Episode 363: Belcher Island – Madness under the Meteors

On this episode of the world famous Sofa King Podcast, we do some more True Crime, but it’s back in time True Crime as we explore the massacre at Belcher Island. Belcher Island is an incredibly remote island in Canada—so remote that white folks didn’t set foot here until as late as 1914. In the winter of 1941, though, the population of migrant hunter/fisher Inuit families faced the harshest of weather conditions and apparently went a little crazy with religious fervor.

You see, the natives on Belcher Island had only recently been visited by Christian missionaries by 1941, and in the bleak, endless freeze of Northern nights, they would huddle in their igloos and read the poorly translated Bible that was given to them. Their own culture and spiritual beliefs didn’t really gel with the apocalyptic nature of the bible, so it really got into their heads. In fact, it led one man named Charley Ouyerack to proclaim he was the second coming of Jesus and that the best hunter on the island, a man named Peter Sala, was actually God Himself.

Somehow, the cold and the starvation and a very ill-timed meteor shower that seemed to fit biblical prophecy convinced the other hunter families that Ouyerack was right. This would just be a case of a bad, weird winter, but when one girl stood up to oppose this, she was bludgeoned to death in the snow. And when a man stood up against her murder, he was stabbed in the face with a harpoon and shot twice. After that, most people just drank the Kool Aid, joined the cult, and thought Jesus and God were among them.

More families came along, and after a few weeks of convincing them, Sala’s sister woke everyone up and drove them out of their shelters with a whip, telling them Jesus was coming down from heaven. Oh, and that he wanted to greet them all in the nude right there on Belcher Island. She and the other fanatics forced them to take their clothes off in the record breaking cold of the North, and several of them (mostly, sadly, children) froze to death.

So, how did the Mounties find out about this and come to investigate? What ghetto stuff did the cops have to do to get to Belcher Island at all? How many people died? What did the judge say about the three people who seemed responsible for this madness, and what sentence did they serve? How did we finally learn about this case when the natives are so private about it all? Listen, laugh, learn.

Nice Summary: http://jmortonmusings.blogspot.com/2014/03/when-god-and-satan-battled-in-barren.html