Inuit customary law meets criminal law in Nunavut--what's the status ten years after?

• Author: Tomaszewski, Andreas
• Position: Feature Report on Nunavut

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If you're like me, you'd like to think we've learned from our mistakes enough to know we can't play God with others' lives at stake. So now we've all discovered, the world wasn't only made for whites, what step are you gonna take to try and set things right in this stolen land? Bruce Cockburn, Stolen Land (1986)

In an article published not long before Nunavut, Canada's third northern territory, was created on April 1, 1999 1 argued in favour of an innovative approach to criminal justice in Nunavut, one that should be grounded in Inuit culture. I did so because research shows that the Euro-Canadian approach to criminal justice fails to take Aboriginal cultures and laws into consideration and often exacerbates their social and economic problems. This article revisits these arguments and discusses to what extent traditional Inuit methods of social control have found their way into the Nunavut criminal justice system.

Inuit customary law and crime control--the old days

To maintain law and order in society, the Inuit traditionally relied on mechanisms of informal social control, which refers to means of resolving conflicts informally and without the involvement of agents and formally set-up agencies of the criminal justice system. Although not codified ( written down), Inuit customary law was binding and non-compliance resulted in negative sanctions. Codification of Inuit law was not needed because of the importance of oral history. Story-telling by elders and a variety of interpersonal games played an important role in the traditional socialization of Inuit youth. This was the means to retain and pass on the system of values, beliefs, and taboos to the next generation. They outlined expected behaviour and made children familiar with the community's reaction if somebody deviated from these norms. When the degree of social interaction in a community is very high, as was traditionally the case in Inuit society, conflicts and tensions between individuals are inevitable. Traditional life on the land demanded a great deal of co-operation and co-ordination among members of the community, and reliance on one another. Their nomadic lifestyle, the culture of hunting, and the harsh climate added to the importance of this interdependency.

The priority of Inuit traditional social control was maintenance of the peace, order and general equilibrium of the community. Reactions to an offence should not cause more problems for the community than the initial infraction. Central values in traditional Inuit society were sharing and co-operation within one's own extended kinship...