Uranium by Burke Anthony;

Author:Burke, Anthony; [Burke, Anthony;]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2017-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

Canada: the Dené of the Northwest Territories

Canada is the world’s second largest producer of uranium. It has been a major source dating from the Second World War, when the mine at Port Radium on the Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories was repurposed to extract uranium which was sent to the United States for the Manhattan Project. Uranium was mined at Port Radium from 1942 after contracts were let by the US government to the Canadian Crown Corporation Eldorado Mining and Exploration. Great Bear Lake is the ancestral land of the Dené indigenous community which has fished the lake and lived off caribou herds for tens of thousands of years. Some 800 Dené lived in the township of Déline and travelled widely across the lake and associated lands hunting and fishing. Despite the Dené having ancestral rights to the land – which were not recognized by the Canadian Supreme Court until 1973 – when radium was first discovered in 1930, they received a few sacks of flour, lard and baking powder in exchange for the rights to extract an exotic mineral then worth $70,000 a gram on world markets.45

It is not believed that Dené men from Déline worked within the mine, but from the 1930s until 1960 they were used as labour to transport uranium ore south to Fort McMurray, along a 2,100 km route of lakes, roads and rivers known as ‘the highway of the atom’. They piloted the barges and carried 45 kg gunny sacks of crushed uranium ore on their backs to load onto barges and trucks, which often spilled. Their families camped by the lake near the mine during the summers. Journalist Andrew Nikiforuk has described how community members ‘ate fish from contaminated dredging ponds. Their children played with the dusty ore at river docks and portage landings. And their women sewed tents from used uranium sacks.’46 The mine superintendent built a sandbox at Port Radium’s school out of fine ground uranium tailings and white miners worked in shafts thick with radon, which were ventilated only by natural circulation. The closure of the mine in 1960 left behind some 1.7 million tonnes of tailings (800,000 tonnes in the lake itself) emitting elevated levels of gamma radiation. They remain in the path of periodic caribou migration, which is a major source of meat for the Inuit. The animals walk on the tailings, eat lichens growing there and drink from the contaminated lake water.47

The health impacts of the mine both on the Dené community and white miners have been a source of bitterness and conflict. By 1998 some 14 Déline men (nearly half those who worked transporting the crushed ore) had died of cancer. The community issued a 14-point declaration and a 106-page report based on their own research and demanded a meeting with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Minister for Resources in Ottawa.48 Two years later a joint Dené-Canadian government committee was formed called the Canada-Déline Uranium Table (CDUT) to investigate the human health and environmental impacts of Port Radium.

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