The Snow Walker (18 page)

In October Aiyaoot and Shooyuk were sent to Spence Bay to buy ammunition for their winter hunt. Immediately upon arrival Shooyuk was arrested, charged with capital murder and flown off to jail in Yellowknife eight hundred miles to the southwest.

In Yellowknife, the Crown Attorney, David Searle, studied the police reports and concluded that the charge should be dropped or at least reduced to one of justifiable manslaughter. He could see no useful purpose in adding new agonies to those the people at Levesque Harbour had already endured and he so advised the Department of Justice in Ottawa.

He was ordered to proceed with the case as originally charged.

The guardians of justice who act on our behalf chose to press the charge of wilful murder not just against Shooyuk (and Aiyaoot who was co-charged with murder sixty minutes before the trial began) but in effect against all the survivors of the tragedy, since the young men had acted on behalf of them all. They chose to sentence this handful of tormented people to a new ordeal of fear and black uncertainty through a
full seven months
until a “proper show trial” could be staged.

The men who made this choice remain cloaked in anonymity. They were senior officials of the Departments of Justice and of Northern Affairs and this decision was part of a greater one, for our government had concluded that the time had come for all Eskimos (and Indians) to conform fully to our concept of law and our version of morality. The time had come when men, women and children, such as those forlorn remnants of the dispossessed who lingered on at Levesque Harbour, should each be made to pay for the essential crime of failing to be born as one of us.

It was a decision which made victims of Eskimos and white men alike. There was not one among the intruders—who had been brought at such expense to Spence Bay to give force to the farce of justice—who was not wracked with agony on behalf of the accused… and with guilt on behalf of our just society.

In a voice taut with suppressed emotion, the Crown Attorney twice apologized to the jurors for doing what he had to do. He was no more torn within himself than was one worldly reporter from Toronto who, in the early dawn of the day following the trial, stood on a headland overlooking the settlement and wept. An R.C.M.P. constable who was marooned for eight bitter February days at Levesque Harbour while investigating the case, and who was fed and sheltered by the very people he was to bring to justice, was as much a victim as was Ernie Lyall, the court interpreter, who, knowing and loving the people, found himself the instrument through which they, in their innocence, convicted themselves of having trespassed against our law.

All these and more were victims; but perhaps chief among the victims of our race was Judge John Sissons. As judge of the Northwest Territorial Court for fifteen years, he had fought a stubborn battle with the legal bureaucrats in Ottawa to temper our justice to the realities and ancient usages of Eskimos and Indians. At Spence Bay what John Sissons had tried to accomplish was as much on trial as were the two defendants. And in his way he was as helpless as they, for he too was pinioned within the legal cage.

The members of the jury were also victims of the worm of guilt—and that was fortunate, for it was they who denied the policy makers in Ottawa the total victory they sought. The jury acquitted Aiyaoot, and although finding Shooyuk guilty of manslaughter, recommended mercy. Then at last Judge Sissons was freed from his cage. In a shaking voice he committed Shooyuk to two years suspended sentence, telling him to go home to his own people and “try to forget the things that have happened to you and try to live a good and happy life.”

He should not himself be judged for the terrible irony of those words. They were said with hope and pity, but it was too late for that.

By trial’s end Napachee-Kadlak, husband of Soosie and father of Aiyaoot, had become a shambling, incoherent travesty of a man whose mind dwelt only in the past. Shortly after the trial, Kadluk, father of Shooyuk and one of the chief witnesses for the prosecution, tried to drown himself in the swirling waters of Bellot Strait not far from the ruins of Fort Ross. One had only to look into the faces of Aiyaoot and Shooyuk to know that these young men, who had been the last strength of a broken people, were now themselves forever broken. Some of the people would survive in the flesh a little while longer, but the spirit within them was dead.

I spoke to Kadluk a few hours before the aircraft carried us back to our own world. I spoke to him not for his sake but for my own. Groping for words, I tried to tell him of the shame that burned in some of us because of what had been done to him and to his people.

His gaze was fixed on a patch of black rock emerging from the snows at his feet. After a while he murmured,
“Ayorama
… there is no help for it.”