Rouvière and Father LeRoux, met their death: a homicide with which the prisoners are charged. It was there and under those circumstances that they became martyrs to their faith.”

Given that so little was known about the culture from which the suspects had emerged, McCaul felt obliged to teach the jury a few things about Eskimo culture. “You do not get any fresh vegetables in that country; every man lives by his rifle,” he said. “Every white man carries his rifle, whether he is priest or sinner, ordinary citizen or policeman.

“The great importance of this trial lies in this: that for the first time in history these people, these Arctic people, pre-historic people, people who are as nearly as possible living day-to-day in the Stone Age, will be brought in contact with and will be taught what is the white man’s justice,” McCaul said.

They will be taught that crime will be swiftly followed by arrest, arrest by trial, and if guilt is established, punishment will follow on the guilt. You, gentlemen, can understand how important this is: white men travel through the Barren Lands; white men live on the shores of Bear Lake; white men go to the shores of the Arctic Ocean; and if we are to believe the reports of the copper deposits near the mouth of the Coppermine River, many white men more may go to investigate and to work the mines. The Eskimo must be made to understand that the lives of others are sacred, and that they are not justified in killing on account of any mere trifle that may ruffle or annoy them.

Just as it is possible to-day for any white man to travel through the country of the Blackfeet, or the country of the Crees, or the country of any of our own Indians, under the protection of the aegis of justice, so it becomes necessary that any white man may travel in safety among the far tribes of the North.¹³

Fighting off any notions that Eskimos were merely a tiny band of nomads, McCaul then launched into a discourse about their wide settlement in the North. “If any persons are under the impression that the Eskimo of Canada are a small and insignificant tribe, it is important that the jury and every other person should have that notion dispelled,” he said. Outside of Greenland, where they had become “civilized” by the Christianity brought to them a thousand years ago, thousands of Eskimos could be found from the shores of Labrador and Newfoundland through Hudson Bay, on both sides of Davis Strait, all through Baffin Land, and the Arctic passages and gulfs, all along the Arctic shores of North America, “extending clear across and around the North of Yukon Territory, around to Alaska, to the Bering Sea. I myself have seen the Eskimo in their kayaks, seventeen hundred miles up the Yukon River at Dawson City.”

In other words, Eskimos were a grave and gathering threat that white men would ignore at their peril. “History, gentlemen, is repeating itself,” McCaul declared.

Hard on the footsteps of the explorers of North America have always followed the Roman Catholic missionaries. Our own Canadian history furnishes us with many examples of their courage, their fortitude and martyrdom. The Jesuits, in the early days of North America, and of Canada, were conspicuous for their missionary zeal, and to us in the West the names of Père Nicolet and Père Hennepin who were tortured and burned to death at St. Anthony’s Falls where Minneapolis now stands, are household words. But there were others—the Sulpicians, Recollets, Ursulines—who labored among the savage tribes of Canada, and many of them were put to death by the Iroquois among the Hurons on the shores of the Great Lakes, at Michilmackinac, at Detroit, of which you all are doubtless more or less familiar.

These two unfortunate Roman Catholic missionaries go off into the barren wilderness a thousand miles or so from their base into the wilds alone among these savage tribes. They entrust their lives to the good faith of the tribes among whom they are working.

McCaul told the jury he would be introducing the letters Rouvière and LeRoux had written during their last days, as well as Rouvière’s “weather stained and wind blown diary.”

“Gentlemen of the jury, whether we agree or not with the dogmas and tenets of the Roman Catholic Church, all good Christians must acknowledge and respect the zeal and fervour, the courage and fortitude of these Catholic missionaries,” McCaul urged, “and we can at least all agree that they were sincerely anxious to spread among the remotest tribes of the North the knowledge of God, and the divinity of Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost. It was for the cause of Christianity, the cause of the Kingdom of God, that Father Rouvière and Father LeRoux laid down their lives. It is in this Christian community, and before a Judge and Jury both sworn in the name of God to render justice, that the men charged with their cruel and dreadful death will have to be tried.”¹⁴

Once again, Sinnisiak had fallen fast asleep. Once again he was awoken. McCaul picked up Rouvière’s diary and offered to read.

By now, James Wallbridge, one of the defense attorneys, had heard enough. He raised an objection. McCaul put the diary down. He would read it later, he said. Instead, he launched into a detailed description of the priests’ final days. Anticipating another Wallbridge objection, he said he would not, for now, provide all the details from LaNauze’s massive police report. He pointed to Koeha, sitting in the audience. Upon their return from Bloody Falls, the murderers “told the whole revolting details to the assembled crowd, including this witness who will speak of it. They told, gentlemen of the jury, how, after they had killed these men, they ripped them open, tore out their livers and each ate a portion: this is the cannibalism to which I referred.”

McCaul described the epic police investigation, then the “thrilling story of the arrests.” He told of the suspects’ trip on the Alaska and their arrival in Edmonton. At last, after taking up the entire morning session, McCaul sat down.

WALLBRIDGE, ASTONISHED at the length of McCaul’s opening statement, stood up and demanded a new jury. Such an epic display of rhetoric left little chance for a fair trial. “I must take great exception to my learned friend’s address to the Jury,” Wallbridge said. “The address has been unfair, and, calculated to prejudice the Jury by reason of the inflammatory remarks of counsel and it seems to me it would be hardly right to proceed unless you empanel a new jury. He made remarks to the jury which I think were very, very unfair.”¹⁵

Defending his rhetorical burst, McCaul explained that he needed to provide an impression of the region’s geography and atmosphere. “I tried to get the jury into a properly sympathetic frame of mind at the very beginning,” he said. “I am quite willing to leave myself in your Lordship’s hands. I think there is no inflammable language. I put the case quite simply, stating no facts not practically admitted; not common ground.” ¹⁶

Judge Harvey rejected Wallbridge’s request for a new jury. Although the opening statement was unusual in its length, he said, there was nothing in its language that could harm the case of the Eskimos. But the judge nonetheless scolded McCaul for being so long-winded, and implicitly seemed to question McCaul’s experience in murder trials. “It is quite unusual to deal with such matters at the opening,” he said. “Generally counsel merely outlines the case to show what evidence he is going to present. However, I think you can trust the jury on these matters. The procedure you have adopted of laying the charges separately may prolong the case for some time.”

McCaul replied that he considered the case important enough that “I would be quite derelict in my duty if I did not to the best of my ability take pains and great care to open the case to the Court and Jury, even if at more than usual length.”

McCaul then asked Judge Harvey for a recess. The Eskimos, he said, were suffering from the heat.

Court was adjourned until two P.M. As the prisoners were led from the courtroom to the holding cell in the building’s basement, “a huge crowd of curiosity seekers eddied and surged about the building.” ¹⁷

CONTINUING HIS objections that afternoon, Wallbridge sought to derail McCaul’s approach. When everything in McCaul’s opening statement described two men killing two other men, why was only one suspect being tried on one count of murder? Perhaps McCaul was playing poker. If Sinnisiak was proven innocent in the murder of Father Rouvière, McCaul would have the chance to try him again for the murder of Father LeRoux. The same, apparently, would hold true for Uluksuk. This was absurd, Wallbridge argued. There should be one trial, and one trial only.

You should have raised that point long before now, McCaul retorted. The trial is already under way. Besides, it is the right of the prosecution to charge suspects individually.

Judge Harvey agreed that such an objection should have been raised during the pretrial hearing. He let the trial continue but, looking pointedly at McCaul, “urged that no unnecessary time be taken.”

McCaul agreed. He had just one more thing to introduce before completing his opening statement. He produced Rouvière’s damaged diary and read the short passage describing the priests’s disillusionment with the Eskimos, which he hoped would set the stage for dramatic evidence he would soon present. Then McCaul sat down.¹⁸

RISING, WALLBRIDGE offered his own opening statement. He would be brief, especially compared to the astonishing performance the jury had just received from McCaul. By the time they heard all the evidence, he argued, the jurors would surely conclude that the killings had been justified. But before they even considered the evidence, he urged, the jury should be reminded of the unprecedented difficulties of trying the case at all. Quoting from the Magna Carta, Wallbridge acknowledged that an Eskimo could not possibly, in civilized Canada, be judged by his “peers.” The best the jury could do would be “to understand his point of view.”

He described the priests’ final moments once again. “Any man, whether he is white or black, civilized or uncivilized, is justified in killing another in his own self-defense,” Wallbridge said.

And I ask you to find that what these men did was nothing more than any of you would have done if the cause in your minds had been the same. I will not suggest that you would have come to the same conclusion, knowing your fellow beings as you know them, that the priests were going to kill you. But with these Eskimos, these primitive men, savage men of the stone age, were they not justified in the conclusion which they came to; were they not justified in believing that these men were going to kill them? Was it not reasonable, considering the extent of their mind, the little knowledge they had of the white race, the two greatest fears they had—fear of the spirits and fear of the white man, the stranger— were they not justified in believing that their lives were in danger?

Wallbridge sat down, and McCaul began calling witnesses.¹⁹

McCaul’s first witness was Father Duchaussois, a balding, bespectacled priest who had taught the classics for ten years at Ottawa College. Duchaussois had studied in Belgium with Father Rouvière from 1901 to 1903 and had taught with him in Ottawa in 1907, prior to their assignments in the Far North. Duchaussois examined a number of photographs from the investigation and identified Rouvière’s vestments, a collection of items used for conducting a mass, a diary, and a handful of letters that Rouvière had received from his superiors in the church. Duchaussois testified that Rouvière “was a gentle man but of giant strength and able to suffer enormous hardship.” When Wallbridge asked him for more impressions, Duchaussois said he regarded Rouvière as “very calm, very quiet. Not very brilliant, but pretty good for theologists all the same. Docile, very, very humble. Obedient.”

Wallbridge objected that not all the items produced had been found in Sinnisiak’s possession, but McCaul persuaded the judge that the diaries, for example, should be considered official church documents, and were thus relevant to the case regardless of where they were found.²⁰

From the pile of books on Eskimo life, McCaul handed the jury a copy of Lands Forlorn, the book George Douglas had recently published about his trip to the Coppermine. Inside the book, McCaul said, jurors could see a photograph of the murdered priest sitting in a canoe with Father LeRoux. McCaul elaborated from the black-and-white image. “The two were calmly floating on a blue northern lake while at the back of the picture the sun was seen half at rest.”

McCaul called Corporal Bruce. Closely following the details he had provided in the police report, Bruce described his journeys along the Arctic Coast in the winter of 1915–16. With McCaul marking Bruce’s progress on a map of the Arctic coast, Bruce told how he, Diamond Jenness, and Patsy Klengenberg had been welcomed into an Eskimo village. As a rule, he said, white people had nothing to fear from Eskimos. Bruce did, however, mention the séance during which he and his party had been told they would be thrown over the cliffs by the spirits and killed.

Bruce described finding some of the priests’ possessions in the hands of the Rich Man, Hupo, and Kormik. He identified the octagonal-barreled .44-caliber rifle that was lying on the evidence table. Such a gun could kill a caribou at five hundred yards, he said. Fewer than ten of the 170 Eskimos he had met had possessed such weapons.

Bruce described the .22-caliber rifle the patrol had discovered in Sinnisiak’s tent. He described leading Sinnisiak back to Bernard Harbor. McCaul asked him to describe Sinnisiak’s confession.

“My lord,” Wallbridge interrupted, accusing McCaul of leading his witness. “I might just as well state now that I intend to make an objection to this man, who doesn’t understand the Eskimo language, stating what the prisoner said. Mr. McCaul can obtain whatever statements were made, if they are admissible in evidence, from the Eskimo interpreter.”

McCaul said he only wanted to know the circumstance of the confession, whether Bruce had in fact heard LaNauze warn Sinnisiak about how the statement might be used. He altered his question, and Bruce said indeed LaNauze had made the warning clear. “He was told very clearly and very emphatically, not once, but if I recollect right, about three times, that he need not make any statement whatever.”

DURING HIS CROSS-EXAMINATION, Wallbridge allowed Bruce to comment more fully on the subtleties of the Eskimo mind. Pointing to Sinnisiak—“the placid creature in the box,” the Morning Bulletin called him—Wallbridge tried to show “the futility of dispensing justice by trying members of a stone-age tribe according to the principles of modern law.”

“What manner of people did you find them?” Wallbridge asked.

“Very simple, kindly as a rule,” Bruce responded.

“What about their intelligence?”

“Well, they are very clever in their work, but their minds don’t work like ours.”

“They compare more with children, don’t they, than with grown up people as far as we are concerned?” Wallbridge asked.

“As regards our ways, it is a hard question to answer.”

“That is what I say, as regards our ways, our methods of doing things, they are simple like children?”

“Yes,” Bruce said. “They want to examine everything. They are very curious to find out about things, how it is made and how it is done.”

“Would you call them primitive?”

“Yes, they are primitive.”

Bruce said that he had read Stefansson’s books and that he agreed with Denny LaNauze that the Eskimos were “men of the Stone Age.” It was true, as Stefansson had written, that they feared strangers, but that was simply because they had met so few of them. As soon as they recognized a newcomer’s good intentions, Eskimos were unfailingly hospitable. “They never feared me, because strangers are always in the minority,” Bruce said.

“You gave them no cause to be afraid?”

“No.”

“None whatever?”

“No.”

“You were very careful not to give them any cause to be afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Did you carry your gun around with you?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you carry your gun?”

“I wasn’t afraid of them.”

“And you didn’t want to arouse their enmity or suspicion?”

“No.”

“You were better without it?”

“Oh, undoubtedly.”

“The man who is taking a gun to go hunting creates no suspicion?”

“No.”

“But the man who takes a gun to back up his dealing with the Eskimo creates more or less suspicion and distrust?”

“Yes.”

Theft was not common, Bruce said. Thieves were looked down on. Over all the long months that Bruce and LaNauze had conducted their investigation among the Eskimos, very little of their gear had been stolen. Indeed, given the opportunities the Eskimos had for theft, far less had been stolen than if a white community had been living in the same vicinity. ²¹

Bruce said he believed that Eskimos treated their children very well, but that child mortality rates were high—and not, contrary to stories propagated by whites, from infanticide. In the summer of 1913, he had been told, fifteen children had died from an unknown disease, possibly contracted from their white or Indian trading partners. Though some babies were “exposed” to the elements at birth, the practice was in fact rare, he said. “The natural affection of the mothers prevents this.”

Murder, Bruce reported, was not common. From what he had learned from Diamond Jenness, murder was committed only during a fit of rage. Most acts of violence were handled by the murdered man’s relatives, and even the impulse for revenge seemed to dissipate after a few years had passed. When asked whether the Eskimos practiced any form of punishment, Bruce replied, “Not that I know of, except they have blood feuds there.”²²

BETWEEN COURT SESSIONS, Denny LaNeuze took his charges around Edmonton, where they were observed looking “with childish interest” at city buildings. People pushed cigarettes and candy at Sinnisiak; they told LaNauze they wanted to make Sinnisiak’s stay in Edmonton “one to be remembered.” While in the city, newspaper reporters noted, the Eskimos “are eating the same food as their guards, and contrary to belief, would just as soon have a nice dish of ham and eggs as the cariboo and blubber of their native country.”²³

During the evening, McCaul invited Koeha and the two Eskimo interpreters over to his house for supper. They were joined by a couple, the Hendersons, and their two-year-old girl. McCaul seemed tickled by the affair. The guests laughed heartily and seemed to enjoy a good joke; better yet, he reported, all three Eskimos “had really quite respectable table manners and behaved with the utmost discretion and politeness to everybody.” As Koeha prepared to leave the house, he persuaded the little girl to shake his hand, and he laughed jovially when she said, “Bye-Bye, Koeha.”

Despite these expressions of collegiality, McCaul did not seem to hold Eskimos as a group in very high regard. He confessed to being impressed with native physiology, noting that “on the whole they appear to be big men, not all the stunted little chaps that one had a notion of before.” One man, whose photograph was reproduced in the 1916 police report, had a face like “a handsome Roman emporer or senator.”

Despite Corporal Bruce’s firsthand tesitmony to the contrary, McCaul had apparently firmly made up his mind about Eskimo morals. “Eskimos seem to have no religion at all, being of the few tribes of savages who have no idea of the Supreme Being,” he wrote. “They apparently place very little value on human life, and do not seem to think much more of killing a strange Indian or a white man than they would of shooting down a cariboo or musk-ox. Neither prisoner displayed the slightest compunction or regret for the murder. They are inveterate thieves, and the testimony of all travelers among them is that they will steal anything that they can lay their hands on. To get an article that is very difficult for them to procure and is of great value, such as a rifle, I do not think that some of them would hesitate to commit murder. This is probably true of the majority of the tribe.”

On the manuscript on which he composed this paragraph, McCaul crossed out the last sentence.²⁴

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Chronological sequence is of no importance to the Aivilik. They are interested in the event itself, not in its place within a related series of events. Neither antecedents nor consequences are sought, for they are largely unconcerned with the causal or telic relationships between events or acts. They have a capacity for recounting brief, minutely detailed legends, but they show little interest in organizing such accounts into wholes with a significant meaning. The details are of interest for their own sake, rather than as part of some larger pattern. When we inspect this mythology, we find no emphasis on past, present or future, but a unity embracing complexity. Everything is in mythology, and everything in mythology is, and is together.

—EDMUND S. CARPENTER, “THE TIMELESS PRESENT IN THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE AIVILIK ESKIMO”

THE NEXT MORNING, THE ODDITIES OF THE FIRST DAY’S sessions were given prominent placement in the local newspapers. “Blood Stained Cassocks, and Robes and Bibles Produced in Evidence Against Eskimo,” blared a headline in the Edmonton Morning Bulletin. Though it hardly seemed possible, the coverage brought out an even larger crowd for the second day of the trial. To accommodate the extra spectators, many of them women leading children by the hand, additional folding chairs were brought in and placed in front of the railing and to the side of the judge’s platform. When the commotion grew too loud, Judge Harvey issued a warning from the bench and ordered several women to take their children outside. A second crowd formed outside the courtroom to watch the Eskimos exit when court was adjourned for lunch.¹

For the second day of the trial, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk traded their native clothing for blue denim jumpsuits. McCaul picked up where he had left off. He entered into evidence a piece of a priest’s robe stained with blood. The director of the provincial laboratory, Dr. H. C. Jamieson, testified that it was in fact human blood. McCaul called Constable James Wight, who corroborated much of what the jury had heard about the investigation, from its departure from Fort Norman in 1915 to its completion in the spring of 1916. Wight described visiting Bloody Falls, and he identified photos from Lands Forlorn, George Douglas’s book about his trip. He spoke about finding a pair of spent .44-caliber rifle cartridges, bits of wool clothing and a belt buckle, and a human jaw, its teeth “strong and compact.”

Cross-examined by Wallbridge, Wight said he made the trip from the mouth of the Coppermine to the site of the murder in a single day—and that they had not been making very good time. Apparently trying to compare this to the nearly three days it had taken the priests to cover the same distance, Wallbridge asked if the miles between the river mouth and the murder site had been easy to walk.

“Anybody could have made that on one day’s travel from the mouth of the river?” Wallbridge asked.

“Yes.”

“With comparative ease?”

“Yes, quite easy.”

Like Corporal Bruce, Wight said he never traveled with a gun in his hand. “We didn’t want to cause any fear among them,” he said.

McCaul offered to read the statement Sinnisiak had given to Denny LaNauze during the makeshift preliminary hearing up at Bernard Harbor. Wallbridge fought this move aggressively. How could Sinnisiak possibly have understood the notion that whatever he said could be “used against him”? Judge Harvey agreed that the statement should not be called a “confession,” but he said he would allow it to be read as long as it was corroborated by further evidence. Harvey asked McCaul to call Ilavinik first, so that he could describe the circumstances under which the statement had been given. On the stand, Ilavinik said he had told Sinnisiak how the police patrol had traveled a great distance to learn the fate of the missing priests and that the patrol wanted to hear what Sinnisiak could tell them. If Sinnisiak didn’t want to speak, Ilavinik had said, he didn’t have to. Ilavinik said he had repeated this twice. The third time, after Ilavinik had asked Sinnisiak to “speak straight, and not with two tongues,” the suspect had finally answered. “I want to speak,” he had said. ²

When Denny LaNauze corroborated this story, Judge Harvey ruled that Sinnisiak’s statement was admissable. As the jury and the audience in the courtroom prepared to hear the ghastly story, reporters scrambled to take down every word. Some papers printed Sinnisiak’s statement in its entirety.

“I was stopping at the mouth of the Coppermine river and was going fishing one morning,” the statement began.

A lot of people were going fishing. When the sun had not gone down I returned to camp and saw that the two priests had started back up the river. They had four dogs; I saw no other men.

I slept one night. Next morning I started with one dog to help people coming from the south. All day I walked along and then I left the river and travelled on land; I was following the priests’ trail. I met the priests near a lake; when I was close to them, one man came to meet me.

The man Ilogoak [Father LeRoux] came to me and told me to come over to the camp. Ilogoak said ‘If you help me pull the sled, I will pay you in traps.’ We moved off the same day I arrived, to be near wood. Uluksuk was with me and we pulled the sled. We could not make the trees; it was hard work, and we made camp.

The next day we started back and the priests were going ahead; it started to storm and we lost the road. After that the dogs smelt something and Uluksuk went to see what it was, and I stayed behind. Uluksuk found that it was a cache of the priests and told me to come over. As soon as we came there the priests came back. Ilogoak was carrying a rifle; he was mad with us when we had started back from their camp, and I could not understand his talk.

I asked Ilogoak if he was going to kill me, and he nodded his head.

Ilogoak said “Come over to the sled,” and he pushed me with his hand.

The priests wanted to start again, and he pushed me again and wanted me to put on the harness and then he took his rifle out on top of the sled. I was scared and I started to pull.

We went a little way and Uluksuk and I started to talk and Ilogoak put his hand on my mouth. Ilogoak was very mad and was pushing me. I was thinking hard and crying and very scared and the frost was in my boots and I was cold. I wanted to go back, but I was afraid. Ilogoak would not let us. Every time the sled stuck, Ilogoak would pull out the rifle. I got hot inside my body and every time Ilogoak pulled out the rifle I was very much afraid.

I said to Uluksuk, “I think they will kill us.” I can’t get back now. I was thinking I will not see my people any more, I will try and kill him. I was pulling ahead of the dogs. We came to a small hill, I took off the harness quick and ran to one side and Ilogoak ran after me and pushed me back to the sled. I took off my belt and told Ilogoak I was going to relieve myself, as I did not want to go to the sled. After that I ran behind the sled, I did not want to relieve myself. Then Ilogoak turned round and saw me; he looked away from me and I stabbed him in the back with a knife. I then told Uluksuk, “You take the rifle.” Ilogoak ran ahead of the sled and Ulusuk went after him. The other white man wanted to come back to the sled; I had the knife in my hand and he went away again.

Ulusuk told me, “Go ahead and put your knife in him.” I said to Uluksuk, “Go ahead you. I fixed the other man already.” The father fell down on his back. Uluksuk struck first with the knife and did not strike him; the second time he got him. The priest lay down and was breathing a little, when I struck him across the face with an axe I was carrying; I cut his legs with the axe; I killed him dead.

After they were dead I said to Uluksuk, “Before when white men were killed they used to cut off some and eat some.” Uluksuk cut up Ilogoak’s belly; I turned around, Uluksuk gave me a little piece of the liver, I eat it; Uluksuk eat too.

We covered up both bodies with snow when we started to go back.

We each took a rifle and cartridges. We took three bags of cartridges each. We started back in the nighttime. We camped that night. Next morning we got back to camp as soon as it was light. I went into Kormik’s tent. Kormik was sleeping and I woke him up. I told him I kill those two fellows already. I can’t remember what Kormik said. Kormik, Koeha, Angibrunna [sic], Kallun, Kingordlik went to get the priests’ stuff. They started in the morning and came back the same night. I can’t tell any more. If I knew more I would tell you. I can’t remember any more.

McCaul paused for a moment, to let the power of the testimony trail off. As rapt as Denny LaNauze had been when he’d heard these words on the Arctic coast, the jury and the audience were more so in the formal setting of a courtroom. Sinnisiak’s words were devastating. But how they would affect the jury’s decision was impossible to tell.

At last, Denny LaNauze took the stand. Methodically, and with little melodrama, the young police officer described the long investigation and told of meeting Corporal Bruce on the Arctic coast in the spring of 1916. He went over many of the details the jury had already heard several times. He told of Sinnisiak’s arrest. “The first thing I saw was a man sitting at the far end of the tent,” he said. “He was engaged in the manufacture of a bow, and he sat there trembling. In fact, he was shaking all over.”

LaNauze said the Eskimos around Sinnisiak had been remarkably circumspect about the arrest. “I simply explained our mission, and rather curious to relate, the people were all on our side. They turned around [to Sinnisiak] and said ‘You must do what the white man tells you; you have got to go with them,’ and after that we got quietly away from the camp.”

During cross-examination, James Wallbridge saw an opening. Like the other officers, LaNauze said he always kept his gun hidden away on his sled, and that without exception the Eskimos had treated him with civility. Of all the people he had met, only Kormik had ever tried to hide anything from the investigation. Wallbridge asked LaNauze to tell the court what he could about the probable mindset of the Eskimos in the moments before the murders. What became clear, especially by comparison to Mc-Caul’s hyperbolic oratory, was that LaNauze had pursued his suspects with no preconceived notions about their guilt or innocence. He had not sought them to broadcast a message to Eskimos generally. He was not an idealogue. He was a peace officer. And contrary to what those in the urban judicial system might expect, he had developed a great admiration for the skills, resilience, and generosity of the people among whom he had come to live. Moreover, despite the patrol’s expressed intent of arresting two of their own people, the Eskimos had never treated the white men with anything but respect and dignity. Exactly what their relationship had been with the priests was up to the lawyers—and the jury—to decide.

“The story you got from all of them,” Wallbridge asked, “as well as the story you got from the prisoner, the information you got, was that these men had killed the priests out of fear?”

“Out of fear?” LaNauze repeated.

“Yes.”

“No,” LaNauze said. “I don’t know.”

“Your report says that they had killed them in self-defense,” Wallbridge pressed.

“I said they might have, I think,” LaNauze said.

“They might have?”

“They might have.”

Questioned about Sinnisiak’s arrest, LaNauze said that Sinnisiak was sure he would be killed “on the spot.” He said Sinnisiak had been so afraid that he would be killed that he had refused to sleep for forty-eight hours.

“And it was only by gradual persuasion and kindness you persuaded him to come to any different conclusion?” Wallbridge asked.

“We just used a little—”

“You used kindness?”

“We didn’t urge him at all.”

“You used kindness and a great deal of tact, I think, Inspector, is that right?”

“We just carried out our duty ordinarily as I would in making any arrest.”

Wallbridge then reached for a copy of Stefansson’s My Life with the Eskimos. He read long sections of it, mostly describing Stefansson’s groundbreaking “discovery” of the Copper Eskimos in 1910. “ ‘Their existence on the same continent with our populous cities was an anachronism of ten thousand years in intelligence and material development,’ ” he read. Sinnisiak is not a descendant of a Stone Age race, Wallbridge said. He is a Stone Age man himself. He continued reading. “ ‘Like our distant ancestors, no doubt, these people fear most of all things the evil spirits that are likely to appear to them at any time in any guise, and next to that they fear strangers.’ ”

Wallbridge asked LaNauze if this was a fair statement. Once again, LaNauze demurred. At every turn, it seemed, he refused the offer of a rhetorical burst.

“Well, Stefansson is an authority,” LaNauze replied.

The Eskimos first saw a white man in 1910, Wallbridge reminded the jury, and could not be expected to make the jump from the Stone Age to the twentieth century in the three short years it took for the priests to arrive. They were being brought to account for the murder of the priests, while back in the early history of Canada the Iroquois had killed numerous missionaries, traders, and trappers “without being hauled off to England to answer for their deeds.”

Wallbridge then asked LaNauze about a comment from his own report: “Their own defense of being ill-treated is their strongest point, and the prosecution has no witness that will deny this.”

“You were unable to find any?” Wallbridge asked

“No.”

“And if a white man, a stranger, holds a gun on an Eskimo, the Eskimo hasn’t any other notion but that it is going to be used? There is no doubt?”

“No doubt.”

Wallbridge then read another line from the police report. “ ‘The unfortunate priests may have been the victims of a premeditated murder for the possession of their rifles and ammunition, or may have brought on the crime by their untactfulness.’

“I want to know whether you had any information that would suggest this untactfulness,” Wallbridge demanded.

“Yes, I thought so possibly by the prisoner’s statements,” LaNauze said.

Wallbridge sat down.³

McCaul called Koeha to the stand. The Eskimo, one reporter noted, “presented a most fantastic appearance, with long straight hair hanging down to his shoulders, and a stiff beard and moustache.” Another account said he looked “not unlike a Japanese.” Koeha had been watching the proceedings with an intense curiosity since they began, and now that he was striding onto the stage he began imitating the gestures he had been seeing. He walked to the witness stand, placed his hand on the rail, and cast his eyes dispassionately on the jury. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief. The clerk administered the oath to both Koeha and the interpreter, Ilavinik. Neither one, it appeared, could make sense of the legal rhetoric being read to them. Though he could not read English, Koeha did not hesitate to place his bare hand on the Bible. With Ilavinik translating, he promised not to “speak with two tongues.” Both Eskimos bent over and kissed the Bible.

Koeha seemed amused when McCaul asked his age. What difference did it make? he asked. He said Stefansson was the first white man he had ever seen. Asked for his impressions about white man’s civilization, Koeha told McCaul he “was rather in doubt as to whether a horse was a big dog or a big caribou.”

Sitting among the spectators, a young American lawyer raised his eyebrows. Edwin Keedy, who would go on to become a professor and later dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s law school, was taking close notes. Imagine how difficult it would be to present a story in such a formal setting when you didn’t even speak the system’s language, Keedy thought. Forget about understanding the British judicial system; Koeha couldn’t even understand the English language. How odd, he thought, to have a man swear on a Bible that he could not read, let alone comprehend. Keedy’s mind immediately flashed back to a Canadian trial in 1904, when a Chinese prisoner named Lai Ping had written his name on a piece of paper and, burning the paper, said his soul would burn similarly if he did not tell the truth. His method of swearing was held to be valid. Two years earlier, in 1902, another Chinese had been on trial for murder, and a witness named Chong Fon Fi had offered to swear by the burning-paper method, but his lawyer had objected, saying there was an oath even more solemn: “the chicken oath.”

Once the witness signed his name, a cock was procured. Then the court and jury adjourned to a convenient place outside the courthouse, where the witness read an oath: “Being a true witness, I shall enjoy happiness and my sons and grandsons will prosper forever. If I falsely accuse [the prisoner], I shall die on the street, Heaven will punish me, earth will destroy me, I shall forever suffer adversity, and all my offspring be exterminated. In burning this oath I humbly submit myself to the will of Heaven which has brilliant eyes to see.” The witness wrapped the oath in joss paper, laid the cock on the block, and chopped its head off.⁴

Securing testimony from an Eskimo would have its own difficulties. As everyone from Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Diamond Jenness to Corporal Bruce and Denny LaNeuze knew, Eskimos tended to tell stories in a meandering, complex manner that often frustrated Western listeners wishing they would just get to the point. Their stories wandered back and forth in time, slipped easily off onto tangents that to white ears sounded irrelevant, and would often tumble into and out of strong emotions during the telling. Men were known to spontaneously start weeping in the middle of a sad story and then, when the emotion passed, carry on with the rest of the tale. When a man wept, his audience would often weep with him. Eskimos “have very little of the stoicism so characteristic of the American Indian,” Jenness had written. And British courts were hardly known to encourage emotional outbursts. If anything, the entire system was designed to examine moments of passion with supreme, highly formalized disinterest. Dry intellect was favored over visceral display; direct, unembroidered fact was given precedence over loose or meandering story-telling. Answers from witnesses were best when they were limited to a single word: yes or no.

But in a court, where jurors relied more than anything on a vivid portrayal of events they had not themselves seen, who could say which was a more accurate method of description? What in life actually unfolded in a linear manner? What crime, especially one as complex and violent as this one, occurred apart from a long chain of events, independent of a complex web of causes? In a courtroom, where testimony was spoken and not written and read, which would provide a more reliable story: the strictly linear Western convention or a more flexible oral tradition? True, oral histories tended to blur experience and metaphor, myth and fact, but people steeped in the tradition had no trouble navigating these tales. How did the priests come to such an end? How long do you have? Truth be told, the story of the priests’ murder could spin back in time to include the whole history of colonization, of everything leading up to that one terrible moment. What of that was relevant, and what wasn’t? In one later case, a court had to sit and listen to native testimony for 243 days. The court transcript filled 126 volumes.⁵

From the beginning of his testimony, Koeha’s tendency to veer from McCaul’s questioning frustrated both the prosecutor and the newspaper reporters trying to get their stories straight. Koeha took five full minutes to tell the court how long ago the crime had occurred, and even then he arrived at the right year only by counting on his fingers. The Eskimo, one reporter concluded, “appeared to have an exceptionally simple mind.”

“Do you remember the time the priests were killed?” McCaul asked.

“Mr. McCaul, I suggest that you don’t refer to them as ‘the priests,’ ” Wallbridge interrupted. “He doesn’t refer to them by ‘priests.’ He mentions them by name.”

Good suggestion, McCaul said. “Do you know who killed them?” McCaul asked Koeha.

“Just a moment,” Wallbridge said. “I think that is a very unfair question, my lord. If he saw somebody kill them, or perhaps if somebody told him that he killed them there might be something to it, but supposing he heard it from some other Eskimo, that it came indirectly, perhaps from three or four people, that a certain person killed another person, and he is asked that question in the form of which Mr. McCaul asks it he immediately says yes, so-and-so did it, and when he is asked, how do you know, well, so-and-so told me. That, my lord, would be a very improper way of getting at the evidence. My learned friend knows a method of getting at it which is not objectionable.”

“With a witness of this mental calibre it is very difficult,” McCaul replied.

“It is very much worse, because a witness of that calibre is more apt to give an answer in the form of the question,” Wallbridge said.

“I think I should be allowed to lead this witness to a certain extent,” McCaul said.

The questioning continued. McCaul asked that questions be translated first into pidgin English by a member of the Royal North West Mounted Police, then given to Ilavinik for translation. Koeha described hearing of the murders, and of the tense moments with Kormik before the priests started their final journey south. Ilavinik, who had translated successfully for Stefansson and LaNauze for years, was perplexed by McCaul’s formal rhetoric, and by the aggressive tone in his voice. What, exactly, was he supposed to translate? The words or the emotions behind them?

“Did you see Kormik take the rifle?” McCaul asked.

“I saw Kormik take the rifle, this rifle, and Kormik give Uluksuk old rifle .44,” came the response.

“At that time where was Sinnisiak when Kormik take the rifle from Uluksuk?”

“I saw him at the same place, Sinnisiak.”

“At the same time?” Wallbridge interrupted.

“That was the question,” McCaul said.

“My lord, I direct that question to be answered whether or not Sinnisiak was there at the same time,” Wallbridge said. “He said he saw Sinnisiak at the same place, but he didn’t say he saw him at the same time.”

By now, Ilavinik’s head was spinning. The speech was too fast, and too strange, for him to understand. He turned to Koeha. They spoke in low, guttural tones. Ilavinik tried again to translate. Again he had no luck. To at least one of the spectators, Ilavinik’s mind “seemed to have lost the pliancy which both Stefansson and LaNauze attributed to it. The poor fellow was sadly muddled by the complex sentences of those who, through him, sought to question the witness.”

Perhaps things weren’t quite so simple. As the Catholic priests and the constables alike had discovered, translating one language into another is never simple; indeed, some linguists doubt whether meaning can ever be fully understood by someone who hasn’t been steeped in a language’s subtleties since birth. How could an Eskimo understand the centuries of Christian ritual behind the image of the cross? How could an Eskimo comprehend the bottomless body of case history defining the difference between murder and manslaughter? If the Eskimos had developed a vast vocabulary to help them grasp the intricacies of their world, so had these white men. Translating a language as subtle as the one spoken by the Eskimos into a language as formal and stylized as that used in a courtroom would have been trying even to a scholar with decades of experience. Over by the defense table, the only other person in the room able to understand both languages was seventeen-year-old Patsy Klengenberg. He leaned over and whispered something to James Wallbridge.

“My lord, the interpreter Patsy informs me that this interpreter is putting [the witness] through the third degree, is accusing him of lying, and trying to get him to give an answer which the Eskimo doesn’t want to give.”

Judge Harvey reacted gruffly. “Ilavinik, just ask him the question that counsel give you,” he said. “Do not say any more to him. Just get him to answer that. You can explain that to him, but do not ask him anything else, and do not say anything else to him.” ⁶

Exasperated, the court finally asked Ilavinik to let Patsy Klengenberg take his place. Patsy’s eyes darted across the courtroom. Turning to Koeha, he managed to make himself understood. The questioning continued.

“Had the priests been pretty good to the Eskimo, to the Huskies?” McCaul asked.

“Yes, they had been good,” Koeha replied. Kuleavik (Rouvière) had taught the people to fish with nets.

“Did you look at Ilogoak’s [LeRoux’s] body to see how he had been killed?”

“I didn’t look. I only saw the cut here.” Koeha gestured lengthwise along his chest. “It was snowed up. I couldn’t see much.”

Koeha told of the things he had taken from the murder scene: a tin can, a pair of scissors, spoons, a pair of boots, and a cod line. Kormik and Angebrunna took everything else, he said.

McCaul sat down. Wallbridge stood for his cross-examination.

“You heard about Kormik taking one of the priests’ rifles,” he said. “Were you aware that the priests loaded another gun and went to Kormik’s tent and demanded the first rifle?”

“I saw them put cartridges in the gun outside,” Koeha said.

“Who did you see putting cartridges in the gun outside—Ilogoak?”

“Ilogoak.”

“Did you see him go towards the tent with the gun with the cartridges in it?”

“My wife and another man told them not to go into the tent.”

“Ilogoak loaded a gun, and he was going to go to Kormik’s tent, but your wife and another man held him back and wouldn’t let him go, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Did they think he was going to shoot Kormik?”

“Yes.”

Koeha described meeting Stefansson and R. M. Anderson, Joe Bernard, and John Hornby before he met Rouvière and LeRoux.

“Did you know the first time you saw Ilogoak that he was a priest, a missionary?” he asked. “Do you know what a priest is?”

Koeha said he did not.

“Did you know Kuleavik was a priest?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Did you think they were trappers or traders?”

“I think they come down for caribou, think they were hunters and traders.”⁷

Asked if he had any more witnesses, McCaul said no. He would not call Sinnisiak. He would rest his case as it stood.

BEGINNING HIS defense, James Wallbridge called Sinnisiak to the witness stand. Wallbridge turned to Patsy Klengenberg.

“Tell him, first, I want him to speak to the big chief, and I want him not to be afraid, and to say everything. You tell him that. Tell him not to be afraid because all these people are here, to just talk to me as if he was talking to me alone.”

Sinnisiak agreed, and kissed the Bible. Told he was not compelled to speak, Sinnisiak replied directly:

“I want to speak.”

Sinnisiak testified that before the priests arrived, he had seen three white men: Stefansson and two prospectors. Though he didn’t mention his name, or the circumstances surrounding their confrontation, one of the men was almost certainly John Hornby, with whom Sinnisiak had fought over the fishing line. Going step by step, Sinnisiak repeated the details of the killing exactly as he had told them to Denny LaNauze.

Wallbridge argued that despite LaNauze’s obvious empathy for the prisoners, Sinnisiak’s testimony had been given under extreme duress. How could it not have been, considering his custody in the hands of strange and well-armed men? Wallbridge asked Sinnisiak to go over the days and hours leading up to the murder. He asked him to reiterate how he and Uluksuk had been forced, under threats, to drag the priests’s sleds, and how Father LeRoux had threatened to kill them each time they stopped pulling, or pulled slowly, or got stuck in the snow.

Sinnisiak repeated how he had started to cry and had gotten very cold. He told the jury again how he’d feared that he would be killed, or forced to live in a strange country, and that he would never again see his people.

“When we started off—every time we tried to get out of the harness the priest had his gun and was going to shoot me,” Sinnisiak said. He then described the killing. He described chopping off one of the priests’ feet.

“Why did you eat a piece of the dead man’s liver?” Wallbridge asked.

“Because I heard from my grandfather,” Sinnisiak said. “I heard about it from my grandfather.”

“Did you know what it was going to do for you to eat the liver?” Wallbridge asked.

“The man might get up again if I didn’t eat his liver.”

“Do you like to talk about spirits?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what? Do you like to talk about spirits?”

“I don’t know how to speak about spirits.”

“Do you know about spirits? Do you know anything about spirits?”

“I know about spirits.”

“Has the eating of the liver anything to do with spirits?”

“I think maybe the spirits make the man alive.” ⁸

Wallbridge rested his case.⁹

The story’s impact on the jury was hard to decipher. The reporters in the room, however, ate it up. “Crowded Court Hears Gruesome Confession of the Eskimos’ Crime,” the Edmonton Morning Bulletin told its readers in a marathon three-deck headline. “Story of Sinnisiak to Inspector LaNauze Describes in Plain Language, Direct and Matter of Fact in Its Simplicity, the Tragedy in the Far Northland—Gist of It Is That Eskimo Concluded Fr. LeRoux, Who Was Angry, Was Going to Kill Him, and He Resolved to Kill Both Missionaries.” The accompanying article reproduced the entirety of Sinnisiak’s description of the murder.

At least one man seemed to feel that its energy may have provided all the power he needed. When Sinnisiak completed his testimony, C. C. McCaul said he would not cross-examine. The witness’s testimony was the same as the statement he had given at Bernard Harbor, McCaul observed, and that was good enough for him. McCaul said he would “go to the jury on the evidence in the shape in which it is.”

JAMES WALLBRIDGE’S closing comments lasted more than an hour. Given the degree to which his client had wilted under the Edmonton heat, he wondered aloud if Sinnisiak might have been more honor-ably treated if he had been killed at the moment of his arrest.

“Sinnisiak sits in his box,” Wallbridge said.

He sees with his eyes what is taking place, but he does not comprehend. He cannot understand what we are doing. It is a great question whether a man of a stone-age tribe, a man who hunts for his daily food, can in common justice have his deeds judged by the standards of modern civilization.

These Eskimos are men absolutely unlettered, knowing nothing of civilization except such as they have gathered from the half dozen men they have seen in their lifetime up to the time of the tragedy. This must be to them a most strange proceeding, but probably not more strange than the other sights they have seen. Buildings like our Court House must be real mountains. Horses look like big caribou, and trains like ships that run on land.

The great charter of English liberties which we call the Magna Carta was passed many years ago, and provided that every man should be judged not by his superiors, but by his peers. Now we cannot judge this man by his peers. We have none of his peers here, if “peers” means “equal in his own land,” but we can try in our minds to approach something of the same by trying to understand his point of view; and when you judge whether the conduct of these men was reasonable or unreasonable try, if possible, to put yourselves in the position of these untutored savages and say where in their minds they were justified or not.”

Every killing was not murder, he reminded the jury. Given Sinnisiak’s fear that he would be killed by the priests, his actions should be considered justifiable homicide. Sinnisiak clearly considered his own actions justified. It was the priests who were carrying loaded guns, not the Eskimos, and in any case Sinnisiak had no idea that the men were priests. He only knew they were white men with guns. Sinnisiak acted out of fear, not premeditation. If the Eskimos had wanted to kill the priests, they would have done so the night before, when the priests were asleep in their snowhouse.

“Any man, whether he is white or black, civilized or uncivilized, is justified in killing another in his own defense,” Wallbridge said.

If he does kill in self-defense, that killing is what we call justifiable or excusable homicide. It is not an uncommon thing and it is not the first time the defense of justifiable homicide has been raised in our courts; and it is not necessary that the man who kills another in his own defense should be in immediate fear of death. As long as he reasonably believes that he is in danger of bodily harm or violence, then he is justified in defending himself up to the point of taking the life of another. And I ask you to find that what these men did was nothing more than any of you would have done if the cause in your minds had been the same. Now, I do not pretend to say that you would, under the circumstances, have believed that the priests were going to kill you. I will not suggest that you would have come to the same conclusion, knowing your fellow beings as you know them, that the priests were going to kill you. But with these Eskimos, these primitive men, savage men of the stone age, were they not justified in the conclusion which they came to; were they not justified in believing that these men were going to kill them? Was it not reasonable, considering the extent of their mind, the little knowledge they had of the white race, the two greatest fears they had—fear of the spirits and fear of the white man, the stranger—were they not justified in believing that their lives were in danger?

Wallbridge’s remarks ended with a burst of hyperbole that several reporters featured in their stories the next day. He declared that “it would be the greatest crime in the world’s history to condemn Sinnisiak to death for doing something he thought absolutely necessary, and which he had made no effort to conceal. The only evidence against him was his own statement of the crime.”

IN HIS CLOSING statement, C. C. McCaul argued that Sinnisiak was entitled to the “advantage” of British justice, and not the “slaughter” that “the fool prospector” John Hornby had promised would result from the murder of a white man.

“My friend stated my opening address was inflammatory because I was unable to refer to the shocking death of these men without showing a little feeling,” McCaul said. “I don’t think a man could make the bare recital of those facts at all, unless he is so cold-blooded as to have the heart of a stone, could consider the awful position of these men and the awful death they suffered without at least feeling a little bit of emotion in regard to it.”

McCaul dismissed Wallbridge’s claims that the Eskimos should be treated as “stone-age, ignorant men, childlike men in many ways,” and that their crimes should be judged somehow differently from crimes committed by an “ordinary white man.” The jury must remember that the law that they were charged with considering was British, not native. “We cannot try these men according to the principles of Eskimo justice,” he said. If we did, “they should have been properly murdered, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. Murder does not justify murder, but it does justify what we hope to be a fair and impartial trial.” ¹⁰

McCaul argued that Sinnisiak’s actions had been premeditated. He had, after all, talked his plans over with Uluksuk. Not only that, he had confessed. But even without the confession, McCaul said he would not have been afraid to ask the jury to convict on the circumstantial evidence of the case. Koeha’s testimony alone was enough to secure a conviction. McCaul said he was “shocked” to hear Wallbridge’s suggestion that the prisoners should not be blamed for the murders. “I am not merely surprised, I am absolutely shocked to hear that come from a civilized human being who has heard the evidence and heard the circumstances of this trial,” he said. “Premeditation, which is necessary to distinguish this case from manslaugher, was proved. You need not search for the motive, whether revenge or the object of stealing the rifle; we have the evidence of premeditation given clearly and squarely in the fact that these men discussed how they were to obtain their opportunity of killing the priests. That is premeditation.”

Simple fear was not enough to justify a killing, McCaul argued. Killing a person required “the actual fear of immediate death, not merely injury.”

“What are the facts?” McCaul continued.

These two savages, these two cannibals—this man says that he ate a portion of the liver, and adds a most extraordinary statement which opens up an enormous field for enquiry afterwards—information apparently he got from his grandfather. He says, because they used to kill white men they used to eat parts of them, a custom, a custom to kill white men by these Eskimo, and a custom to eat them. My friend asked you to admire their courage and bravery, the courage of a man who sneaked up behind the priest and drove his knife into his back when he wasn’t watching, the courage of two men who threw the priest down, trampled him to death, stabbed him, took his rifle away from him, the courage and bravery my friend asked you to admire, the courage and bravery, my friend’s idea of the man who fires at the poor fleeing priest, running over the snow, and kills him, and the two men come up, and he is stabbed and haggled with an axe. Brave men, Mr. Wallbridge said. Oh! Mr Wallbridge says, what bravery, what courage!¹¹

Once McCaul had finished, Judge Harvey charged the jury. His language would become one of the trial’s most controversial legacies. “Gentlemen of the jury,” he began. “The crime of which the prisoner is accused is the most serious that is known to our law, and naturally that will impress upon you the solemnity of your duty, because it is on you, and you only, that the duty is cast of determining whether or not he is guilty or not guilty of the charge.”

The heart of the case, he said, was based almost entirely on Sinnisiak’s confession, in which he admitted to the killing. It was up to the jury to determine whether the act was murder or justifiable homicide. There was no evidence, the judge said, that Father Rouvière had ever threatened the Eskimos. This made a plea of self-defense out of the question. Furthermore, Harvey asserted, the jury should feel no compunction about returning a guilty verdict. He would personally recommend that a death sentence not be carried out, and he felt quite confident his recommendation would be accepted by Canada’s governor-general. Most likely, the two prisoners would be sent back north, and would show through their experience that, as one reporter put it, “the lives of white man were not to be trifled with.”

To Wallbridge’s astonishment, Harvey made no bones about his own feelings. “The fact that he is a poor, ignorant, benighted pagan,” the judge remarked, who comes from beyond the borders of our civilization, does not stand in the way of his receiving all the protection that our law can give any person charged with the same offense. As you have seen he has been furnished with counsel, not some junior counsel who might be desirous of getting the experience of defending an important case, but he has been provided as counsel with one of the leaders of the bar, who has left no stone unturned during the course of this trial to see that no unfair advantage was taken of the accused, and to see that everything that might be brought out in his favor should be brought out. Owing to the circumstances of this case, the particular circumstances, I instructed the sheriff, when empanelling the jury, to see that no person was put on the panel of jurors except men of the highest standing in the community. I thought it only fair that the prisoner should have the best that our country can afford in answer to a charge such as this.

Much has been suggested in the present case about the prisoner’s lack of knowledge of our law and our customs, and his own custom. Of course, that applies to a greater or less extent to many of the foreigners who have come to our country; the Indians, although they have to become gradually more and more accustomed to our laws, but that cannot be dealt with by the court such as this in considering the liability for the crime. In law a person must be considered liable. In fact, there is a very great difference. That is a matter to be dealt with in the matter of punishment.

Harvey argued against the claim of self-defense, saying, The question then would seem largely to be one between culpable homicide and excusable or justifiable homicide. Now, homicide is justifiable if it is done in self-defense, but self-defense does not mean prevention. We have, of course, in the last two or three years had pressed upon us very frequently the question of self-defense in a way that is more or less applicable to this. Germany has declared that she is making this war as a war of self-defense. Assuming that she is honest, all of us consider it is not self-defense as we look upon self-defense. It may be for the purpose of preventing what she fears, but it is not defending herself against an attack because she attacked first. That perhaps is her view of self-defense, and that is a view of self-defense that has been advanced as an excuse for killing within our own memory. We have accounts of it in the early unsettled portions of the country where the law is not strictly enforced of people taking the law in their own hands. Where they feared, and had good reasons to fear, men might kill them, they kill the person to prevent it. That is not self-defense. That is an attempt to prevent, but it is not under our law permissible. Now, the self-defense, as it is known to our law, that is, the excuse for the killing, is the defense against attack, a defense against an assault of some sort.

When I say that, I do not want you to misunderstand me. A man might point a gun which is loaded at you and which he has the ability to discharge and kill you. You would be justified, in self-defense, in shooting him first if you could prevent that, if circumstances were such as to satisfy you that he was likely to shoot you. But that is because he is assaulting you. That is an assault, the pointing of a gun under those circumstances. But if the man said, “I am going to shoot you, the next time I see you,” that would not justify you in finding the first opportunity of shooting him. That would not be self-defense. The prisoner says that he was afraid he was going to be killed and that he could not get back home. There was no immediate danger. He does not support that there was. He showed a certain amount of cunning, a reasonable amount of cunning and reason by making a subterfuge to get out of the harness and get back to the sled where he could get control of the gun. The killing was done deliberately and intentionally and would, therefore, seem to be murder. There would have been no excuse, no justification, in the way of self-defense for that killing.

Harvey told the jury to deal with the case “calmly and deliberately and not to be affected by your sympathies, but allow your judgment full sway.” He then went on to all but instruct the jury members to harden their hearts and pronounce the defendant guilty.

You are human, however, and you have your sympathies as you cannot help having them, and they, no doubt, will have some effect upon you; and I want to say to you, therefore, that while it is your duty to find a verdict of murder, if you view the case largely as I have suggested it to you and on that verdict, if you find it, it will be my duty to pass the sentence of death; that would be the only sentence I could pass. Yet I have no hesitation in saying to you that I would consider it a crime that this man should be executed for the act with which he has been, and for which he is being charged here. It is there that his condition, his absence of knowledge of our customs should have effect, and I would be bound, in the exercise of my duty, to recommend that the sentence of death should not be carried out, and I have no doubt whatever that the authorities would recommend to His Excellency, the Governor General, that he should not be executed, but that some other form of punishment would be imposed which would meet the requirements of the case, and which would take home to him and to the member of his tribe the knowledge of our laws and our measure of justice. I have no doubt that some such punishment as that would be given to him, and not that the extreme penalty of the law would be exercised. I tell you that so that you may feel freer perhaps to do what the law demands of you, but which might be abhorrent to your sentiments of humanity if you felt that the strict letter of the law would have to be carried out.

The moment Judge Harvey finished speaking, Wallbridge leaped to his feet to object to the judge’s rhetoric. It was outrageous, he said, for the judge to imply his support for a guilty verdict. “I think your lordship should not have stated as you did in regard to the probability of the prisoner not being punished according to the law,” Wallbridge said. “A man ought to be convicted or not convicted of murder according to his guilt or innocence. You should not have told them that the evidence of the prisoner does not suggest there was any immediate fear. I think the purpose of the evidence of the prisoner was fear, a continuous fear, and he thought that his fears would be realized. You should have directed the jury that a reasonable apprehension of violence—if it is justifiable and it is an apprehension—is sufficient to justify the act.”

Harvey overruled the objection. “I think my declaration of the law to the jury on that point is correct,” he said.¹²

The jurors began their deliberations at 12:03 P.M. They returned to the courtroom just an hour later. The throngs of onlookers, shocked that the debate had ended so quickly, rushed back to the courtroom and squeezed into their seats again. Given the forceful words of the judge, the spectators assumed that the jury could only have reached one conclusion. They were in for a surprise.

At 1:10 P.M., James Mould, the jury foreman, read the verdict. The court clerk, doubting he had heard correctly, asked him to read it again.

“Not guilty.”

Patsy Klengenberg leaned over to Sinnisiak and translated the decision. Sinnisiak began trembling visibly. An odd look drew over his face.

“It is not true,” he said. “I did kill him.” ¹³

Sinnisiak was led from the courtroom to a carriage outside the courthouse, and ushered off to the mounted police barracks, where he was told he would remain until the conclusion of Uluksuk’s trial. Ilavinik and Patsy couldn’t understand what had transpired. “I suppose it means this, that our two years’ work is all for nothing,” Ilavinik said to LaNauze. “I understand now, I am always finding out something new about the white man.” ¹⁴

CHAPTER TWELVE

A man knew so little that he had to be very careful in life. He had to observe the rules of life not only for himself but for others, since his failings could affect the hunting and welfare of the community as a whole. And as careful as he himself might be, others could behave in such a way as to bring disaster upon him.

—ANGAKOQ, AN ESKIMO SHAMAN

THE EDMONTON VERDICT, C. C. MCCAUL WOULD LATER WRITE, shocked everyone in the courtroom. How could an all-white jury possibly have come to this conclusion? McCaul felt his case was rock solid. Were the jurors blind to the symbolic importance of the case? Had their judgment become clouded by all the strange anthropology that had swirled through the testimony? Had they become unconsciously sympathetic to the Eskimos, seen them as somehow victims rather than the murderers that they had confessed to being? McCaul quickly blamed the newspaper coverage of the trial. Reporters and headline writers, especially at the Edmonton Morning Bulletin, had created stories “calculated to bias and prejudice the public mind against the prosecution and in favor of the acquittal of the prisoners.”

He also blamed the jury, which, he believed, had been influenced in dramatic and peculiar ways. A prominent local businessman and “Indian agent” named H. A. Conroy “has had access to the prisoners and Eskimo interpreters at the barracks ever since the prisoners were brought there,” McCaul wrote. “From the information that I can gather I believe that he has been active in spreading in this community prejudice against the Crown and stirring up sympathy and sentiment in favor of the Eskimo prisoners.”

Some of this sympathy had reached the ears of the jury, McCaul said. One juror, with whom McCaul admitted to having had “very pleasant and satisfactory business relations, and who happens to be more or less a friend of mine,” described some of the jury’s deliberations. The juror had come to believe that the priests had caused some “trouble” among the Eskimos before they left the mouth of the Coppermine. Some thought the priests were “monkeying with the Eskimo women,” he told McCaul. “Even a white man would kill for this.”

McCaul was outraged. “Not only was there not a tittle of evidence remotely suggesting this, but LaNauze had found that this story had been spread by a disreputable half-breed trader who had a grudge against the priests.”

Another juror harbored resentment against Catholic missionaries, McCaul believed. Alfred Fugl, who had been the manager of a northern Hudson Bay outpost, blamed Gabriel Breynat for his own failed campaign to join the legislature.

A third juror, H. Milton Martin, a professed Roman Catholic, told McCaul that the Eskimos ought not to be convicted or punished because “our missionaries have often been killed by the savages in much the same way.” When McCaul had said that even he, “a heretic,” had felt sympathy for the priests, Martin replied that his archbishop felt the Eskimos should not be punished. “Just exactly what . . . H. Milton Martin meant by this statement, I do not understand,” McCaul wrote.

McCaul confessed to being bewildered about what to do next. Thankfully, given his initial decision to charge only Sinnisiak with the murder of Rouvière, he had plenty of options available. He promptly filed an affidavit asking for a change of venue. “On account of widespread prejudice among the community of Edmonton against the prosecution, and the alleged or rumored conduct of the priests with whose murder the prisoners were charged; and on account of the widespread sympathy and sentiment that has been developed in the said community by (as I verily believe from information received by me) interested persons; in my opinion a fair trial of the said prisoners of either of them on the charge of murder cannot be obtained in, or in the neighborhood of Edmonton.”

McCaul also decided to file charges against both prisoners jointly for the murder of LeRoux. “You can easily imagine that I congratulated myself that I had only charged Sinnisiak with the murder of Father Rouvière, so that I had the new crime of the murder of Father LeRoux with which to charge him jointly with his fellow prisoner,” he would write.

Edwin Keedy, the American lawyer who watched the proceedings in Edmonton and who had befriended McCaul, told the prosecutor that it was “quite unheard of for the prosecution to apply for a change of venue.” Such a move would be “very prejudicial” to McCaul’s case, Keedy said. McCaul dismissed Keedy’s opinion as “an American notion.”

Indeed, McCaul believed he had reason for optimism. Chief Justice Harvey, McCaul noted, “had been very much annoyed” at the verdict, coming as it did “dead in the teeth of his charge.”

James Wallbridge, for his part, argued against moving the second trial, citing a case in which a change of venue was refused even though the judge in the first trial had been “hooted and nearly mobbed.” The citizens of Edmonton were just as competent to sit on the LeRoux case as any jury that could be empaneled in Calgary, Wallbridge argued. The charge of prejudice was nonsense; McCaul would use the word to define any opinion contrary to his own. Wallbridge then asked Judge Harvey to recuse himself from the second case.

“In view of the fact that you have already expressed your opinion as to the guilt of the prisoners, would it not be possible to secure another judge to preside?” Wallbridge asked.

Impossible, Judge Harvey replied. The other judges were on vacation. The proceedings would move to Calgary, and the trial would begin in six days. Harvey, once again, would preside.

WHAT HAD INITIALLY been a few days’ curiosity was suddenly turning into something of an epic. The trial of the Eskimos had already become “one of the most costly ever undertaken by the Dominion government,” the Edmonton Morning Bulletin reported. Before the second trial even began, those in the city’s legal circles estimated that the investigation and trials would cost more than $100,000.¹

After they were moved to Calgary, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk were housed in a second-story room of the city’s police barracks, along with Patsy, Ilavinik, and Koeha. The door to the room was not locked, though a guard was posted nearby. The two prisoners were given a ride around the city in a motorcar.

The Calgary newspapers were no less astonished than the Edmonton papers had been by the appearance of the accused. Alongside their photographs, the News-Telegram said the accused “might easily be taken for Russians of the Mongolian type. They are far from being unintelligent in appearance, having high foreheads and good large eyes.”²

“The trial is unique in the history of Alberta,” reported the Calgary Daily Herald. The “accused pagans” were “so steeped in ignorance that it is impossible to convey to them the meaning of an oath.” The trial was especially vexing given that the prisoners had a “standard of morals necessarily approximate to those of the stone age, and the difficulty of conveying to them, through an interpreter himself only recently reclaimed from a state of savagery, the true meaning of the trial.”³

“Eskimos Falling Easily into Ways of White People,” another headline read. “They Eat Ordinary Food with Knives and Forks—Sleep on Beds.” Admiring the adapabilty of these men who “are actually on the plane of our ancestors in the Stone Age,” the paper reported that Sinnisiak and Uluksuk “use a knife and fork with more grace than many ‘bohunks,’ and have shown an appreciation of the white man’s food, which, considering their previous upbringing, is certainly remarkable.” Prison guards told the reporter that the inmates were “having the time of their lives.” They had discarded all their native clothing and seemed to be getting used to the hot weather. One night, outside the police barracks, a journalist reported seeing Ilavinik “shiver and go inside the building.” Another reporter wrote an entire story about Ilavinik realizing “the wish of his life” when a member of the police gave him a Waltham wristwatch.

“Ever since he had first seen one of the wonderful things that marked the time of the sun and kept some semblance of order in the police lives he had hungered for one, and at last he was appeased,” the reporter wrote. Winding the watch for Ilavinik before he went to bed one night, a police officer told him the sun would rise when the hands reached a certain time. Sure enough, the next morning Ilavinik rose before everyone else and went outside to see if the watch would bring the sun. It did. The second night, however, he did not wind the watch, and when he arose the next morning, Ilavinik “was so worked up he forgot all about his powers as an interpreter, and nothing could be got out of him except pure Eskimo, in which the word ‘taboo’ shot out now and then. He kept pointing to his watch and then outside, and on examination of the watch it was found to have stopped at half-past two. Ilavinik was on the verge of tears.”

Police officers rushed off to find Patsy. “He say something no good,” Patsy told the officers. “Yesterday morning sun come when this hand here and that hand there. Now this hand and that hand not reached place yet and sun come. He want to know what matter with sun.”

“It took a long time to explain that the sun was all right,” the reporter wrote. “Ilavinik had always had the impression that the watches fixed the sun’s getting up, and that was why he wanted one. His faith in the white man’s time piece was considerably shaken when he was informed that the watches were governed by the sun, and not the other way around.” ⁴

None of the newspapers covering the case saw fit to offer an editorial opinion about it. They had other things to worry about. Writing about the “national egomania” under which the Germans were conducting the war in Europe, the editors of the News-Telegram opined that “an unwholesome mental diet is more of a menace to the welfare of the world than impure material food. Until they get this poison out of their minds, there can be no real peace, since in their present abnormal state they seem incapable of grasping the fact that other peoples have, like the Germans, inalienable rights. With this example before them, other civilized people must beware henceforth of that form of so-called patriotism which is mere megalomania, teaching that all the world beyond their own frontiers is a Naboth’s vineyard.”⁵

In addition to continuing coverage of the war (“19,000 Enemy Prisoners Taken”), local papers were also reporting other human-interest stories, such as the discovery of the body of a well-known Ontario doctor, found surrounded by three drunk (and unconscious) businessmen near the grounds of an oil company. The story appeared under the headline “Was Murder Committed in Liquor Orgy?”⁶

The second trial, Rex v. Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, opened at Calgary’s Seventh Avenue courthouse at ten A.M. on Wednesday, August 22. An initial pool of twenty-five jurors was summoned to the courthouse and eventually winnowed to six. Once again, their names appeared in the local papers before the trial began: Hugh Melvin, William Ireland, J. K. Cummins, J. M. Baker, C. B. Clarke, and M. Allan. All had been residents of Calgary for at least ten years.

This time, though, Judge Harvey sequestered the jury. They would be put up by the court, and would not be allowed to communicate with anyone outside their own group without going through the sheriff’s office. They were not to see any newspapers until the trial had been completed. This unusual step would prevent “too much sympathy being expressed on account of the actions of the priests,” according to the Edmonton Morning Bulletin, which had been criticized by the judge for its coverage of the first trial.

Rather than the native skins in which they appeared at the first trial, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk were dressed in open-collared dress shirts. “White man’s clothing,” the Daily Herald called it. The prisoners “appeared to be in very low spirits, and sat much of the time during the morning with their sharp brown eyes downcast, and an expression of deep melancholy upon their faces,” the News-Telegram reported.

Opening his case, McCaul spoke to the jury for fifteen minutes, a far cry from his epic two-hour opening statement at the first trial. He began slowly. “May it please your Lordship, and Gentlemen of the Jury: This trial has been perhaps appropriately ushered in by a little taste of arctic weather which we got yesterday afternoon and last night as the trial will be redolent of the atmosphere of the artic regions.” He explained the law that allowed the state to try a case far from the scene of the crime if it occurs in an “unorganized terrirory.” He said prosecuting the case was especially critical in such areas “to establish a feeling of good faith on the part of the Indians and to trust in the white man’s justice, to establish in their minds the fact that an Indian or an Eskimo will be treated in exactly the same way and on exactly the same plane as any white man in the country.” He showed the jury maps, and gave an overview of the investigation. He praised the Royal North West Mounted Police, who represented not “a punitive expedition, not an armed military force, as might have happened in some other countries, sent against the tribe to punish the tribe for the murders.”

McCaul took a photograph of one of the prisoners to show the jury. This is Uluksuk, he said, and motioned for Uluksuk to stand up. Peering at the image, the jury quickly realized they were actually looking at a photograph of Sinnisiak. When Sinnisiak was told of the mistake, he broke into a wide grin. Recounting the mistake, one reporter noted that the moment proved “that the Eskimo is a human being and has a sense of humor.”⁷

McCaul continued. White men are beginning to go into the Far North country, he said.

It is a matter of common knowledge that there are copper deposits which will, no doubt, be prospected on the Coppermine River. You can appreciate the extreme importance of these remote people being taught respect for the law which prevails throughout the entire Dominion of Canada, and that whatever their customs may have been, whether their justice was retributory justice, the law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a leg for a leg, that that has got to be replaced, not by retributory justice. Our justice is not administered in any feeling of revenge.

You are not asked here, no matter what you hear about the death of these priests, to avenge their death. You will be asked to give a verdict which will result in the punishment of these men, punishment so that it will act as a deterrent upon which British criminal justice, or criminal justice practically of all civilized nations, works.

As he had in Edmonton, McCaul warned that Eskimos were not a small band of people, but “a very large race” inhabiting most of northern Canada. “There are many thousands of them,” he pointed out. He reminded the jury of the massacre Samuel Hearne had seen at Bloody Falls in 1771. “And it was just within a few miles of this spot that these unhappy and unfortunate priests were done unto death.” McCaul did not dwell on the fact that Eskimos had been the victims, not the assailants, in the original Bloody Falls massacre.⁸

He sat down.

Wallbridge, too, opened as he had in Edmonton. The killings had been in self-defense, he said. Since the Eskimos could not possibly be judged by their peers, the jury must try to look beyond notions of civilized justice and understand the Eskimo point of view. Was it not reasonable, given their fear of strangers, especially strangers aiming rifles at them, that Sinnisiak and Uluksuk had been justified in believing that their lives were in danger?

THE FIRST WITNESS for the prosecution, once again, was Father Duchaussois, who had known Father Rouvière since their days as students in Belgium. As he had done at the first trial, Duchaussois described Rouvière as a gentle man of excellent judgment who rarely lost his temper. Looking over a pile of correspondence handed to him from the evidence table, he identified Rouvière’s handwriting in one letter, which described the respect the priests were shown by their Eskimo hosts. Even after giving a tent over to the priests, Eskimos would always ask permission to enter. “ ‘They are always trying to do more for us,’ ” Duchaussois read. “ ‘How different to the Indians, who often content themselves looking at you as if you are in a bad case.’ ”

Taking a somewhat darker turn, the letter then described how the priests’ mission was in part to reverse “the sowing of bad seed” by a Father Fry, a missionary with the Church of England. Reaching the Eskimos on the Arctic coast, Rouvière wrote, had been a race between the Anglican and the Catholic Churches.

Duchaussois identified the cassock, rosaries, breviaries, a bloodstained altar cloth, and, finally, the remains of Rouvière’s diary. As at the first trial, the last words in the diary were open to interpretation. McCaul and Wallbridge spent considerable time arguing over the meaning of the word “disillusioned.” Did it imply frustration with missionary work or Rouvière’s fear that the priests’ lives were in danger?

Corporal Bruce took the stand and identified the robe and the other articles he had gathered during the investigation. He offered his impressions of Eskimo culture. He boiled his remarks down to a few digestible sentences; the reporters covering the case tried to do the same. “There was no established authority among the Eskimos or courts by which a man could right a wrong if he wanted to do so,” the Calgary Daily Herald quoted Bruce as saying. “They were a communistic people. They had no sense of religion compared to that of a white man, although they appeared to have some idea of a hereafter. There were many superstitions, such as a tradition that considered it unlucky for a woman to sew when the sun was high.”

Corporal Wight spoke about the items he had discovered at the murder site, including the teeth and jawbone that had been scattered over an area of forty square feet.

During his turn on the stand, Ilavinik said it was common in the Far North to kill certain people, especially “the insane and incurable.” He said that lying and stealing were far more serious offenses than the taking of human life and that rarely was there an instance of an Eskimo violating Eskimo traditions by telling a lie or thieving from another Eskimo. He described Sinnisiak as “a hunter by land and sea; a furrier; a fisherman; a guide; a carver; a metal sheather; a navigator of kayaks; and a driver of dogs, as he had followed the various occupations in turn and is equally adept at either.”

Ilavinik described the moment when Sinnisiak was arrested:

“ ‘What you want?’ Sinnisiak said.

“ ‘The police want you,’ I say.

“ ‘What for?’

“ ‘You kill two priests.’ ”

Sinnisiak had said he didn’t want to go, Ilavinik related. Ilavinik had translated this for LaNauze. LaNauze had said Sinnisiak had no choice. Ilavinik continued the story:

“You going to kill me?” Sinnisiak had asked.

“No, nobody going to kill you,” LaNauze had said. “You got to come along.”

“If you kill me, the boat will sink,” Sinnisiak threatened.

“Did Sinnisiak say he was a medicine man?” McCaul asked.

Objection, Wallbridge said. Overruled, pronounced Judge Harvey.

“I did not know Sinnisiak to be a man that made storms,” Ilavinik said.⁹

TAKING THE STAND, and using Patsy Klengenberg as his interpreter, Koeha spoke for over an hour. Koeha “is the most beautiful of the four full-blooded northerners who have been decorating the courtroom for the last two days,” the Calgary News-Telegram reported. Koeha seemed far more relaxed than the two prisoners, often slouching in his seat and resting his chin on his forearm. “His rim of scraggy whiskers showed a more advanced state of vegetation than did those of the other representatives of the tribe, and his hair was longer and stiffer. When asked how old he was, he grinned until there were no eyes left visible in his copper-colored shiny face, and said he didn’t know. When pressed to divulge his age, he said it was more than he could count on his fingers.”

Koeha described hearing Sinnisiak’s story, then spoke of finding the snow-covered bodies of the priests. He told of the Eskimo tradition of licking the blood off a killing knife to ward off evil spirits.

DENNY LANAUZE told the jury that Uluksuk had a “particularly happy” disposition and had probably been urged to the killing by Sinnisiak. When Rouvière raised his rifle “to an alarming position,” LaNauze told the court, Sinnisiak said, “ ‘We ought to kill them, or they will kill us.’ ” “ ‘They can kill me if they want to,’ ” he quoted Uluksuk as responding. “ ‘I don’t want to kill any people.’ ”

Asked by McCaul to compare the intelligence of the Eskimos to that of the Blackfoot Indians, LaNauze refused. He did say that when an Eskimo hunter returned with a kill, the people “shared the spoils in proportion to their families. It was a case of share and share alike.”

Cross-examined by Wallbridge, LaNauze told the jury how cooperative the prisoners had been since their arrest. When Wallbridge asked LaNauze whether the Eskimos had any superstitions, LaNauze offered an enigmatic answer: “Well, it is not long since they burned the last witch in England.”

McCaul let the witness stand down.

WALLBRIDGE BEGAN his defense by calling Sinnisiak, who repeated much of what he had said in Edmonton. Rather than let Sinnisiak’s testimony stand, as he had in the first trial, McCaul decided to cross-examine him at length. “When Kuleavik [Rouvière] was running away, when you shot him, Kuleavik hadn’t a rifle at all?” he asked.

“No, he had no rifle.”

“He was unarmed? No arms?”

“He had nothing.”

“Ilogoak, the other priest, was dead at the time you shot Kuleavik?”

“Yes.”

“What were you afraid of Kuleavik for when he was running away and hadn’t a rifle? Why were you afraid? Were you afraid of the spirits again, or what were you afraid of when Kuleavik was running away?”

“I don’t know what I think. I shoot him.”

McCaul asked Sinnisiak how far away Rouvière had been when he shot him. Sinnisiak pointed to a red house about seventy-five yards from the courthouse. McCaul had Sinnisiak identify photographs of Rouvière and LeRoux, and of John Hornby. He had Sinnisiak draw schematic diagrams of the sled, of the positions of the dogs in their harness, and of the priests. He had him draw himself and Uluksuk. He had him describe the struggle with Kormik over the rifle. He had him describe pulling the sleds.

“Quite a common thing for an Eskimo man to get into the harness and pull the sled, is it? The Eskimo men often put the harness on themselves and help the dogs pull the sled?”

“Yes. They always help pull.”

“When the priests came up and you said the priests threw some stuff into the river. What did the priests throw into the river?”

“Axes, and some ammunition and some other stuff, I don’t know.”

“And did they throw the ammunition into the river?”

“Yes.”

“They threw the ammunition into the river, and the axes they threw into the river?”

“Yes.”

“The river was running?”

“Yes.”

“Were the priests frightened of you and Uluksuk when they threw the ammunition into the river? Were the priests scared?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did they throw the ammunition into the river then?”

“Because they were mad.”

“They threw their own ammunition into the river because they were mad. Didn’t they throw it into the river so you couldn’t get it, and that fellow Uluksuk couldn’t get it?”

“Maybe.”

“When you tried to stop pulling the priest shoved you and told you to pull?”

“Shoved and pointed the rifle at the same time.”

“Shoved you and told you to pull?”

“Yes.”

“That made you angry, mad, hot inside?”

“I was scared.”

“Were you mad, angry?”

“We weren’t so very mad. We were very scared.”

McCaul sat down.¹⁰

Wallbridge then called Uluksuk, who had not testified at the trial in Edmonton. As he took the stand, Uluksuk smiled broadly.

“Do not be afraid of these people,” Wallbridge said. “Tell us whatever we ask you about. Speak out and do not be afraid.”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

Uluksuk, who appeared to be thirty years old, held up fingers on both hands. “Maybe I am eight years old.” A ripple of laughter rolled across the audience.

“Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“Babies?”

“No babies.”

Uluksuk detailed the moments leading up to the murder.

“What did the priests say to you? Which priest was it, first?” Wallbridge asked.

“One took the rifle, the other took the knife.”

“You said the priest came over from the sled to the pile of stuff. Which one came over, or both of them?”

“Both of them.”

“What did they ask you to do?”

“I thought I was going to get shot.”

Which priest had the gun? Wallbridge asked.

“Ilogoak [LeRoux] had the gun.”

“Did the other priest have any arms at all?”

“He had nothing when he threw this stuff out. He had no knife.”

The priests made them pull for a long time, Uluksuk said. “The priest pointed a gun every time I wanted to stop. I was afraid I get shot.”

“Did you know how far the priests were going to take you away?”

“We think maybe take us a long way.”

“Did you expect to see your people again?”

“I think we wouldn’t see them again.”

“Then Sinnisiak suggested you had better kill the priests?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened then? What did you do after Sinnisiak said you had better kill the priests?”

“I don’t want to. I scared of white man. I didn’t want to tackle the white man.”

Sinnisiak said he would kill the white men anyway, Uluksuk related. When LeRoux hit Uluksuk with a stick, Uluksuk reluctantly agreed to Sinnisiak’s plan. Once the priests were dead, Sinnisiak hacked into Rouvière’s leg with the axe. Uluksuk cut the priests open. They removed the livers, and ate small pieces. Then they went home and told their people what they had done.

“Did you know that Ilogoak and Kuleavik were priests, teachers of religion?” Wallbridge asked.

“I think they were just white men.”

“What did you think they were doing?”

“I don’t know what they were doing.”

DURING HIS cross-examination, McCaul held up a sketch of a knife and asked if it was about the size of the one Sinnisiak had used to stab the priests. Yes, Uluksuk said.

“How long had you known Kuleavik before you killed him?” McCaul asked.

“Three summers I saw him. I knew him.”

“Kuleavik good fellow?” McCaul asked.

“Yes.”

“How long had you known Ilogoak before you killed him?”

“Two summers I know him.”

“Ilogoak pretty good fellow too?”

“No.”¹¹

WITH THE TESTIMONY complete, Wallbridge offered a closing statement that closely resembled his argument in Edmonton. He began by outlining a bit of historical context, noting that the Eskimos had treated most of the priests’ white predecessors, including the pioneer Stefansson, very well. Perhaps there was a reason for this, he suggested:

Stefansson, when he went among them, was apparently endowed with that necessary amount of tact and good sense to make friends, and nothing happened to him because he treated the natives in the way they ought to be treated. Nothing has happened to Hornby. He also has good sense and good judgment, and if anything happened to the other men it must have been because they transgressed some law, wittingly or unwittingly, and ran contrary to what these people imagined a man should be. In the words of the witnesses, he “makes them afraid.” They fear strangers, Stefansson says. We do not know why. We only know it is a fact, and because they fear strangers, it is all the more reason why the strangers should be very, very careful not to do anything which would cause that fear.”

There were two reasons why the jury should acquit the Eskimos, Wallbridge said.

First, they should be treated as young children or imbeciles, and I say that a young child or imbecile is incapable of committing a crime, and these men are incapable of appreciating the crime which they have committed. For hundreds of years, many hundreds, these Eskimos have been governing themselves by custom. The are like children turned loose on the prairie, if you can call the Arctic ice a prairie. They are turned loose without any semblance of government or order, just allowed to shift for themselves. When they have a dispute, they settle it among themselves. They cannot be treated like the civilized men of the city, cities that Stefansson says are ten thousand years ahead of the civilization of the Eskimos.

When strangers come from an unknown foreign land to an unknown people, savage people, people of the stone age, is it not a fact that they take their chance, that they believe by a certain course of conduct they can walk safely among them and come and go? Do they not take the chance of offending those people and paying the penalty of that offense?

The Magna Carta mandated that people be judged by their peers, Wallbridge noted, which in this case was a practical impossibility. But if members of the jury could put themselves in the place of the accused, up there near Bloody Falls, with the winter coming and strange white men holding them at gunpoint, they would surely conclude that the killings had been justified.

“When these men say that they were forced at the point of a gun to get into the harness and pull this sled, you cannot help but believe it,” Wallbridge said.

There is no evidence to the contrary. If it were not for the statements of these men there would be no trial, because there was not a tittle of evidence to connect them. And I say that you must believe them when they say that they were frightened, when they say that they were forced to get into the harness again to drag that sled against their will for we do not know how far in miles. And I say that when they say to you that they were afraid, that they believed their lives were in danger, that you must believe them. I say those fears, to them, whether they were real or otherwise, if you were judging them by their own standards, were very real when you have to look at it through their eyes, through their minds.

Considering that these men were in the harness in front and the two priests behind, one of them armed with a rifle, I say it took a degree of courage on the part of these Eskimos to do what they did. These Eskimos, in their minds, thought they were doing a justifiable act; they thought it was a case of necessity. The odds were against them, and they had to rely upon their wits as well as their strength. No matter how much we personally may want to blame these men for killing the missionaries, we cannot help but think that in their minds what they did was reasonable under the circumstances; looking through their eyes and through their minds, that it was done from necessity.

Sinnisiak and Uluksuk did not murder simply to steal the rifles, the defense lawyer argued. If this had been their intention, they would have killed Stefansson, or Hornby, or the other whites they had encountered over the last few years. “There is no evidence of murder in their hearts, that they were doing anything other than what they said they were doing, killing these priests in self-defense.”

Wallbridge reminded the jury that if they had the slightest doubt about the Eskimos’ guilt, they should acquit them. More important, given the thrust of McCaul’s rhetoric, the jury must resist the temptation to use their verdict as a chance to make the prisoners an example to the rest of their people. It was not possible to reach a guilty conviction to enact a kind of “policy.”

“That, gentlemen, is not in accordance with our ideas of justice and fair play,” he said. “If these men are guilty of murder, they should be found guilty of murder and should pay the extreme penalty. If these men are not guilty, then they should be sent to their homes, free. Either they are guilty or they are not guilty. There is no half-way measure.”

Anticipating a reiteration of the exhortation Judge Harvey had issued from the bench in Edmonton, Wallbridge asked the jury to be circumspect about any guarantees that the prisoners would not be put to death. These men had already been under surveillance for eighteen months. If the jury compared the photographs of the rugged men Denny LaNauze had taken into custody in May of the previous year with the men before them now, they would see just how much they had already suffered. They had learned their lesson. Imprisoning them for even six more months would be “like condemning them to a slow death that is worse than hanging. There are natives who can be treated with the whip, natives of Africa I understand, thrashed into the way of the white man, made to do his bidding. But that is not the way with the Eskimo. He is a free, independent man. You cannot coerce him. His motto is the one made famous by Patrick Henry: ‘Give me liberty of give me death.’ ”

Wallbridge then tried to take his preemptive tactic one step further, by reminding the jury of why the case was before them in the first place. “I think I should tell you why these men were brought from Edmonton to Calgary for trial,” he said.

By now, Judge Harvey had had enough. “I think you had better confine yourself to the evidence,” he interrupted.

“I just want to explain, your lordship,” Wallbridge said.

“It is not at all necessary for you to do that,” Harvey shot back. “It is quite improper.”

Wallbridge asked again.

“It is quite improper for you to refer to that at all,” Harvey said. “It does not come out in the evidence.”

James Wallbridge sat down.¹²

AS HE HAD in Edmonton, McCaul, in closing, reminded the jury that British law does not say that a man may kill simply because he is afraid of being killed. At the moment of assault, he may kill only if he is unable to overpower his assailant. Picture the circumstances when the priests arrived at the mouth of the Coppermine, McCaul said. They were in a hostile village, far from any familiar faces or customs, and they were desperately hungry. Winter was coming on hard, and the village was already getting low on food. No longer were they being welcomed into the Eskimos’ tents. The fear of being stabbed in the back for the rifles could not have been far from their minds.

McCaul advised the jury not to act out of caprice. They must carefully weigh the evidence and apply the law as it was written. And the circumstantial evidence, he said, was sufficient to convict the prisoners even without their confessions. Indeed, contrary to what Wallbridge argued, the confessions were the only evidence the defense had to maintain that the killings had been justifiable homicide. How could the jury be sure that Sinnisiak and Uluksuk had actually been going south to meet their people? Wasn’t it possible that they had set out precisely in order to kill the priests and steal their rifles?

Once they’d killed LeRoux, why had they had to kill Rouvière? “Why didn’t they let the poor fellow run?” McCaul asked. “Why didn’t they let him go off and starve to death in the wilds? Why didn’t they let him have a sporting chance of getting back to the village and getting assistance? Why didn’t they let him have a sporting chance of meeting some of the people who were expected to come down from Imaerinik? No. My friend Mr. Wallbridge tells you they had to kill him in self-defense. In self-defense they had to kill this poor unfortunate priest who, when he was brought down with the second shot, was apparently too wounded to rise again.”

McCaul then shifted his rhetoric. Beyond the cause of justice in this particular case, the jury had the opportunity to send a signal to all native people. It was an opportunity that should not be fumbled. “If these men are acquitted,” McCaul continued, “it means that the jury find that they were quite right and justified in killing these missionaries under the circumstances that have been detailed. It means that these men go forth from this Court room without a shadow of a stain on their character, that they can return to their tribes and be able to say to their village community and to all the tribes that the white men, the big chief and his counselors, told us we were perfectly justified in killing the white men under the circumstances that we killed these men.”

McCaul agreed that sentencing the Eskimos to death would be a “terrible thing,” but that was not for the jury to worry about. “That is a matter that can be dealt with, and will, in the natural course of things, necessarily have to be dealt with.” If McCaul had his way, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk would be convicted and have their sentence commuted to a short prison term. After this, they might be “an object lesson” to other Eskimos.¹³

WHEN THE LAWYERS had finished, Judge Harvey instructed the jury. His rhetoric closely resembled the language he had used in Edmonton. It might seem cruel to punish men for acts they did not consider to be wrong, he said, but as strange as they might seem to the jury, the Eskimos were still Canadian citizens, and subject to its laws.

“Nothing in the way of prejudice, nothing in the way of suspicion or of what might have been or of rumors, nothing in the way of sympathy, should enter into the decision of the case. Your judgment, and your judgment only, should be your guide,” he said. The prisoners had confessed their role in the deaths of the priests. All that remained for the jury to decide was whether the murder was culpable or not culpable.

Harvey reviewed the facts of the case. There was nothing to indicate that the Eskimos had ever feared retribution for the killings. No one in their tribe would punish them, he said. These men were “quite intelligent enough to know what they were doing,” Harvey maintained. They say they feared for their lives, that they killed the priests “to prevent the priests from taking them away where they would not get back to their own people and perhaps from killing them. That is their story.”

Although the Eskimos might have felt the killings were justified, in British law they were not, the judge stated. “We find in this case that both the prisoners admit that they had decided and determined, before any attack was made at all, to kill the priests, so that there is no doubt that they intended to kill them and that it is murder unless there is something which reduces it to manslaughter.” A charge of murder could be reduced to manslaughter only if the Eskimos had been provoked by fear. “It might possibly be that fear might cause a person to lose his self-control as much as anger would, so that he could not deal with the case as he would under normal circumstances, but I do not know of any case,” Harvey said. “I have never known of an instance, where such has been the case. It appears to me that on the evidence there should be a verdict of murder rather than of manslaughter, but I don’t feel like directing you any more definitely on that because I think there are such circumstances as make it incumbent upon me to leave it to you to say finally whether that is the case or not.”

Judge Harvey recognized the difficulty of the jury’s role. “You are human beings, and you cannot help feeling sympathy, and it is very difficult for one to guide one’s conduct apart altogether from his feelings of that sort. You probably all feel as most of us must, that the penalty of death is not a proper penalty to impose in the case of these ignorant pagans for the act which they committed.”

Harvey then told the jury of his intentions should they return a guilty verdict, as he hoped they would. If the verdict was one of guilty, and he could see no other verdict possible, he was certain that the usual penalty would not be consummated. “I feel that the prisoners should not have the death penalty imposed,” he said. Harvey would consider it his duty to ask the governor-general for a lighter sentence.

“You may now retire to consider your verdict,” he ordered. It was 5:20 P.M.

AS SOON AS the jury left the room Wallbridge once again objected to the way the judge had instructed the jury. Not only had Harvey made plain his own feelings about the verdict but he had not offered an alternative line of reasoning—that a reasonable fear of being killed makes homicide justifiable. Wallbridge also objected to Harvey’s presumptuous declaration that he could somehow ensure that the death penalty would not be enforced. How could such a statement not prejuduce the jury in favor of a guilty verdict?

Harvey overruled each of Wallbridge’s objections.

The jurors returned at 6:06 P.M. They had deliberated for forty-six minutes, even less than the Edmonton jury. The standing-room-only crowd fell silent as the foreman read the verdict:

“We find the prisoners guilty of murder, with the strongest possible recommendation to mercy that the jury can give.”

Visibly pleased, Judge Harvey turned to the men in the jury box. “Gentlemen of the jury,” he said. “You have performed a very unpleasant duty and, I think, have come to exactly the correct conclusion in all respects. I think the verdict is the only honest verdict that could be rendered on the evidence and the recommendation is most proper. It will be submitted by me with my own recommendation to the same effect at once.” Harvey said he had “not any doubt in my mind” that the sentence would be greatly reduced.

He then addressed Patsy Klengenberg. “Patsy, tell them that the jury has found that they were guilty of killing the priests without right to do it; that under our law when people kill others that way they have to give their lives, but the great white chief further away than the distance they have come may interfere and show them mercy, be kind to them.” ¹⁴

Rather than turn to the defendants, Patsy hesitated. As one awkward moment gave way to another, a white observer said he must have been “lost somewhere in the mists that separate a taboo from a code of ethics.” Perhaps he felt uncomfortable about delivering the news. Perhaps he was bewildered by how this second jury could have reached such a radically different conclusion from the first one. Patsy did not say. He did not speak at all.

Harvey asked LaNauze to press his interpreter, and this time Patsy repeated the words, as directed. Listening to his translation, the prisoners were silent, their faces reflecting the dramatic fluctuations in the judge’s words. Their eyes widened. Hearing that they would have to sacrifice their own lives, they began visibly trembling. When Patsy said the Great White Chief would be merciful, they seemed to relax, “nodding their heads in a complete return of confidence in the goodness of the white man,” one reporter wrote. They faced LaNauze and assented: “It is true, we will do anything you tell us to do.”¹⁵

Harvey told the jury he would telegraph their verdict and his recommendation that very night. If the death sentence was in fact overturned, Harvey said, he would recommend that the convicts be transferred to a prison “more suitable to their constitutions.”¹⁶

Harvey remanded the defendants to police custody to be taken back to the Supreme Court in Edmonton, and said he would telegraph the minister of justice in Ottawa. LaNauze, Bruce, and Wight escorted their prisoners back to Edmonton on August 24 to await their sentence. Patsy, Ilavinik, and Koeha went with them.¹⁷

With the possibility of a death sentence still hanging over the Eskimos’ heads, the Calgary News-Telegram finally offered an editorial opinion on the case. “Were the death penalty to be imposed on Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, the two Eskimos convicted of murdering Father LeRoux in the far north, the cause of justice would not be served so well nor so fairly as it would be served were the two aborigines of the Arctic to be imprisoned for a time and then restored to their tribe,” the paper opined. Their trial and sentence could serve as “object lessons which are intended to impress upon the primitive mind the fact that civilization does not allow murder to go unpunished. Had the authorities balked at the task of capturing these Eskimos, their tribe would hold the lives of white persons very lightly, and the results would be unfortunate and most probably fatal. With the murderers instructed concerning the white man’s unfailing law, the word will go forth through the north, and the lives of those who follow the unfortunate priests’ steps will be safe.”¹⁸

FOUR DAYS AFTER the end of the second trial, back in the Edmonton courtroom, Judge Harvey passed his sentence. In some ways, this was Harvey’s moment. He could be tough and forgiving at the same time. He could dangle the power of British justice over the Eskimos’ heads, then let them go. Most important, he could send them back to their people with a vivid impression of both the white man’s severity and his wisdom.

“Patsy, tell the prisoners to stand up,” Harvey said.

Tell them what I have to say. You told them in Calgary the other day that I would ask the Big Chief far away not to be too hard on them, and I have asked him by the way we have here, a long way, by telegraph, and he says because they did not know our ways, that they did not know what our laws are, he will not have them put to death for the killing of these men at this time. They must understand though that for the future they know now what our law is and if they kill any person again then they have to suffer the penalty.

I am going to pass sentence. I do not think it is necessary to explain the particulars of it now, but in the usual course action will be taken so that it will not be carried out. I impose the sentence of death in the usual form, and I will fix the date of the 15th of October as the date of execution. That is, of course, under the circumstances, something more or less a matter of form, but it is a form the Minister desires to have the proceedings take so that the commutation of the sentence may be in the usual way. He authorizes me to state the sentence will be commuted. You may tell them just what will be done I cannot say, but they will know in a few days. They will probably be punished in some way, but I do not know just in what form it will be.

Patsy, you might tell them when they get back home, if they do, they must let their people know that if any of them kill any person they will have to suffer death. They know now what our law is.

Hearing Patsy’s translation, Sinnisiak said nothing. Always the more voluble of the two, Uluksuk offered this: “Now I understand the ways of the white man. He speaks not with two tongues, and he thinks for us. If the police ever let me return to my people, and if I find that another man has taken my wife when I get there, I will turn around and travel the other way, because if I stayed there might be more trouble.”¹⁹

At first, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk were to be jailed at the Royal North West Mounted Police’s Herschel Island post, but a day later, court officials decided instead to send them to a jailhouse at Fort Resolution, on the southeastern shore of Great Slave Lake.²⁰

A week later, Denny LaNauze took Sinnisiak and Uluksak to the railway station to see them off on their journey back north. The two convicts “whined and cried and seized us with both hands and clung to us,” LaNauze wrote. “Patsy Klengenberg was cool and self-possessed as usual. Ilavinik was crying quietly. We shook hands, I swallowed hard and turned away to hide my feelings, for the Great Bear Lake patrol was ended.” The patrol had taken two years and covered five thousand miles. It ended just in time, LaNauze wrote, to give its members the chance to serve in the Great War.²¹