The Court of Better Fiction

Three Trials, Two Executions, and Arctic Sovereignty
In The Court of Better Fiction, forensic science reveals that to establish sovereignty over the Arctic people, Canada hanged the only Inuit ever executed. The men were innocent, but the nation’s guilt lives on.
In its rush to establish dominion over the North, Canada executed two innocent Inuit men.

In 1921, the RCMP arrested two Copper Inuit men under suspicion that the two had murdered their uncle. Both men confessed to the crime through a police interpreter, though the “confession” was highly questionable.

The Canadian government used the case to plant their flag in the north, but the trial quickly became a master class in judicial error. Correspondence among the key players reveals that the trial’s outcome was decided months before the court was even convened. Authorities were so certain of a conviction that the executioner and gallows were sent north before the trial began.

The precedent established Canada’s legal relationship with the Inuit, who would spend the next seventy-seven years fighting to regain their autonomy and Indigenous rule of law. Drawing on documents long buried in restricted files in the National Archives, The Court of Better Fiction reveals the disgraceful incident and its fallout in unprecedented detail.

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