to build scores of nukes, a tired old Washington lobby has been
rejuvenated, and there is talk of a “hydrogen bonus”—using new
nuclear capacity to produce hydrogen, the current dream fuel for
a new clean and green economy.
World production of uranium, however, does not even meet
present demand. In 2004 world consumption of U O was
38
79,000 tons while global production was just 46,500 tons. The
di=erence was made up with secondary sources (stockpiles,
decommissioned weapons, and recycled waste). But those
sources are shrinking, and demand is growing for new sources
of radioactive fuel. So when U.S. energy policymakers gave serious reconsideration to nuclear in 2007, about the same time as
some large mines in Canada and Australia became ?ooded with
groundwater, hedge-fund speculators dove into the market and
uranium shot up to $138 a pound, settling back eventually to
about half that price, but still almost ten times the $7 low.
Within weeks of the price jump there were thousands of uranium claims staked around the world, hundreds of them in
Nunavut. Each claim, a small parcel of land purchased from the
government for as low as $5, gives its owner the rights to all
minerals beneath it. In most countries a claim owner is required
to invest a small sum in the development of the claim in order
to retain ownership. One by one newly formed prospecting companies helicoptered supplies into barren, windswept >eld camps
across the Arctic, each sta=ed with geologists, engineers, pilots,
cooks, and as many Inuit helpers as they could recruit. They
were either oblivious to the plebiscite that banned mining or
hopeful that it would be overturned. One camp opened in 2004,
six more the following year. There were eight by 2006, and
when I arrived in April of 2008 there were twenty-eight uranium prospectors drilling the tundra of Nunavut.
Huge mining companies from around the world with names
like Uranor, Areva, and Titan opened community-liaison o;ces
around the territory, promising jobs, partnerships, and royalties to impoverished Inuit villagers. “We want to make sure that
we’re moving at a pace that is not too intimidating to the people of the region,” Titan Uranium president Philip Olson told
the territory’s leading newspaper, the Nunatsiaq News, in 2006.
Olson said he received a warm welcome from Baker Lake
mayor David Aksawnee and the hamlet council. “People are
looking for work,” he said of the people who had once voted 90
percent to oppose uranium mining. In truth they are desperate.
The unemployment rate in some Nunavut communities is
close to 70 percent.
Complicating matters is the fact that the Baker Lake
plebiscite was held nine years before Nunavut was Nunavut.
This vast area, a landmass the size of California and Alaska
combined, used to be part of the Northwest Territories, but land-claim and sovereignty negotiations had been under way between
the Inuit and Ottawa since the late 1970s. True autonomy and
the complex gazetting of Canada’s >rst and foremost native-governed region were >nally achieved on April 1, 1999. At that
point, the land ownership of the region became exceedingly
complex. The surface of Nunavut remains mostly federal property, administered from Ottawa. However, about 20 percent of
the land is owned outright by the Inuit people, who also gained
about 2 percent of the territory’s subsurface rights. And under
those sections lies most of the region’s uranium, which means
the resource is native-owned, and any potential mineral royalties
would become dividends for the twenty-four thousand Inuit of
Nunavut, most of whom live in twenty->ve small communities
on the coastline of the Arctic Ocean.
PAINTINGS BY TONI ONLEY (1928–2004) © TONI ONLEY ESTATE
URANIUM MINING, NATIVE RESISTANCE,
I
N A DINE CREATION STORY, the people were given a
choice of two yellow powders. They chose the yellow dust of
corn pollen, and were instructed to leave the other yellow powder—uranium—in the soil and never to dig it up. If it were
taken from the ground, they were told, a great evil would come.
The evil came. Over one thousand uranium mines gouged the
earth in the Dine Bikeyah, the land of the Navajo, during a thirty-year
period beginning in the 1950s. It was the lethal nature of uranium
mining that led the industry to the isolated lands of Native America.
By the mid-1970s, there were 380 uranium leases on native land and
only 4 on public or acquired lands. At that time, the industry and gov-
ernment were fully aware of the health impacts of uranium mining on
workers, their families, and the land upon which their descendants
would come to live. Unfortunately, few Navajo uranium miners were
told of the risks. In the 1960s, the Department of Labor even provided
the Kerr-McGee Corporation with support for hiring Navajo uranium
miners, who were paid $1.62 an hour to work underground in the
mine shafts with little or no ventilation.
All told, more than three thousand Navajos worked in uranium
mines, often walking home in ore-covered clothes. The consequences
were devastating. Thousands of uranium miners and their relatives
lost their lives as a result of radioactive contamination. Many families
