EXECUTION ON THE ICE

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 45, 16 November 1929, Page 26

EXECUTION ON THE ICE

murderer pushed down a HOLE. An extraordinary account of the fatal religious mania of a young Eskimo is given by the members of a police patrol who have returned from Southern Baffin Land, the large island opposite Greenland. Mako Gliak, apparently a victim of the fanaticism which has swept the Canadian Arctic at intervals during the past ten years, went mad. He shot dead his father and mother and a girl relative and tried to kill his brother. He told his relatives that he had been chosen as a “purifier of the race” and that a Heavenly voice had commanded him to slay the whole tribe. He was overpowered, bound with sealskin thongs, and kept under guard in an ice-house all the winter. Gliak escaped twice, and when he was recaptured for the.second time it was decided that, as all the. men were tired of maintaining a guard on him, he should be killed. He was brought before a tribal meeting and given his choice of death by shooting, stabbing, or drowning. Gliak protested that he did not want to die, but bis judges cut a hole in the ice and pushed him through it to his death. " It is stated that no action will be taken by tlie Canadian Government, as it is considered that the Eskimos acted in self-defence,