There is No Place for Sympathy Here: On Trial in the Belcher Islands

David Berg, There is No Place for Sympathy Here: On Trial in the Belcher Islands, published with McGill-Queens University Press.

In the late summer of 1941, the Belcher Islands in Hudson’s Bay were the scene of a series of murder trials that became a cause célèbre in southern Canada. Known to very few Canadians at the time, the murders of nine people occurred in an area inhabited only by small bands of nomadic Inuit and the trials put the Islands on the front pages of many newspapers. The trials brought the full panoply of the Canadian state – an RCMP Inspector, a trial judge from the Ontario Supreme Court, a court reporter, and crown and defence attorneys – to one of the remotest parts of the country. Seven people were tried and all were either acquitted or found guilty only of manslaughter. As in earlier encounters between the state and Indigenous people reservations about bringing the full force of the law down on people with their own cultural understandings modified its application.