Seventy-five years after two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan β killing hundreds of thousands of people in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki β one small community in the Northwest Territories is still haunted by its connection to the blasts. Across Great Bear Lake from the 533-person hamlet of DΓ©lΔ±Μ¨nΔ sits the historic mining site of Port Radium. [β¦] [T]he Canadian government quietly called for uranium production as part of the countryβs involvement in the Manhattan Project. That uranium was sent south to help the United States [β¦]. [W]orkers would eventually wonder about the risks they took delivering sacks of ore on their backs as they sent it south β without being told what they were about to be complicit in. [β¦] Days after the blasts, the Canadian government announced the countryβs role in the explosions, citing the Great Bear Lake mineβs uranium as a key ingredient for the project [β¦]. An English-language sign connecting Port Radium to the atomic bomb was photographed in DΓ©lΔ±Μ¨nΔ in December 1945. [β¦] While the Canadian government hasnβt apologized to DΓ©lΔ±Μ¨nΔ, the community has apologized to Japan. [β¦] Locals in DΓ©lΔ±Μ¨nΔ say many ore workers and their family members developed cancer later in life. [β¦] In the book If Only We Had Known, which tells the story of Port Radium from the eyes of the SahtΓΊot'ine, elders remember workersβ clothing covered with dust, windy days when ore was caught up in the air and children playing games in mine tailings.
Text by: Katie Toth, βSpectre of atomic bomb still looms over N.W.T. community 75 years after Hiroshima,β CBC News, 5 August 2020. [Presented for commentary, teaching, criticism.]
[O]n 6 August 1998, 10 members of the small Sahtugotβine Dene community of Deline (Fort Franklin) in the βNorthwest Territoriesβ apologized in Hiroshima for the atomic destruction of that city β and the death of over 200,000 civilians β exactly 53 years earlier [β¦]. Eldorado Gold Mines Ltd. [was] placed under state control during World War Two. They [the Dene] were allowed only to help it [uranium] on its long and winding way, 3,000 miles by river, lake, road and air, from Port Radium on Great Bear Lake to Port Hope on Lake Ontario, where, from 1942-45, the suddenly precious ore β the βnew goldβ of the atomic age β was, together with βBelgianβ uranium from the Congo, refined and dispatched to Los Alamos, the desert lab in New Mexico secretly building the new, city-smashing Superweapon. [β¦] Beginning in the 1970s, and spiking sharply in the 1980s, many of the men who had handled and carried the ore β and the men who had mined it β began to die from cancer [β¦]. The βDene,β the CBC βrevealed,β βwere never told of the health hazards they faced, even though the government knew β¦ as early as 1932 that precautions should be taken in handling radioactive materialsβ. Instead [β¦]Β βworkers [were] dressed in casual clothes and uranium dust [β¦] covered the men like flour.β [β¦] [A]s detailed in a December 1998 article [β¦] in First Nations Drum: [β¦] [T]he mine was kept running at a very high pace [β¦]. The Dene were employed asΒ βcooliesβ packing 45-kilogram sacks of radioactive ore for three dollars a day, working 12 hours a day, six days a week. This at a time when the ore was worth over $70,000 a gram. [β¦] In 1998, the DΓ©line Dene Band Uranium Committee released a 160-page [β¦] report, βThey Never Told Us These Things.β In a 2011 article in Maisonneuve, Salverson recounts a community meeting in Deline to discuss the report, βwhere [non-Dene] lawyers delivered a yearβs worth of uranium-impact research from the archives in Ottawa,β revealing that in βthe mountain of papers we dug up β¦ there is not one mention of the Dene, your people.β
Text by: Sean Howard, βCanadaβs Uranium Highway: Victims and Perpetrators,β Cape Breton Spectator, 7 August 2019. [Presented for commentary, teaching, criticism.]
