The nomadic Inuit of the Arctic did not have any concept of law or tit-for-tat justice as the sedentary societies in Europe, Asia, and Mesoamerica did. Rather, crime was defined principally on whether the action was considered detrimental to group survival. Punishment was meted out according to the level of disruption, which the Alberta Law Review calls the “maintenance of peace.”
A handful of offenses were considered so noxious to collective survival that they usually resulted in execution. Some of them were typical — serial murder (single murders could be excused in the name of group harmony), serial lying, serial theft, or mental illness, and sorcery. Other “crimes” related to group survival included being an extra, unwanted (usually) female child, being elderly, or chronically ill — and the Inuit way of administering justice was simultaneously strange and extremely cruel to modern eyes.
Under Inuit custom, relatives of the condemned party carried out the execution. This undoubtedly was incredibly difficult — imagine being a mother asked to abandon her baby daughter, or a man told to kill his elderly relative. But within the Inuit value of collective survival above all else, the rules made sense in the harsh Arctic, unity was paramount. Disunity through internecine feuds could mean the destruction of the group and all its members. But if the people closest to the condemned person carried out the killing, there was no one to take vengeance on.
