If history is a fair indicator, it will be communities like Sharbot
Lake, not Baker Lake, that are able to keep the miners at bay.
CANADA IS THE WORLD’S largest producer of uranium,
meeting about one-third of world demand. It is followed closely
by Australia and Kazakhstan. Together these three countries
produce over half the world’s supply. However, while uranium
has been found in every province and northern territory of
Canada, the entire Canadian yield currently comes from >ve
large, open-pit mines in northern Saskatchewan, where the ore
grade is unusually high (up to 20 percent U O as opposed to 1
38
to 3 percent in most deposits) and resistance to mining is
unusually low.
Some provincial governments, notably those of British
Columbia and Nova Scotia, have legislated outright bans on uranium mining. And the Ottawa City Council recently voted eighteen to one to urge the Ontario premier to temporarily ban all
uranium prospecting in Canada’s capital city watershed. British
Columbia’s ban is particularly surprising, as the provincial government is avowedly pro-business and pro-mining. Moreover,
Vancouver, its major city, is headquarters to some of Canada’s
largest mining companies and host to the stock exchange where
most of the country’s juniors raise their capital. Other
provinces, like New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and the Inuit
region of Labrador, have moratoria on uranium exploration and
mining presently in place.
Fear of uranium is not unfounded in Canada, as some of the
world’s largest public-health catastrophes have occurred near
Canadian uranium mines. Take for example Elliot Lake, north of
Lake Huron, where uranium mining began in 1955. Home of
the Serpent River First Nation of the Anishinaabeg people, the
Elliot Lake area once hosted eleven uranium mines—eight of
had few interactions with outsiders. That is, until recently.
Kakadu is the longtime home to the aboriginal Mirrar people, as
well as a recent intruder: British-based Rio Tinto. In the 1970s,
Kakadu’s Alligator River System became the focal point of Europe’s
uranium demands. Built right in the center of the Mirrar homeland,
the Ranger Uranium Mine is one of the largest uranium mines in the
world. But the Ranger mine is also in the center of Kakadu National
Park, one of just twenty-five UNESCO World Heritage sites in the world
designated on the basis of both cultural and ecological significance.
Kakadu includes over 190 major aboriginal rock-art and sacred sites.
The Ranger Uranium Mine opened in the early 1980s, after much
protest from the Mirrar people, who made it clear that they opposed
the mine. Rio Tinto has assured Australians, UNESCO, and the aborigi-
them owned by Rio Algom, a subsidiary of the giant Rio Tinto
company of England—as well as a one-product chemical plant
that made sulfuric acid to leach uranium from its ore.
In 1975 a power failure at one mine caused a 500,000-gallon
radionuclide spill into McCabe Lake. In the years that followed,
other mines ?ooded and were closed down. By 1990 the entire
area, including at least ten major lakes, was permanently contaminated with radioactive mining e<uvia, 165 million tons of
it. The hunting, >shing, and gathering grounds of the Serpent
River Anishinaabeg were lost forever, and >fty->ve miles of the
once pure and bucolic Serpent River waterway was turned into
a massive dead zone. As a direct consequence of the spills, a
thriving native community of over twenty->ve thousand aboriginals has since declined to fewer than one hundred.
Closer to Nunavut, on the east arm of Great Slave Lake, is the
remote Dene village of Lutsel K’e. In human terms, Lutsel K’e
still deserves its name, which means “small >sh.” In 1996 the
population was 304; by 2006 it had grown to 318. The people of
Lutsel K’e remain widely outnumbered by caribou, which, as
with the inland Inuit, are the most important material and spiritual aspect of their culture. But small as it may be, the village of
Lutsel K’e is a vital center in the vast Dene First Nation, which
reaches from the Mackenzie Valley to the Western Yukon and
from provincial borders up to the Arctic.
Male Dene elders around Great Slave Lake have painful
memories of the Great Slave uranium mines from which they,
as young men, carried radioactive ore on their backs in burlap
sacks through long dark tunnels. Not only have scores of former
miners since succumbed to cancer and other related a<ictions,
the caribou they eat still have detectable traces of uranium and
other radioactive isotopes in their tissue—partly the fallout from
atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and partly a conse-
nal owners that it is operating under “world’s best practices” of uranium mining, a term some would argue is an oxymoron. Meanwhile,
radioactive groundwater contamination is reported to be spreading
through the park. A 2004 incident allowed a number of workers to
drink, ingest, and shower in heavily contaminated water, with a large
amount spilling out of the site itself. And in 2006, Cyclone Monica
delivered extreme rainfall, causing the radioactive containment ponds
to fill. The company responded by lifting tailings dams, redirecting
runoff into streams, and using the contaminated water for irrigation.
In 1999, Jacqui Katona, a Djok aboriginal woman, and Yvonne
Margarula, a Mirrar woman, won the Goldman Environmental Prize
for their struggle to oppose development at Jabiluka, another mine
proposed for Kakadu National Park. Yvonne explained that an agree-
