Highway of the Atom 9780773580879

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THE HIGHWAY OF THE ATOM

T H E H I G H W AY O F T H E

atom

Peter C. van Wyck

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2010 isbn 978-0-7735-3783-5 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2010 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication van Wyck, Peter C. The highway of the atom / Peter C. van Wyck. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3783-5 1. Uranium mines and mining–Northwest Territories–Port Radium–History. 2. Atomic bomb–History. 3. Chipewyan Indians–Northwest Territories–Great Bear Lake Region--Social conditions. 4. Nuclear industry–Canada–History. I. Title. qe390.2.u7v35 2010

553.4'932097193

c2010-903969-6

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Sabon 10.2/13.6

For Angela June Matéo & Bella

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Contents

Images / xi Acknowledgments / xiii

1 1.01 Field Note: Great Bear Lake – 30 July 2003 / 3 1.02 Archive / 6 1.03 Tracking Stories / 8 1.04 History / 12 1.05 Writing / 17 1.06 Map / 18 1.07 Theory / 22 1.08 Field Note: Apology – November 2002 / 24 1.09 The Route / 25 1.10 A Gentle Compulsiveness / 33 1.11 Material / 35 1.12 Village of Widows / 38

2 2.01 Punctum / 45 2.02 Rice Christians – Who knew? / 50 2.03 Cargo Cult / 51 2.04 Magic / 52 2.05 Field Note: Two Contrasting Figures – May 2003 / 54 2.06 Field Note: Tulita – 6 August 2003 / 58 2.07 The Idea of North / 61

viii / CONTENTS

2.08 Naming / 65 2.09 Field Note: Yellowknife, Explorer Hotel – August 2003 / 69 2.10 Field Note: Northern Metaphor – Norway Point, February 2005 / 71 2.11 Field Note: Landscape – Yellowknife, August 2007 / 73 2.12 Field Note: Tigullapaa – Nuuk, Greenland, 25 August 2008 / 75 2.13 Field Note: Norway Point – April 2009 / 76 2.14 Abduction / 78 2.15 Birth Order / 82 2.16 Vision / 83 2.17 Meanwhile / 85 2.18 Radium / 87 2.19 Sum and Remainder / 93

3 3.01 Finding Aids / 97 3.02 Field Note: Cobalt-Bloom and Copper-Green – Echo Bay, 2003 / 101 3.03 Pitchblende / 104 3.04 Congo / 111 3.05 White Myth / 113 3.06 Oh Canada – More Silence / 116 3.07 Field Note: Cameron Bay – August 2003 / 119 3.08 Field Note: Bewilderment – Déline, 2003 / 123 3.09 Field Note: Grey Goose Inn, Déline – 25 July 2003 / 128 3.10 Field Note: Arctic Circle (66˚32⬘) – 1 August 2005 / 131 3.11 Chorography / 135 3.12 Field Note: Port Radium – 30 July 2003 / 138 3.13 Field Note: Déline – August 2003 / 143

CO NTENTS / ix

4 4.01 The Stones Are Speaking Now / 149 4.02 Phantoms / 153 4.03 Alibi / 155 4.04 Lieux de Mémoire: A Mnemonics of Catastrophe / 157 4.05 Abduction and the Accident / 160 4.06 Shipwreck with Raven / 161 4.07 Field Note: New Mexico – February 2004 / 163 4.08 From Figure to Metaphor / 165 4.09 Spectator / 167 4.10 Ecology / 173 4.11 Story / 177 4.12 Erasure, Redux / 182 4.13 Equivalence / 186 4.14 Field Note: Black River – 3 August 2005 / 189 4.15 Field Note: Mackenzie River – 3 August 2005 / 192 4.16 Field Notes in the Margins / 198 4.17 Field Note: Tulita (Fort Norman) – 6 August 2005 / 200 4.18 Field Note: Tsiigehtchic (Arctic Red River) – 6 August 2005 / 202 4.19 Problems / 204 4.20 Field Note: (The Gift) Déline – February 2003 / 205 Notes to part 1 / 207 Notes to part 2 / 214 Notes to part 3 / 220 Notes to part 4 / 225 Bibliography / 235 Image credits / 257 Index / 259

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Images

Tennis court, Port Radium / 6 Untitled, Port Radium / 8 Radium barge no. 423, Hay River / 18 The Radium Trail, 1934 / 25 Man on machine, Port Radium / 38 Radium Gilbert, Déline, 2002 / 54 Commemorative plaque, Port Radium / 56 Inadvertent raven, Yellowknife, 2003 / 69 Port Radium, 1930s / 83 Earth Angel Arthritic Radon Gas Mine, Montana / 87 Uranium hexafluoride container, Port Hope, Ontario / 116 Branson’s Lodge, Cameron Bay, Great Bear Lake, 2003 / 119 mv Radium King / 131 Dump, Cameron Bay, Great Bear Lake / 138 In the bunkhouse, Port Radium / 157 Sawmill Bay, Great Bear Lake / 167 Eldorado Place, Port Hope, Ontario / 177 Ten-cent stamp, 1946: Great Bear Lake / 192 Porthole no. 9, Mackenzie River / 200 Port Radium, August 2005 / 205

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Acknowledgments

I first began to research and write about the Highway of the Atom in 2001, and over the years I have found myself in discussions with more people than I can name. The gifts of friendship and talk outstrip my ability to remember them all. But I will try. I express my gratitude foremost to the Community of Déline on Great Bear Lake. On each occasion of my visits there my questions were treated with patience and respect; I was shown enormous hospitality. I am grateful for the time I was able to spend there, for what I was shown, and for the stories I was told. In particular, I wish to thank Chief Raymond Tutcho and all the elders and community members who agreed to speak with me; the Déline Uranium Team; Morris Modeste for his help crossing the lake; and Ken and Vera Caine for their hospitality and the use of their couch. To Deborah Simmons, whose interest in this work resulted in my invitation to Déline to begin with, I will always be grateful. I would also like to thank the staff, archivists and curators at the nwt Archives at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife; the Norman Wells Historical Centre; the Northern Life Museum in Fort Smith; the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; Library and Archives Canada; the Archives of Ontario; Jim White and The Northern Miner magazine archives in Toronto; the Canadian Mining and Energy Corporation (cameco), for access to their archival materials in Port Hope; the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos; the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History (formerly the National Atomic Museum) in Albuquerque; White Sands Missile Range Museum; the Atomic Testing Museum and the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation in Las Vegas; the Yucca Mountain Information Centers in Las Vegas and Beaty, Nevada; and the Greenland National Museum and Archives. To Julie Salverson of Queen’s University I owe much. Without the friendship that developed between us, this work would be quite different. Her uncanny grasp of the poetics and significance of objects,

xiv / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

and her unnerving ability to ask the right question at precisely the correct moment – these things are registered in this text. As to all the other others, the incomplete list must include the ongoing support and friendship of Jonathan Bordo, whose work has long enriched my thinking and scholarship; Sherrill Grace, for her work on the North and her interest in mine; Rae Staseson, for her support and all those melancholic sunflowers; Charles Acland, Martin Allor, Matt Soar, Kim Sawchuk, Andra McCartney, Maurice Charland, William Buxton, and all my colleagues and graduate students in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University for providing a convivial and stimulating environment; Peter Blow for Village of Widows and more; Marie Clements for talking to me about her play Burning Vision; Peter Goin for letting me use “Earth Angel”; Jody Berland for her questions; Sandra Gabriele for her archivophilia, and Joel McKim for his skilled research assistance; Douglas Stilton Cohen and Michael Keene, of course; the ever-supportive Jonathan Crago at McGill-Queen’s University Press; Heather McDougall, for her last-minute proofreading skills; and Scott Zeman for showing us the Trinity site and the oryx. Glenn Macdonald’s Northern maps remain, for now, virtual. Rob Van Wyck was fearless and intrepid. Naomi Pauls of Paper Trail Publishing created the index. Portions of this book were delivered as papers and lectures at the Portland Center for Cultural Studies; Emory University; the University of Western Ontario; Université Laval; the Royal Society of Canada; Trent University; the Munk Centre, University of Toronto; York University; Ilisimatusarfik (the University of Greenland); the University of Saskatoon; and Queen’s University at Kingston. I am grateful to my hosts and interlocutors for their criticisms and insights. This work has twice benefited from the support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A one-year Visiting Fellowship at the Concordia University Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture provided me with space and time. Concordia University’s Faculty of Arts and Science provided a last-minute sshrc Institutional Grant toward the publication this book. Portions of this text have appeared in Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies and the Canadian Journal of Communication. Thanks to Howard White of Harbour Publishing for permission to

ACKNOW LEDGMENTS / xv

use the Al Purdy poem from Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, Harbour Publishing, 2000. Angela, although named last, was there from the start. And always.

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1

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1.01 Field Note: Great Bear Lake — 30 July 2003

To start a story at the beginning is of course not an odd thing. Not really. As though one had a choice to begin elsewhere. As though a later object could somehow reach back and make one’s having begun into other than what it was, into something else. Beginnings are like that. So to sit here now on a windswept glacial beach at the tip of Grizzly Bear Mountain peninsula and write the beginning of this, let’s say, story, in no way poses itself as an historical proposition. This is not my business. Rather, what it may be is an example of how it is that history itself reaches forward to organize the present. This seems more agreeable to me. The “now,” as Walter Benjamin might put it (meaning, of course, the now as the actual site of history). This, we may add, is the secret complicity between the past and the present.1 Yesterday this all began with a trail of tears, with Indians and potatoes, and Irish famine activists. Another route. Another mourning. Today, however, today is different. Today it begins on another lake. A proper name. Great Bear Lake. Yesterday I was reminded of what I knew four years ago. And what I knew then was that the Highway of the Atom was a story about ethical theory. It was a story about the aporias of responsibility. It was a story, foremost, about the infinite character of responsibility. I still know this to be true, but today I am in a different place. I am on the lake. By which I mean of course Great Bear Lake. Mile zero of the Highway of the Atom, where the wind blows with a fierce intensity, falling down the ancient hills, pouring onto the lake to lift the water’s surface into waves. This shall be the metaphor for today: the wave. It makes sense, really. For on the lake it is all about scale. Which is to say, it’s all about an amplitude, and a frequency. The lake and the waves. A present, and its projection. Or a past. The wave. A wave goodbye. The sound wave. A sine wave and a sign wave. The tidal wave and the swell. The waves. Again and again. Amplitude and frequency together bursting in sound. Something is struck, put into motion, a kind of vibration. A sympathy, in other words. Like the sympathetic magic where things once in contact remain connected, somehow, when they are apart. An affinity and a sympathy.

4 / THE HIGHWAY OF THE ATOM

And, like the other magic, the sympathy can sometimes be about the similar too. Mimesis. Another kind of sympathy: for I am like you. This time it is an intimacy of form, or at least of formal qualities. A wave, let us say, is a self-similar structure of sympathetic origin. The wave goodbye. The hand that touched the cheek, reaching out in a parting contact, remaining warm from the touch, resembles itself as a parting frequency, and amplitude. This, my sorrow, again and again. Today it begins here, because it really began there. And, like a long wave, it signals through the route to its significant points. One could call this movement communication; following its itinerary to its scheduled stops, to its intersections. An historical transmission.

I wrote this piece of melancholic prose as I was beginning an eastward route across Great Bear Lake in the summer of 2003. It seems strange to me now. Many of my “data” look like this; like tears, someone said. What makes these field notes of interest to me is that they are occasioned by a kind of contact – a place, a text, a story, a landscape. They are a record of a kind of encounter. Surprising facts, we might say after the great semiotician Peirce. Facts that demand a mode of abduction – what state of affairs might be imagined that could account for these things? They are about having been somewhere. A lake, a mine, a town, a river, an archive, a ruin. It doesn’t really matter; these are just the things that constitute a particular repertoire of events. They can be seen in kinship not only with “theory” (conventionally understood), but also with “story.” They are also and therefore pieces of testimony. Yet this is a long way from clarifying things. As witness, I am too late. The witness is always too late – and perhaps for this reason testimony is always strangely complex. “There is no testimony,” wrote Derrida, “that does not at least structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacra, dissimulation, lie, and perjury – that is to say, the possibility of literature.”2 This, of course, is to take away none of the force from testimony, but rather to place it in a zone of undecidability. For, on the other side, “if testimony thereby became proof, information, certainty, or archive,” Derrida continued, “it would lose its function as testimony.”3 That is, in order to be testimony, it must be haunted, although this too is far from clarifying things.4 My notes are pieces of testimony, they do register events, but it is the nature of this testimony, and the status of these events, that must be explained.

PART 1 / 5

I begin on the lake, then, with this gesture of the wave, which like memory seems almost involuntary. To explore this place and this time – and our time too, inaugurated by a wave and occasioned by a lake, a river, a mine and a route – I will find myself, and perhaps you as well, writing about many things. The fragments, pieces, reflections that constitute this work are a commentary on a place and a time from which I am, and remain, a bewildered stranger. A term of neither grandiosity nor self-negation, bewilderment, to become bewildered (and I would insist on the processual over the static, so perhaps becoming-bewildered is more like it) is of course not the same as being lost, although it is related. In fact, there is a certain and interesting lack of symmetry between the two terms. Lost, being lost, seems much more comfortable with the categorical; you either are lost, or not. Whereas it makes less sense, intuitively at least, to speak of becoming lost, unless we are being particularly metaphorical in our usage. This bewilderment to which I refer, and I will stop just short of calling it a critical bewilderment – at the risk of suffocation under the mass of terms – is a kind of movement of going astray, of confronting an ambiguously located wilderness, perhaps inside, perhaps outside, or both. It is to be unsettled, off the path, but not unmoored completely (this would be precisely the phantasy of “going native”).5 What follows is a manner of story-telling; that is, theory – patterned versions of possibility, or better, virtuality. It should be read not as complete ideas, or even arguments. But rather as instances of my uncertainty.

1.02 Archive

Tennis court, Port Radium

I want to wander through a story that begins (or ends) at a place not far from where I now sit. At Library and Archives Canada there is a vast repository of objects that one might wish to relay into concepts. Of particular interest to me are some thirty-four metres of objects – more often called records – belonging to Eldorado Nuclear Limited. This archive contains a story about Canada, and in spite of the fact that, for reasons of secrecy and bureaucratic inertia, it has been largely inaccessible, I want to relate my attempts to approach this invisible story and to reflect on certain questions of method as I do so. Indeed, over the course of this work the question of method has become the abiding concern, eclipsing perhaps the story itself. Thus “The Highway of the Atom” has come to designate two things. First, it is a proper noun. It pertains to the route over which uranium passed through the North of Canada, then to Port Hope, Ontario,

PART 1 / 7

and then into the productive centres of the Manhattan Project, and so on. Second, it refers to a field of inquiry involving questions of fieldwork, method, trauma, disaster, landscape, knowledge, and memory. Although this text follows many conventions of scholarly work, I have attempted to retain the fragmentary structure of the inquiry as it progressed.6 In a way, it stands as an argument against the certainties of academic work. At the same time, it is a call to the humanities – already besotted with questions of memory and history – for a renewed engagement with place. Place as site, as historical, as lived (being-in-place), as experienced.7 It is a kind of writing – a chorographic writing, I have come to think – that attempts to conform to a landscape of questions. A writing that attempts an intimate and subjective engagement with place, “as offering a form of understanding that is between description and explanation.”8 Of course, all the standard disclaimers apply.

1.03 Tracking Stories

Untitled, Port Radium

The history of the Eldorado mine at Great Bear Lake is long and tangled and very much tied up in the mystery of radium and the equally dazzling mystery of North. It is part of Canadian mining mythology, full of repeating figures, contradictions, colourful characters, and intrigue, and largely absent of a sustained recognition that the North was actually inhabited before incursions from the south. Of course, myth is a large and begging word to use here. Let us say that the Eldorado story is mythological in the precise sense that it draws on repetitive story elements of a cultural origin. And it is not mythological, in the sense that it reveals nothing about the order or meaning of a world beyond (or before) human understanding. So I suppose it might be better to refer to it – after Bringhurst – as a “social mythology.” Such a mythology would then be understood less as “attempts to celebrate and understand the world than [as] charters for its wholesale exploitation.”9

PART 1 / 9

Although the “popular” story of Eldorado is known within Canadian mining circles, there is no canonical version outside of these circles. In fact, few knew much about it at all except through the documentary Village of Widows, which flashed up briefly in the late 1990s, which, to say the least, did not have an ideological spin pleasing to those concerned with commemorating the achievements of Eldorado. Here, I will simply set out some of the significant versions of these stories about this bleak episode of the twentieth century, in part to show how the development of radium and uranium in the Canadian North brought with it parallel developments in technology, transportation, and communication, but also to think about the stories – white stories – that were told in the conquest of this particular North.10 The Dene, of course, have their own stories about how the mine came to be, and although these narratives are much shorter than the white versions, they are also multiple and complex. I will come to this later. But first, to look at the Eldorado side of things, there have been several attempts to produce large-scale histories of the company and, particularly, the mine at Port Radium. The archival records that contain virtually all the relevant corporate information about the mine and its directors, practices and policies, communications, and so on, are all in the hands of Library and Archives Canada (lac) – all thirty-four metres of textual documents, and thousands of maps and photographs – and have been since Eldorado was privatized in 1988. However, the situation with this collection has been almost hopeless for researchers. Because Eldorado was at one time a Crown corporation, the collection was decreed to be subject to the provisions of access-to-information and privacy (atip) legislation,11 resulting in a laborious and frustrating procedure whereby each document sought from the collection had to be requested and processed by an atip officer who, acting on behalf of the Crown, would decide if the document in question could see the light of day. I say “subject” to the atip provisions because the collection’s standing vis à vis this legislation was presumptive – “in spirit,” as the archivists would put it. What this meant was that the review procedure had to be followed, but without benefit of any of the rights normally accorded to those making such requests. If files had previously been viewed (and, hence, de facto cleared for viewing), this procedure was unnecessary. However, the vast majority of the Eldorado collection has not been open for viewing since being placed on deposit in the National

10 / THE HIGHWAY OF THE ATOM

Archives. This, together with a woefully understaffed complement of archivists and atip officers at lac, results in a slow and frustrating progress through the archive. The interested researcher is essentially unable to access this material except to see what had already been seen. In 1983, Eldorado became a subsidiary of the Canadian Investment Development Corporation (cidc), and in 1988 the federal Crown corporation Eldorado Nuclear Limited was amalgamated with the provincial Crown corporation Saskatchewan Mining Development Corporation to form the private Canadian Mining and Energy Company (cameco), which until 1995 was still owned by in part by cidc.12 Around the same time, cidc created another subsidiary, the Crown corporation Canada Eldor, the corporate successor to Eldorado Mining and Refining Ltd. Eldor is wholly owned by the Government of Canada, for the purpose of following up on the affairs of Eldorado (lawsuits, pensions, documents, etc).13 In essence, Eldor is a shield to protect cameco from liability pertaining to past practices of Eldorado. None of this was particularly clear until quite recently. cameco had been presumed to be the “donor” of the Eldorado papers, and was taken as the de jure owner of the collection. In 2004, the “donor” pulled the plug on the entire collection: its formal status became closed (Code 10). No access without permission, and no permission would be granted. It is unclear why exactly this happened. It may be that the kinds of requests being made under the de facto application of the atip legislation appeared potentially inflammatory; after all, the closure happened to coincide with the efforts of Déline, nwt – in the context of their land claim settlement – to document Eldorado’s activities on their lands, and their connections to it (pathways of exposure, kinds of employment, etc.). Thus, what had been treated as a quasi-governmental collection, and accordingly subject “in spirit” to the atip legislation, was transformed into a private collection, beyond the purview of the legislation and no longer available for viewing. The collection was again secret. I don’t suppose this will ever get sorted out completely, but at some point around 2003 lac came to realize that cameco was not in fact (or law) the owner (or donor) of the collection, and that Canada Eldor was. At the same time, a request for access to Eldorado files was made by the fact-finder, Intertec Management Limited, that had been contracted by the Canada-Déline Uranium Table (cdut).14 The

PART 1 / 11

committee wished to obtain specific information that would assist in reconstructing levels of past exposure to radioactive material and in answering a host of questions that the community needed to resolve concerning virtually everything to do with their relationship with Port Radium, Eldorado, transportation, and so on. When Canada Eldor became aware of their responsibilities for the historical materials of Eldorado, they simply closed all access.15 Accordingly, the fact-finder’s request was formally denied.16 The timing of all this could not have been worse. What had been a difficult archive to access was now impossible. Perhaps this is not an unusual state of affairs, but, to be clear, the donor (Eldor) denied the Canadian government (that is, the CanadaDéline Uranium Table) access to files and information that had been, until they pulled the plug, protected precisely because they were documents that belonged to the Canadian government.17 This is, I suppose, a working demonstration of bureaucratic irony, but more significantly it was a decision that has affected lives, and that never for a moment came under public scrutiny. All of this to say that the central archival repository of this history remains for the Dene unread, unexplored, and inaccessible. This has affected the trajectory of this research, of course, but it has also shaped the outcome of Déline’s search for answers. A recent round of changes to the Federal Accountability Act (2006)18 have now placed cidc and Canada Eldor formally within the atip legislation – and, with them, the Eldorado collection.

1.04 History The question of the archive is not … a question of the past. derrida 19 Movement within a landscape, whether on water or occasionally on land, can be seen in the linear image of water moving down to the sea, or … of the rivers being tentacles of the protean sea reaching over the land. In other words, the movement (life) of human beings is always analogous to the line water draws upon the land. wiebe 20

In his breathtaking manifesto of twentieth-century crisis, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin issued a warning. A caution, that is, that when we fail to remember it the past threatens to disappear irretrievably. This is not the quasi-obsessive historical dictum that not to know history is to be doomed to repeat it. Rather, this is about memory. Cultural memory. A sobering caution, itself largely lost. The present text describes a very Canadian exercise in forgetting. It is an account of a marginal history dispersed temporally and geographically, at the core of which lie stories about the vicissitudes of trauma and history, method and memory, and other things too. Like any work, this text has several derivations. One follows from a large project of mine that culminated in the publication in 2005 of Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma and Nuclear Threat.21 In this work I was attempting to account for some aspects of an American project to permanently inter nuclear wastes in the desert of New Mexico. In particular, I became fascinated by the requirement that, once the wastes had been stored deep beneath the desert surface, a marking scheme would be put into place to deter human intrusion into the site for a period of ten thousand years. The placelessness of these spent nuclear materials, most of them derived from military (as opposed to commercial) applications, set in motion an impossible and fascinating search for a sign system that could operate into the deep future. It signalled a remarkable point in time where a people

PART 1 / 13

had to entertain the thought of their own passing; where a future equal to the accumulation of the past had to come under administrative control; where signs came to be invested with the burden of the present’s techno-military activities; and where the toxicity of the present would be transmitted to the future. At the level of a story, it is an astonishing piece of American history, with a vast cast of characters, documents, and controversies. What I have attempted to derive from my research into all of this was, on the one hand, a theory of (ecological or nuclear) threat that reflects the distinctly contemporary features of “the nuclear” and, on the other, an argument showing the impossibility of inventing a semio-technics that would operate apart from human practice and memory. That is, a sign would be charged with the responsibility to perform the work of future commemoration. A thought without a thinker. Because the American project has been closely monitored by other nuclear nations, its philosophy and the parameters of its design are likely to be duplicated elsewhere. Accordingly, the machinations surrounding the deep storage of nuclear wastes in the United States have had, and will continue to have, important repercussions elsewhere. It struck me that the question of how a problem is thought is exceedingly important and is particularly fraught when its implications have such temporal reach: ten thousand years. Three hundred generations. It might as well be forever. My current interest in Canada’s North and the radium and uranium that were produced there between 1930 and 1960 is in this sense an extension of the Signs of Danger project – a backstory or prequel, one might say. Knowledge of Canada’s role in producing materials for the bomb, and the subsequent postwar nuclear buildup, is not at all widespread or well understood. This is understatement. Eldorado Gold Mines was the central corporate protagonist in this piece of marginal history.22 From the terra nullius of the mid-Depression Canadian North, Eldorado was to “invent” a decidedly modern North not once, but twice, from a site on Great Bear Lake, at a place known to some as Port Radium. From this place, Eldorado pioneered two uniquely modern Canadian staples – staples that created strange loops connecting the premodern fur trade routes and the very deadly projects of atomic modernity. This particular North began in 1930 with one of the richest radium and silver mines in the world – a “mineral museum,” as it was

14 / THE HIGHWAY OF THE ATOM

called, featuring an abécédaire of minerals and metals, the most valuable of which was the radium-bearing pitchblende. At the time (and ever since, as far as I know) radium was the most valuable commodity on earth. It was held to be a substance of miraculous power; it was action at a distance, a tonic for health, and a scourge of the cancerous cell.23 Reminiscent of the recent and ongoing public furor concerning aecl’s isotope production (nuclear McGuffins, for sure), radium – because of its apparent inexhaustibility – was once poised to fulfill a promise of medical democracy: radium for all. In the second instance, this time at the dawn of the Second World War – with an Eldorado about to be transformed and fortified as a corporation of the Crown – it was seen as a critical and strategic Allied source of uranium and technologies of refinement. This ore made its transformed debut at Alamogordo in July of 1945; its entrance was reprised shortly thereafter, over the clear morning skies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The aptly named Eldorado archive, vaulted by Library and Archives Canada, is a kind of black box, a grail, on the Highway of the Atom. Largely inaccessible to researchers since the time of its deposit, it contains papers – the reports, minutes, and drafts; marginalia and maps; photographs, sketches, tables and figures – that might collectively, one could imagine, divulge something about the details of Canada’s involvement in a war effort to invent something that promised to eradicate war itself. It is thus a repository – a phantastic abridgment of testimonies and stories – of considerable interest to those who may wish to understand this time through the optic of what was kept and what concealed of the remains.24 That is, the now as the actual site of history. Although I have barely begun to explore this potlatch of objects, what I know already is what is not contained in this archive, or what is made present only as an absence, as the inductive terminus of a via negativa. The published record on all of this is scant. The circle of citation orbits around two corporate biographies, one on Eldorado, and another on Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, both researched and written by Robert Bothwell under contract to the corporations involved; together they have come to constitute a kind of proxy archive of necessity.25 A reviewer for the American Historical Review figured the Eldorado book as follows: “A company history is often a sign of trouble. It frequently signifies the passing of a generation of managers, the need to clean up the company image after

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a corporate catastrophe, or the loss of institutional memory. Increasingly corporate histories are now being written as part of a long-range planning process. This book by Robert Bothwell is an example of all of the above.”26 The Eldorado volume, written between 1981 and 1984, is not historically inclusive (covering the company history only until 1960), nor is it a critical work, nor does it consider issues of health and safety or Aboriginal involvement, nor did Bothwell consult (or address) the Eldorado archive comprehensively. It is unclear why. Bothwell acknowledges that he had the support of Eldorado, wide access to its directors, employees, former employees and resources – and, significantly, access to the company records before they were put on deposit with Library and Archives Canada in the fall of 1984.27 Nonetheless, this work and, to a lesser extent, the aecl history have functioned and continue to function as the authoritative, historical datum for virtually all research, journalism, activism, dispute, and land claim–related work that touches on this history; that is, the work of a single author under a contractual arrangement with a corporate body has come to constitute the field of historical facts for all questions pertaining to Eldorado. In addition to Bothwell’s work, and the inaccessible company papers, other sources of archival documents exist, although Ottawa remains the resumed El Dorado, so to speak. Visually, the mine is exceedingly well documented by the hundreds of photographs taken by scores of journalists and other visitors to the mine over its history. A German immigrant and photographer by the name of Henry Busse established a photography club at Port Radium in the mid-1930s, and as a result there are thousands of amateur photographs of life at and around the mine28 (including what amounts to a genre of solstice image particular to Port Radium of multiply exposed frames showing the sun cutting a low arc across the horizon). Many of these photographs and a number of other documents, maps, and journals are held in the nwt Archives at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife. The offices of The Northern Miner magazine in Toronto have a very good set of files with clippings covering the entire period from 1929 onward. The museum in Norman Wells has an ongoing exhibit of documents and images from Port Radium, and in it one can see the image of the “fused sand” plaque (see § 2.05).

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Port Radium was such an extraordinary place, time, and project that the miners who worked there tend to be fiercely loyal to the maintenance and propagation of its mythos. Two former employees have published books chronicling their time in the North: Fred “Tiny” Peet’s Miners and Moonshiners, and Robert Jenkins’ The Port Radium Story.29 Jenkins emerged briefly as a critic of the Dene’s claims about cancer. There is also a very interesting and quite detailed unpublished manuscript by George Inglis entitled “History of Northern Transportation Company and Eldorado Nuclear Limited” that can be consulted in Ottawa.30 Eldorado began its own historical work in the late 1970s, when it hired Jane Mingay to conduct an oral history project with former Eldorado employees.31 A number of these documents (interviews, background papers, assessments of extant historical resources, and bibliographies) are among the Eldorado papers in Ottawa, many of which I have been able to consult. Like so many projects that have been and continue to be conducted in the North of Canada, this archival absence refers to the stories of those people who actually live there, who laboured on the Highway of the Atom, and who watched as their lands were contorted into a site of “national self-realization.”32 Yet their story – their stories – remain closed to others in different ways as well. Of course they are inaccessible, if we mean by that geographically remote from the south: a pious and ironic alibi. But, more than this, they are closed because many from elsewhere have not had ears with which to hear them. It seems clear as well that voices from the North seldom gather sufficient force to rise above the colonial din of southern, settler life.

1.05 Writing

In my journal from the summer of 2003 there is a note that reads: “an emphatic geography creates the language for its own expression.” Oddly, I don’t recall having written this, yet there it is. Nor am I certain that I know exactly what I meant by it. Journals can be like this. Writing that is purely occasioned by a place – in situ writing – sometimes travels poorly. But it offers nonetheless an opening into thinking about the language of landscape, about site and about place. The landscape I am concerned with is in the North – understood, that is, as place, as idea, and as limit.33 Lucy Lippard writes somewhere that every landscape is a hermetic narrative. But this puts too much on the side of reading, and leaves not nearly enough for writing. What I find interesting – far more interesting – is a mode that “paints more than it digs,” as Barthes put it,34 reminding us perhaps of the productive intimacy between image and memory.35 He continues: “The semiologist is, in short, an artist (the word as I use it here neither glorifies nor disdains; it refers only to a typology).”36 And the task as he figured it is to “play with signs as with a conscious decoy.” The sign “is always immediate … like a trigger of the imagination.”37 Barthes then goes on to identify the things to which this mode of tentative analysis is, above all, attracted: narratives, portraits, he says, expressions, idiolects, passions, and “structures which play simultaneously with an appearance of verisimilitude and with an uncertainty of truth.”38 On this account, semiology plays with the sign “as with a painted veil, or … with a fiction.”39 All of this to say that one must remain mindful, always, that to make an interpretation is foremost to make something. In other words, this interpretation is always as much about writing as it is about reading. Invention is there from the start. And so is story. Accordingly, one’s method must seek to place inquiry into a question of making: that is, of writing – narrative, portraits, expressions, passions, and so on.

1.06 Map

Radium barge no. 423, Hay River

Accordingly, there are many things in play. There are archives. And within the various levels of accessibility and restriction, some of these materials can be consulted. At the outset, this work was to rely on the trickle of documents that emerged from the Eldorado papers in Ottawa. It was a question of effort and resistance, of access-to-information requests and the inertia of the lac. Because Eldorado had been a Crown corporation, it was treated by the lac in a curious manner. It was subject to privacy legislation “in spirit.” No one was ever quite able to explain to me this spirit. It was as though the network of evidence had a centre, yet this centre was hollow and silent. Its capacity to testify to the events I was drawn to was checked by a spirit. The site of the archive, the imperative it seemed to issue to the practice of research – the knowing that the boxes and files contained a residue of events, the trace of a corporate structure, a logic, in other words – at first appeared to structure this work around its very absence, as though its silence

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redoubled its authority. My wish to see what had not been seen was permuted into a desire to see what could not be seen; a strange repetition that was to echo throughout this work. There are people, Dene, who were involved in various ways with the mining and transportation aspects of the Highway of the Atom. There are people – again, Dene – who have taken this up as an important piece of traditional knowledge that requires urgent and careful attention. There is the land – the territorial archive, as I have come to think of it – upon which this time is etched at various locations, although the legibility of this inscription is difficult and contested. There is the Dene’s apology to the Japanese, and the question of how it is that one comes to assume responsibility for events over which one had no knowledge or control. There is the abiding question of method, and how one ought to go about a work such as this. What kind of writing, in other words, does the Highway of the Atom demand? What imperatives might there be? My impressionistic journeys to the North, to archives, to monuments and graves, to airfields and ruins have sought to identify residues and other forms of leakage. Stains on the land, on the territorial archive. Some of the leakage is “real,” by which we might mean material, at least in the case of the stain down the Highway of the Atom, measurable in the half-lives of boats, barges, building materials, mine tailings, and so on. But some of the leakage doesn’t quite have this kind of materiality, statistical or otherwise. This sort of leakage might be narrative, or memorial, or archival, or indeed might have the character of a deferred action through some traumatic mechanism. This is not too difficult to imagine.40 Leakage comes in many forms, such as a 1943 Lord Haw-Haw radio broadcast promising that the “Japs would blast Port Radium and Norman Wells off the map.”41 Accordingly, a method emerged as the direct result of two things. First, the (perhaps obvious) realization that the secret archive could not (and ought not to) exert a ghostly authority over this work. And, second, beginning in 2002, a series of excursions to sites along the Highway allowed me to understand the archival absence not as the limit of the work, but as its operative principle. The archive as site gradually shifted toward the archive as practice. Through a mimetics of necessity, the dispersal of materials along the Highway – the strange loops (temporal and geographic), the network of effects, the tropes and figures – came to figure an archive equally dispersed.

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Archivally speaking, the Highway of the Atom is about placing oneself “downwind.” After which, the practice called for is one of gleaning. Gleaning, a practice of the periphery, of the remainder. My practice of gleaning the remainders involved a series of trips to Great Bear Lake, Port Radium and Déline, to Hay River, Norman Wells, Inuvik, and Fort Smith; to Yellowknife, Rae, and Edmonton; and, trying to figure out Harold Innis’ field practice by retracing his steps with his journals in hand, up the Mackenzie River from the delta to Great Slave Lake. I spoke to people, I listened to conversations, I looked around, I made photographs and sound recordings, I collected and read everything I could find. And I wrote. I made trips as well to archives and monuments, museums and libraries throughout Ontario, across New Mexico, the fabulous Northwest Territories archives in Yellowknife, and British Columbia. I came to think of this all as addressing an archive, a territorial archive, dispersed, but nonetheless in situ. Perhaps all of this amounts to building a semiotics, yet one with no signified at the centre to hold things together. All one can do is search for discursive figures, for regularities and discontinuities, and to engage with types of material “evidence” that are as many and as varied as can be located. A difficult task, given that the very question of evidence, or the evidentiary, is itself subject to its own decay, half-life, and interpretations. It strikes me that the multiple and varied modes through which the route must be conceptualized (material, narrative, memorial, etc.) tells us that such work requires a methodological and conceptual openness, and the cultivation of something we may call a hermeneutics of leakage. I have found myself advancing this project along all of these fronts, and with each I find myself involved with a larger problem than I had imagined at the outset. Particularly significant has been the question of working in the North as a southerner and a stranger. A stranger to the community and to that Aboriginal way of living, and a stranger to that part of the world, the North. This relationship of being an outsider, and attempting to think, not against, but within this relationship has occupied a great deal of my attention. But not only this. The insurmountable question of writing is perhaps the leitmotif of this text. The mythopoetics of the Canadian North for the southern stranger have come to stand as a more general figurative position for me. Although the problems posed are not purely the function of geography or latitude, this dimension of place brings them into relief.

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This piece of marginal Canadian history ought to be looked at. To me, an interested reader of Harold Innis, the development of radium and then uranium as Canadian staples made this project an ideal opportunity to site a cultural theoretic project within a Canadian historical context.

1.07 Theory

This is not only a story of ecological catastrophe suffered upon a community. This is not Grassy Narrows, or Love Canal, or Chernobyl. It is not only that this community has been traumatized by what it came to know. There is always more. One way of thinking of this more, is that it involves the entire set of investments that it brings to the site of academic work. In this way it is both personal and abstract. Let me explain. I received much of my academic training during a period of intense political and theoretical upheaval within “Cultural Studies” in its various North American institutional settings in the 1980s and 1990s, when the legacy of the various turns of structuralism/post-structuralism (received in North America, bizarrely, in reverse chronological order) – and the disenchantment of the pre-feminist left (as Roberta Hamilton once put it to me) – placed theoretical work in a decidedly precarious position. There is no reason to rehearse all of this here, but the de-centrings, the post-foundational displacements, and the hermeneutics of great suspicion created a kind of anxious quietism on the theory front. The basic manoeuvres that came to be expected of theory, the almost ritualistic chanting of affinities and denunciations, came to seem politically and affectively debilitating. Add to this the proprietary infighting among the various institutional sites of theoretical production, and it became exquisitely difficult to continue the project of academic work. It is slightly ironic that the very work of the new humanities has been so central in showing nature as a zone of figurations and prior commitments, that the question of oikos (now besieged by pestilence, disease, warming, cooling, and so on) has returned with a vengeance (at the risk of sounding paranoid). The Highway of the Atom has revealed itself to be a kind of corrective and conduit into this morass, for me at least. It is not only a hermeneutic problem. It is in part a problem of ethics (insofar as it involves witnessing death and the stories of others), in part a problem of method (insofar as it involves navigating an archive sans

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frontière, so to speak) and in part a question of the practice of writing (insofar as it demands attention to the productive, inventive, and creative imperatives of interpretation). As Kevin Dwyer puts it, in order to pursue the other, one must become able to pursue the self; and the self must therefore be exposed. Anthropologists, perhaps sensing that to expose the self is necessarily to place it in jeopardy, have for the most part been unwilling to take such a gamble … [T]hey have refused to admit that the very possibility of dealing … with the other is tied to the capacity to put the self at stake.42 Ethics, method and writing. Such questions, and the field practice they require, never get settled. They remain the neuroses of theory. So what do I mean, specifically, by a field practice? It is certainly not “going native.” What I have in mind is far more haphazard and far less mimetic. It is certainly not a kind of scientific gesture of distance, nor that of a formal ethnography. I am interested in a kind of field practice that is decidedly subjective. Indeed, to get from one to the other requires a tremendous discursive shift that leaves behind a great deal.43 What one gains is a mode of intensity, along with an awareness of subjective emplacement. And of bewilderment, perhaps.

1.08 Field Note: Apology — November 2002

Anyway, the apology. This is what is left. The remains. In the wake of all the rest of this, it leaves me shivering with the thought of insurmountable difference. Yet this thought is just that: a thought. How does one come to settle this difference? To adjudicate it? Surely this is not the end of the story. One must not end up in silence, in a political and ethical quietude. It is not, after Wittgenstein, that of which we cannot speak. It is, rather, that of which we are unsure. There is a difference. Or indifference. To continue the analogy, we are not adept at seeing-as, particularly when such a seeing conflicts with other cultural investments. To see a relation between ourselves and the gesture of the Dene apology is to attempt to understand the possibility of a resonant relation that might tell us something. About justice and ethics? But then again, “we hate people who try to make us form connexions we do not want to form.”44

So, after having spent some number of years writing about the other end of the process – the placelessness of spent nuclear materials – I began to think about this place in the North of Canada, about how it is connected with southern history, and about what exactly this Highway of the Atom might really be. This is a piece of marginal history only because the south has never been interested in knowing about it. It is a history that is precariously contained in the aging memories of those involved, documented (though largely inaccessibly) in metropolitan archives, and materially deposited on landscapes in the North and elsewhere. As history, it is largely latent, untold, unasked. A history too unformed to be rubbed against the grain, as Benjamin recommended of historical practice. A history in suspension, yet one that is very much alive. In its wake, people are dead and dying. Dene mostly. But also the white miners. And others too: at the beginning of 2010, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only recognized survivor of both atomic bombs, died at the age of 93. Body counts always depend on how one does the arithmetic.

1.09 The Route

The Radium Trail, 1934

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foil, v.1 I. In sense of Fr. fouler. 1. trans. To tread under foot, trample down. 2. Of animals: To trample or tread down; to tread into mud; esp. in Hunting, to run over or cross (the ground, scent, or track) with the effect of baffling the hounds. Also absol. of a deer (see quot. 1886); refl. of a hound: To spoil his own scent. (OED) A route is a foil: it is a track (a mark, a line) and a concealment, the effacement of the line. The foil foils. Yet one can follow a foil, sometimes with ease. Sometimes not. The foil in question, the Highway of the Atom, around which this text circles, was from the beginning a palimpsestic economic and colonial path used by Europeans carrying furs, food, and disease, and subsequently carrying radium and uranium. Call this Highway of the Atom1. This material passed through the North of Canada, leaking as it went, into the productive centres of World War II, and subsequently extended itself over the morning skies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and back again into the community of Great Bear Lake in the form of cancers, stories, addictions, and depression; hauntings. Call this Highway of the Atom2. In the first sense, the Highway is a piece of historical geography. A fur trade route, really; a conduit from margin to centre. One can make a map, point to it, measure it, follow it. At one end, Great Bear Lake. A vast inland sea. Nearly 12,000 square miles. Shore to shore, you can travel almost 200 miles, perhaps more. On the far eastern shore, where no one lives today, just below where the treeline cuts across the immense glacial body of the lake, carved into barely fathomable depths sometime in the late Pleistocene, at the end of what is now called McTavish Arm, buttressed in ancient granites by the very western edge of the Precambrian Shield, lies Port Radium. Deep fjords and talus slopes, mural precipices and greenstone hills. At the other end, the very other end, is Waterways, Alberta, now known as Fort McMurray. The “end of steel,” as it was called, the end of the railway; another stamp, another route. And in between is, well, the Highway of the Atom. In one sense the route is fairly simple. At least I could give you instructions and you would probably find your way, like this:

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When you reach the end of steel, the terminus of the Northern Alberta Railway, you’ll be in Waterways. Put your boat in the Athabasca River, then head downstream, just head for the ocean. At Lake Athabasca, find the Slave River. Mind the portage at Fort Fitzgerald, there’s four sets of rapids there, so it’s a long one; nearly 18 miles. These days it goes all the way through to Bell Rock, but in the 1930s, before the landslide at Fort Smith that erased the landing site, it was about 14 miles. When you get to Great Slave Lake, look at the far western arm for the “River of Disappointment” – as Alexander Mackenzie was moved to call it upon his discovery in 1789 that it led only to the Beaufort, and not the Pacific – and just follow the current. At Fort Norman, follow the Great Bear River upstream into Great Bear Lake. About halfway up, there’s another portage around the St. Charles rapids. When you come onto the lake you’ll be just a few kilometres from Fort Franklin. (Until recently, you’d have been able to see the Radium Gilbert – the vessel that traversed the lake between the mine and the Great Bear River – on the other side of the bay.) From here, just go northeast for about 200 miles, right across the lake, and you’re there. That’s it. Fourteen hundred river and lake miles; 835 miles by air. At least that’s part of it. Another 2,600 miles of rail travel was required to get the bags of ore to the refinery at Port Hope.45 This is a very long route, full of meanders. Oxbows, like footnotes; failed riparian experiments. Ideas. Highway2, however, is in no way merely geographic (if geography can be mere). This Highway asks different (though related) questions. How are we to understand the history and the memory of this time through such a route? How long is the Highway, really? It certainly goes to Japan, but where else? How much leakage, and where? As the half-life of memory asymptotically approaches a vanishing point, these questions grow more fragile and thus more pressing. If brought together in thought, these two Highways efface their subscripts. They cannot do without each other. History and memory, shot through with geography and place, converge on the Highway of the Atom as a problem. This fractured route that we call the Highway of the Atom has an imposing name that locates the route precisely within the atomic

28 / THE HIGHWAY OF THE ATOM

modernity of the twentieth century. Perhaps the name itself derives from the title of a short 1953 corporate film (made by Crawley Films of Ottawa for the Northern Transportation Company); perhaps its source is elsewhere.46 I’m still not certain. In Niger, for example, there is a 500-mile “Uranium Highway,” so called because over it the French transport uranium from their mines to the sea port in Benin.47 Harold Innis referred to the Mackenzie River as a “highway” in his Mackenzie River journals of 1924, but he never was much interested in uranium, or in highways for that matter.48 I think the name was probably coined by Crawley for the film, but this is of minor importance. From a geographic point of view the route began on Great Bear Lake, at what is now known as Port Radium. From here it moved westward across the lake to one of two points. In the long winter months when the lake was covered in ice, the route involved aircraft. Planes would land and take off from the ice in front of the mine site, or from an airfield at Sawmill Bay, some 35 miles to the south. The flat, sandy topography of Sawmill Bay allowed the bulldozing of runways for flights heading south to Edmonton, to Fort McMurray, or elsewhere. During the brief shipping season (roughly mid-July to mid-October), however, a much more arduous route was taken. Materials destined for the south were loaded onto ships and barges appropriate to travel across the lake. Before the development of the mine at Port Radium, Great Bear Lake was not part of the Mackenzie River transportation route. At the time that Gilbert LaBine staked the claims, there was only one commercial boat, a small (15 ton) craft owned and operated by the free trader, A.W. Boland.49 He also had a small fleet of “rapids boats” that operated on the Great Bear River between Fort Norman and Fort Franklin, handling loads up to 3,000 lb. The Hudson’s Bay Company had two large boats that operated on the Mackenzie – the Distributor, and the Mackenzie – both wood-burning paddlewheelers. Within two years after the mine was in production, the Hudson’s Bay Company moved the Liard River to Great Bear Lake (this is the same boat, by the way, that Innis took down the Mackenzie in 1924). By 1934, LaBine had commissioned his own lake boat, the merchant vessel Great Bear, to be built in Waterways. Edmonton entrepreneur Cy Becker established the Northern Transportation Company Limited (ntcl) in 1931. In 1936, the company was purchased by Charles and Gilbert LaBine, who in turn

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sold it to Eldorado Mining for $87,500. In 1976, ntcl ceased to be part of Eldorado Mining and became an independent entity, although still a Crown corporation. ntcl had a profound effect on the development of the western Arctic. Although purchased to supply Eldorado mining, it always acted as a general carrier. In 1948, the ntcl was dominant in the Arctic transportation industry in the Northwest Territories, and in 1960 it received the contract to supply dew (Distant Early Warning) Line sites and began operating on the Arctic Ocean.50 Fuel came from Fort Norman, initially, and then Norman Wells, with a considerable drop in price when a pipeline was constructed over the portage on the Bear River. This basic movement of modernization and cost efficiency repeated itself across a number of domains. As more boats were placed on the lake, the cost of freight fell dramatically. For example, the cost for freight in 1931 was $400 per ton, and by 1934 it was down to $90. When Canadian Airways discovered the efficiencies made possible by the (otherwise wellknown) bush and tundra practice of caching, the cost of air freight fell accordingly. One can see in these details Innisian themes. The development of radium and uranium at Great Bear Lake presupposed a number of parallel developments. To begin with, there was the remoteness of the mine; previously, the costs of a mine so distant from markets and processing would have outstripped the good sense of its investors, if not the potential value of the resource itself. Processing ore for radium requires massive amounts of chemicals and scientific expertise. At the time of the “discovery,” however, there was no consensus as to which chemicals and what scientific expertise. The process had not been undertaken in Canada before, and while the technology existed elsewhere (with the Belgians, for example), a considerable effort on the part of the federal Department of Mines was required to determine the precise industrial process required. The conventional story that it was in fact Marcel Pochon who developed the extraction techniques is apparently apocryphal.51 Pochon is a fascinating character in all of this. A former student at the Curies’ institute in Paris (he is said to be one of the few such students to live past the age of forty), he was recruited by Eldorado from his tin mine in Cornwall, England, where he had been recovering radium from uranium. His exotic academic heritage gave con-

30 / THE HIGHWAY OF THE ATOM

siderable weight to the development of the processing plant in Port Hope (another story that deserves its own treatment) and the mythology that came to surround it. At the time the health and safety standards for handling radioactive materials were whatever Pochon said they were; he has since been described as the only acknowledged authority on this subject in the free world. When Fermi and the others came to the United States, Pochon was one of their first contacts: they came to Port Hope in secret. Later when they had spills at Columbia, Pochon was the man who cleaned them up – or at least directed the cleanup. Paradoxically, Pochon’s laboratories in Port Hope were incredibly dirty, and his daughter told us in an interview recently that Pochon’s radium uptake was so great that his teeth glowed in the dark. No one understands how he lived so long.52 Pochon was later to become tragically entangled in an international radium-trading scandal, lose all his money, and die of lung cancer in relative obscurity. The health and safety record of Eldorado at both its Port Hope plant and the mine site on Great Bear Lake was grim. As late as 1946 an Atomic Energy of Canada report concerning radon in the mine found that “dangerous conditions were clearly indicated,” on the order of “1000 times higher than the usually accepted tolerance.”53 The same report discloses that three radiation surveys conducted at the Port Hope facility in 1945, including one by the National Research Council, concluded that “medical hazards at Port Hope were extremely grave, and that the intensity of uncontrolled radiation was far above any accepted or acceptable tolerance.”54 It is also said that Pochon arrived in Canada with several grams of pure radium, and that it may in fact have been this radium that was used to demonstrate to shareholders and the press in 1933 that Eldorado was a fully functioning radium producer. Various sources concur on this point. In particular, preliminary work undertaken by Eldorado on a corporate history – a project entitled “Eldorado’s Historical Resources” – makes this claim. About 10 years after Port Hope had produced its celebrated first gram of radium Gilbert LaBine admitted under rcmp questioning (we have the rcmp report of the interview) that he had

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“once” bought radium from Pochon. “Once” turned out, under further investigation, to be 1933, the year Eldorado “produced” its first gram – sending its stock up to $8.10 (over three times the previous market value).55 Returning to the lake, river transportation in the early years of the Eldorado operation was, if not primitive, insufficient to handle the people and materials that would require transit. The technologies of freight transfer were exceedingly slow, and at the outset the Hudson’s Bay Company held a virtual monopoly. Air transportation across the north was not yet well developed, and even with gasoline caches salted across the North, was exceedingly expensive. There was virtually no wireless radio network in the North, and the efficient coordination of labour and resources at a location so remote from processing facilities and markets was impossible to achieve without it. Similarly, Canada had no experience with marketing radium, and the Belgians had been enjoying a global monopoly for nearly a decade. The water route from the mine to the railhead in northern Alberta – almost 1,500 miles of water and portage – required tremendous labour and a variety of river craft and vehicles. From the mine site, the material was taken by lake boat and barge across Great Bear Lake to a transfer point at the top of the Great Bear River, just a few kilometres from Fort Franklin (Déline). In the early years, lake travel was accomplished with one of the two Hudson’s Bay Company boats, and by the Speed. By 1936 Eldorado had purchased Northern Transportation, and successive boats were commissioned to service sections of the Highway: the Radium King (1937), the Radium Queen (1937), the Radium Lad (1937), the Radium Gilbert (1946), Radium Charles (1947), Radium Yellowknife (1948), Radium Franklin (1951), Radium Dew (1955), Radium Miner (1956), Radium Prospector (1956), and Radium Trader (1956). The Bear River is a fast-flowing and shallow river, and as it cuts through the St. Charles mountains, it has a 6-mile section of difficult and shallow rapids. In the early days these rapids were traversed with flat-bottomed York boats and similar vessels. But to carry the upstream and downstream freight that the mine required was impractical for such small craft. A portage was established, and material from the upper river would be off-loaded onto trailers, towed across the portage, and reloaded on river boats for the lower half of

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the river. Boats were very expensive, but labour was exceedingly cheap. The invisible labour of this work was done by Dene workers from Déline and Tulita (Fort Norman). At the mouth of the Bear River the river boats were again unloaded and then loaded again, this time onto large river boats for the trip south up the Mackenzie River. Navigation on the Mackenzie system is notoriously difficult, and as development along the basin area grew, it became difficult to find qualified river pilots. (This likely accounts for how it was that some of the pilot jobs were given to Dene.) South of Fort Smith, navigation is made challenging by many meanders and a minimal depth on the order of 5 feet. Each new season presented an entirely new layout of channels and sandbars, with the result that river pilots had to learn the river anew each year. Barges had to be loaded according to the anticipated water level. This shifting situation on the Mackenzie proper was magnified by a number of other obstacles. There was the shallow water of the Providence Rapids. Upstream, tugs could manoeuvre only by pushing one barge at a time. There is a very long stretch of fast water and rapids beginning some 70 miles upstream of Fort Simpson; in particular, the Green Island Rapids were the site of a number of lost barges. The Sans Sault Rapids, with very fast water, posed difficulty for upstream travel, particularly in years of low water. And there was the Ramparts, the most inspired vertical corridor along the Mackenzie River, where the river narrows between high cliffs on either side. The costliness of freight added to the general improbability of mining in the far North. Material transported over the Highway was loaded five times and unloaded six, at a minimum. The frequency of handling could be increased if, at various points, materials had to be warehoused, or stacked in order to wait for available barges, as happened frequently during particularly busy freighting seasons. At Waterways, materials were transferred to the Alberta and Great Water Railways for a 280-mile trip to Edmonton, and from there on to the Canadian National or Canadian Pacific railway for transport to Port Hope, Ontario, another 2,100 miles or so. All along this route there are many sites with actual – that is, material – forms of contamination. Some of these sites have been identified and cleaned up, or identified and not cleaned up. As for others – well, we are not certain.56

1.10 A Gentle Compulsiveness

In following a route such as the Highway of the Atom, one must take care. History, as Maurice Halbwachs wrote, may leave us passengers on a boat. As the riverbanks pass by, everything he sees is neatly fitted into the total landscape. But suppose he loses himself in thought … Later on he will be able to remember where he travelled but few details of the landscape … he will be able to trace his route on a map … [but] he has not really been in contact with the country through which he passed [emphasis added].57 Good advice for the distracted traveller; to be lost in thought is surely an occupational hazard. But how to really be in contact with the country? This is the question. Yet we suffer, here as elsewhere, from having too few routes into the past. And perhaps into the present, too. From the point of view of this route – this Highway of the Atom – what is the power of the past, apart from our efforts to reconstruct it? Is it, as Peirce put it of memory, a gentle compulsiveness?58 It doesn’t seem very gentle. Nor is the imperative clear. The image that comes to my mind is musical – a kind of contortion of Bruce Chatwin’s realization that “music is a kind of memory bank for finding one’s way about the world”59 – or, in other words, musical phrase as a “kind of map reference.”60 The route, showing my own European roots, might thus be thought of as contrapuntal; that is, punctus contra punctum. We might then shift this thought from the note against note of polyphony, to a moment against moment, or point against moment. Then our route would not be simply a horizontal movement, a line, a vector, a spreading path, an extension, the lay of the land. Rather, we would think of it, simultaneously, in its vertical development – as with bodies of all kinds – in a presupposition that is both generative and controlling. Extension and intensity. Paradigm and expression.

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The extension of the route is also a thickness of intensity, a palimpsest. Really, there’s no point in making a new portage when there’s one already there. What, then, is the art of memory proper to the route? How are we to understand the mnemotechnics of the route as an idiographic succession of topoi?

1.11 Material

As a question of history and memory, the Highway of the Atom is singular. It is not a history symbolically deposited at a site, figured as a monument. It is a kind of history that literally – that is to say, materially – persists in the present in the form of ruins and memories. These are inadvertent monuments by virtue of what they have come to transmit. This is the power of the past. There is, of course, no simple opposition here between memory and history. Memory, writes Nora, “takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things.”61 Yet this may cut too sharp a distinction. It may leave out the possibility that memory and history are not strictly antithetical. Traumatic memory, for instance, which is certainly a mode of historical transmission (operating below, or apart from, conscious recall) is discernable precisely in spaces, gestures, images, and objects particular to memory; so it is to suffer from a history not entirely experienced in the first place. This is the line of argument taken by Diana Taylor, who shifts the terms of the field by focusing on the relations between archive (as material traces of culture) and repertoire (as embodied memory and practice), and argues that performance itself is a critical mode in the recuperation and transmission of memory (traumatic or otherwise). Performance, its very repeatability, likens memory to trauma, she says.62 Yet with an expanded sense of archive – the territorial archive – the distinction between lieux and milieux is already less rigid, more porous. It includes all of the material and immaterial deposits, residues, and remnants from which the living may transform a past into the realm of active and ongoing memory. A territorial archive is that matrix from which the past is transformed by the present not as history, as mere record of past events, but as sites of active and ongoing concern. Concrete social practices – political, memorial – articulate with a territorial archive in the production of a site of memory. Bordo, after Mulvaney, calls these “keeping places”; Nora calls them lieux de mémoire.63

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In this sense, there is no need to blast history into the present. It’s already there. Rather, the problem appears to be one of representation – that is, of modes of transmission or communicativity. Or perhaps modes, because we speak here not only of a territorial archive (dispersed as it may be) but also of material scattered along a route. Leakage. There is material leakage all along the sides of the Highway, as well as on the vessels and barges that used to traverse it. The merchant vessel Radium line: the Radium King, the Radium Queen, the Radium Lad, Radium Express, and of course the Radium Gilbert … and so on. The rest of the list: Cruiser, Prince, Gilbert, Charles, Scout, Yellowknife, Franklin, Dew, Prospector, Trader and Miner. And the wooden barges – towed or pushed, according to conditions – of the 1930s and 1940s, most of which are now gone, salvaged for firewood and building materials, and the steel barges that followed for other uses, including the two I saw – one in the Mackenzie at Inuvik, and another just off Old Town in Yellowknife – that have become floating homes. And there is leakage at Fort Smith and Bell Rock, at Fort McMurray, at Hay River and Fort Norman, and at Cache Island.64 But also, further downstream, at Wrigley and Tulita, at the Bennett and Franklin landings on the Great Bear River, at the Sawmill Bay airfield and around the remains of Great Bear Lodge, at the mine site itself, of course, and in Great Bear Lake where, over the years, Eldorado dumped something on the order of 1.7 million tons of mine tailings. And Port Hope – The Town that Radiates Friendliness, as it once dubbed itself – where there are still homeless heaps of radioactive materials in temporary sites around the town. The Highland Drive Landfill, the Pine Street Extension road bed, the South Ravine, the Alexander Street Ravine and the Waterworks Site, The Granby Landfill, the Harbour, the Viaducts area, and the Welcome site. The Chemitron Lagoon. Welcome.65 This material presents itself as a kind of confluence between a nuclear concept of half-life – How long before it’s half gone? – and a biological concept of LD50 – What’s the lethal dose at which half are dead? As Deleuze and Guattari say of the machine,66 I will say of these materials: we do not ask of them what they mean – a senseless question – we ask only what they do. How long, and how much – these are the questions proper to nuclear materials. And, of course, where. Where have we put them? Where have we forgotten about them? The clicking of a Geiger counter, indexed to these materials, is taken to be a sensuous rendering of atomic decay. Over here, more;

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over there, less. A disclosure. Yet there is nothing there to see or be seen, or to hear, or to taste or smell. It is not simply concealed from sight; it falls entirely outside of the register of the visual itself. Elsewhere I have called this, after Derrida, “absolute invisibility,”67 but as Lippit correctly points out, even this “remains a form of secret visibility: it is seen in the other senses, as another sense.”68 The invisible is already destined for visibility. Lippit’s argument is that with the advent of the entire atomic field we enter into a radically different regime of visuality, a visuality in excess of the visible invisible / absolute invisibility posed by Derrida. The mode of visuality here is the avisual. Lippit writes: The unimaginable nature of the destruction [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] has produced a proliferation of concrete and abstract, literal and figurative tropes of invisibility that move toward the atomic referent. The visual materiality of the tropology is marked by erasure and effacement, by a mode of avisuality that destroys the lines between interiority and exteriority, surface and depth, visibility and invisibility. Avisuality is the possibility of the spaceless image, the impossible figure of that which cannot be figured, an image of the very facelessness of the image.69 Avisuality stands as a limit point, gesturing blindly toward the impossible vision signalled by the atomic detonations. A visuality without images. It may be that this is the visuality proper to thinking more generally about atomic threat. It might provide the traveller on the Highway with a necessary concept (if concept it is) to think of the manner in which history – and its articulation in and as the present – clings to the Highway. After all, that’s what’s left. The remains, the litter, the dross. Everything else is gone, in ruins. One is left with all manner of signs. It is really the domain of the forensic semiologist (as though there were any other kind). So the question is, what kind of signs are these strange objects? The ruins are one thing, but the material is something else. Ruins are easy. One finds them, and brings them back; here, look, a shard. And then comes the crushing disappointment. The avisuality of nuclear materials does not work this way. They do not signify as ruins. They are not part of the same signifying regime. And this is one way of explaining what makes them such difficult objects.

1.12 Village of Widows

Man on machine, Port Radium

Something happened as I was beginning to become interested in Canadian uranium history that added another, and in a way much more profound, dimension. This may actually say something general about how it is that one comes to define a problem; what it is, in other words, that makes a good question. About the time I was beginning to think about all of this, I saw a documentary film by the Canadian filmmaker Peter Blow. His 1998 film, Village of Widows, which aired on the Canadian cable channel Vision TV, was exactly the history I was thinking about, only it was told from the point of view of the Sahtú Dene of Great Bear Lake.70 Made from contemporary video shot on location by Blow and his crew, along with extensive archival footage, photographs, and newsreels – he did a lot of research – Village of Widows really is a harrowing tale that, at the time, no one knew about. So he told the story. Village of Widows relates the experience of the Dene, who have resided in the region for three or four thousand years – or for-

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ever, if you ask them – and their involvement over a period of thirty years with the development of these exceedingly modern staples on their land.71 They were deeply involved, as Blow’s film demonstrates, in the transportation of radioactive pitchblende ores from the mine site on Great Bear Lake. With testimony from elders, Blow’s film reveals an unknown narrative concealed within a story that was itself largely unknown. The Dene had also been involved at and around the mine site in various support roles – providing moose, caribou and fish for the mine’s kitchen, firewood and building timbers, beading, crafts and clothing, and performing miscellaneous jobs. Still unknown is whether any Dene men worked underground at the mine. The Canadian government concluded there had not been any Dene miners. I’m not so sure. The answer to this probably remains to be unearthed in the archives. As a result of this labour, the Dene contend that they have suffered the loss of many of their kin – men mostly, and children – to cancer. Although the dangers of mining and handling radioactive materials were well known to both the American and Canadian governments,72 neither the miners nor the Dene were given much at all in terms of training or awareness about the dangers of the materials they were handling, the radon they were inhaling, or the wastes that were strewn about at the mine and at other points along the Highway of the Atom. As it turned out, and quite unbeknownst to them, not only had the radium and uranium mined from their land contaminated their waters, lands, and population to an unknown extent, but the uranium had come to be used in the development of the bomb, and in the massacre of Japanese civilians – as southerners and the Dene were told – to save lives and end a war in which the Dene, at least, had had no hand. This was a revelation. There was no knowledge of this, not this kind of knowledge. When the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry took place in the mid-1970s, Thomas Berger convened community hearings in thirtyfive settlements between northern Alberta and the Beaufort Sea, collecting testimony from nearly a thousand Dene, Métis, and Inuit. The pipeline proponent, Canadian Arctic Gas, had argued stridently that opposition to the pipeline project was “confined to a few radicals in Yellowknife.”73 Berger’s travelling inquiry discovered otherwise. When the inquiry arrived at Fort Franklin (Déline) in June 1975, extensive testimony was given concerning the opposition of the community to outside development generally and the proposed

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pipeline from the Arctic coast to northern Alberta. Witnesses emphasized the importance of experience, of local knowledge, and of autonomy, but at no point of which I am aware was the history with Eldorado entered into the record. It was just not, at that moment, an important feature of their past.74 Nearly a generation had passed. The miners, gone. Boats and barges beached or sold. It was about the middle of the 1980s that the Dene became officially – that is, publicly – aware of the significance of their historical activities; until then, it hadn’t really been a question. A motion was passed in 1989 at a Dene Leadership Meeting held at Fort Franklin that resolved to support efforts to engage the Inuvik Regional Board of Health and the Minister of Health to “investigate the circumstances of the old Port Radium Mine.” Yet in the early 1990s, for example, in the wake of the politically charged climate of the Indian and Dene Brotherhood movements, oral history projects undertaken by the Dene themselves pass over this time and this history in silence. One must surmise that it was not deemed a sufficiently significant piece of the past to warrant its recollection as testimony. Instead, the interviewees recalled their previous movements, their summer camps, their caribou and fish. They lamented their grandchildren’s disconnection from the land and from tradition. They spoke of the centrality of experience to their way of life. But they did not speak of the era of Port Radium.75 That is, their collective history project did not register the fact of the Highway, its purpose, and the threat posed by its material, memorial, and symbolic legacy. Contamination. The absolute invisibility of radiation. From Port Radium to Déline, down the river to Tulita, then up the Mackenzie and into southern Canada, and beyond. The rocks from their land, the cancers in their community: these things had not relayed into this kind of understanding. Not until then. By the mid-1990s the Dene had become well informed about the connections between the mine, their labour, and the health of their community. The reaction was complex. Certainly, it politicized the community around questions of health and radiological contamination. A report was authored that collected their memories and assembled what little documentation was then available. Their task was to write the history of their exclusion using the very documents that excluded them. Nonetheless, what they were able to show was that the story told in these documents also pertained to their story, that they had indeed worked for Eldorado in a number of capacities,

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that the government was fully aware of the danger posed in the mining, handling, and processing of pitchblende ores, and that they had never been told any of this. As it appears to me, in the wake of these realizations the Dene came to interpret their role in the most complex manner: as both accomplice and victim. One can see something of this in stories that have circulated in recent years. I paraphrase a story told by the late George Blondin that references an ancient Dene prohibition concerning the very site of Port Radium.76 The Dene had always known it was bad medicine to travel in front of the area now known as Port Radium; it was said that loud noises came from within it. For some reason a group of Dene hunters had camped there, and in the morning the medicine man told them of his dream, in which he saw white people going into a large hole in the ground with machines. He saw boats on the lake and huge flying birds loaded with things. They were making something long, like a stick, that they dropped on people, burning everyone.77 In counterpoint to the if only we had listened to what we already knew tone of this story, another began circulating – a kind of creation story – in which the genesis of the mine itself was predicated on a theft of a pitchblende-bearing rock. In this story it is Gilbert LaBine – the main protagonist in white mining mythology – who steals a rock by trickery from a Dene man by the name of Beyonnie. The stolen rock revealed the secret of the radium and uranium folded into the Precambrian hills, for which the Dene, of course, were never properly compensated. In this way, they were positioned as both victim and accomplice. As to the former, the Dene sought recognition and compensation from the Government of Canada. Their land claim negotiations were under way, and the story of the mine, their involvement and their exposure, needed to enter into the accounting. As to the latter, they disavowed the vortex of history and archive, and the also vortical administrative discussions of sovereignty, rights and self-government, and moved directly into the realm of the ethical. In 1998, on the anniversary of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Dene did something exemplary, unthinkable: they organized a formal expedition to Japan to make a call for peace and to apologize to the Japanese and Korean hibakusha (bomb survivors) for their role, their labour, their complicity (unknowing as it was), and foremost, the complicity of their land – the territorial

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archive that was now indelibly stained with the record of their collusion. In a particularly poignant scene in Village of Widows, the Dene find themselves in a hospital for Korean hibakusha. Much like the Dene experience in Canada, the story of the Korean labourers in Japan (some 40,000 died in the detonations or their aftermath) is absent from the official histories of the time.78 The Dene disaster required that something be done. The issue was procedural. It required that a responsibility be acknowledged and acted on; an apology was to be made. In other words, for the Dene, the entire apparatus of implication, the mining company, the Crown corporation, the processing facilities in Port Hope, the secret laboratory at the Université de Montréal, the interjurisdictional industrialmilitary complex (the British, the Canadians, and the Americans), the principal nations involved in the uranium economy (the Belgians, and the Germans), the entire route through which those materials passed, infinitely beyond their sphere of knowledge, influence, and concern, was bypassed.

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2.01 Punctum

In August 1998, to coincide with the anniversary commemorative events held on the fifty-third anniversary of the atomic bombing of that city on 6 August 1945, a delegation of ten Dene went to Hiroshima.1 They went to the end of the circuit, the end of the route that we will call the Highway of the Atom, to convey their apologies for having been involved, and to acknowledge their responsibility. What had not been registered as traumatic in the first instance – or at least no more or less traumatic than any other of their historical and ongoing contacts with Europeans and southerners – was in a way even less so in the second.2 This was the punctum that drove me to this impossible work to begin with. I use the term carefully. Derived as it is from Roland Barthes’ final work, Camera Lucida, and long debated by theorists of the photograph and image, the photograph’s punctum refers to a kind of co-presence that he detects in certain photographic images.3 The first, studium, has to do with a kind of average effect, something that brings us into alignment with the photographer’s intentions. “It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally … that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.”4 In a sense, the studium signals a relay between the total field of the image and what the spectator brings to it. It describes no significant operation beyond that of preference, interest, liking. It is the second element that interferes with the studium. “This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element that rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow and pierces me.”5 He continues, “This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”6

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Here, I shift this term from the domain of the photographic image and place it in the realm of thought as image. I see it as a kind of irreparable detail; a detail that is at once disclosed as knowable – as part of a narrative, a story, a biography – and yet is unassimilable. It is irreparable precisely in the sense that, once known (seen, felt), it can neither be undone nor (at the outset at least) understood. If the locus of the irreparable brings to the fore a situation calling for decision or action – “its use calls attention to the unique and precarious nature of some object or state of affairs, and stresses the timeliness of our relationship to it” – the punctum may in fact signal the impossibility of action.7 The punctum, then, falls strangely on the side of reception. It is particular, it pricks me. Within the sad arc of the story of Canada’s first uranium, the Dene’s trip to Japan is a punctum. It leads me to ask how one comes to assume responsibility for that over which one has no control. How? How in the midst of recognizing their own disaster did the Dene attend to the Japanese survivors? What economy could account for this? Was it, perhaps, a gift? Or was it a piece of ethical behaviour called into presence by their disaster itself? Struggle though I have, I cannot answer this question. It occurs to me, though, that Rudy Wiebe offers us a clue. Writes Wiebe: “[H]istory sometimes offers us a moment, a crack as it were, where a certain light can illuminate our ignorance.”8 The crack of interest to him – in the supplementary Coda to the reissued Playing Dead – takes us to Fort Providence, a Hudson’s Bay Company post, in December of 1821, where Franklin, Richardson, a sailor and a Métis translator have been brought, barely alive, having been rescued by a group of Dene (Yellowknife Indians). Franklin has explained to the Dene that the supplies from which he was to pay them for their generosity in (again) having saved them by sharing their meager supplies with the English exploration party had not, and would not, arrive that season. No supplies meant no payment could be made. As Richardson records in his diary, upon hearing this sad news the Dene leader Akaitcho noted their disappointment: “The world goes badly,” he said, “all are poor. You are poor, the traders appear to be poor, and I and my party are poor likewise, and since the goods have not come in, we cannot have them. But I do not regret having supplied you with provisions, for a Red Knife can never permit a White man to suffer from want on his lands without flying to his aid … At all events,” he added in a

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tone of good humour, “it is the first time that the White people have been indebted to the Red Knife Indians.”9 Wiebe is fascinated by this moment, this crack, as am I. As Wiebe sees it, Akaitcho is telling his English friends: “This is our land. You came here without us inviting you, but we fed and clothed you so that you could live here. After you left us, and we heard you were dying, we went to your aid immediately. We saved your lives because it is the nature of Dene people to help every human being.”10 Perhaps, then, just perhaps, this is nothing new. I have come to think that the Dene’s response to their slow-motion, retroactive disaster was irreducibly ethical, for they had nothing to give. Their actions did indeed graft something onto the real; it was profoundly ethical in this sense, at least.11 Yet an analytic optic on this is somehow not quite right. Ethics is more than damage control. More than reactive. Notwithstanding the conceptual seductions of trauma theory, one must be careful; the real remains a theoretical problem, not an alibi for, or gesture toward, silence. One may wonder if there are perhaps the seeds of a categorical imperative here, recast as something strange: to behave toward the other as though one were responsible for their misfortune? Is that it? What, then, would constitute a Dene model of the accident? Is it that over which one has no control, and in spite of that (or, as I come to suspect, because of that) it is that for which one comes to assume responsibility? The archive ratified a memory of a trauma never experienced as such, and the Dene saw in their own suffering an ethical inducement toward a responsibility for the other. The mind reels; or mine does. And the mine did. Peter Blow’s documentary followed them on their journey to Japan and captured this remarkable moment of cultural exchange. Most of the travelling party of Dene had never been further than Edmonton, and none as far as I know had been overseas. This much is interesting. But more than anything else – the stories of white and Dene children playing in sandboxes filled with mine tailings; the Dene using discarded, used ore sacks to repair tents and clothing; the accidents and spills; the lack of precautionary hygiene – more than anything else, this move on the part of the Dene is incomprehensible, unfathomable. Every other is every bit other (Derrida). It is this particularly Canadian, or better, particularly Dene, historical punctum that has fuelled my interest in all of this. This is the thing that pierces, that punctuates or bruises the studium. My

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archival and hermeneutic studium. Their expedition to Japan was not traumatic, it did not engage a pathological or repetitious impulse. Nor was it simply therapeutic in terms we might call, after Freud, a working-though. It wasn’t, as far as I can understand it, in order to make themselves feel better about what had taken place. There was, rather, a kind of imperative that they were acting upon. An essentially ethical imperative. It may be the case that the ethical and the traumatic spring from the same place, from the same wound, so to speak. I think, for example, that Derrida was of this opinion in his later years; think here of his writings on Kierkegaard’s Abraham.12 But for the Dene, the historical trauma, its retroactivity, is invented in the same instant as an ethical proceeding is undertaken. It’s complicated. I expect that this will be one of the questions that do not get answered, at least by me, at least not here. How would one even ask such a question? “Why did you go?” Because it seemed like the right thing to do … it’s obvious. And when I had occasion to put this question to people in the community, the answers I received were no more revealing than this. In fact, my interest in asking the question to begin with was seen as a bit odd. Blow’s film has stuck with me since I first watched it. It was a remarkable achievement in that it brought to light not simply a story that was seeking to be told – in a way, until Blow’s film was made, there was no story to be told – but through the patient organizing of oral narratives and historical and archival materials, it created a key moment in the retroactive and traumatic re-evaluation and politicization of the past that the Dene were becoming engaged with at the time the film was made. It was also responsible for bringing a great deal of attention to the village of Déline, the site of Port Radium, and other significant locations along the Northern transportation corridor; to the very fact of Canada’s integral role in the development of the Bomb; and to the allegations that the former ore carriers and workers were dying of cancer as a result of their unprotected labours. In particular, Andrew Nikiforuk of the Calgary Herald wrote extensively about the “Village of the Widows” and the history it referenced. And other media outlets – e.g., cbc’s television news program The National, Maclean’s magazine, the Toronto Star – throughout Canada and elsewhere also covered the story in relation to the Dene’s trip to Japan, and the community in relation to the Village of Widows documentary. For the Dene, as it appears to me at a distance, the film was instrumental in a process of completely resignifing the preceding half

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century. Memory itself came under siege by a knowledge that had the power to rewrite and resignify. It is not that the pieces started to fall into place; they were just pieces. Falling. An imperceptible tide of suspicion washed over the past. In a stroke, lives lived in and around the mine, on the river, the portage, and the lake, were transformed into something quite different. The health and abundance of fish and game, the unimaginably vast lake, the land, upon which everything depends – all this was thrown into question. Domestic life, the very intimacy of the home, the oikos, was also and retroactively contaminated. Families began to recall that they had been living with radioactive ore dust, ore bags repurposed for domestic and sanitary uses, contaminated building materials scavenged and used elsewhere, and that standards of hygiene appropriate to hazardous radioactive materials and gases (radon) were not enforced, much less taught or recommended. Details gathered new and grave significance. Dust and dirt became “tailings.” Hands not washed became precautions not taken. Caribou and fish were freighted with risk. Even, and perhaps particularly, the deaths of those who had already passed were no longer secure. Symbolic death was denied to the dead. In this way, the past, their past, was itself rendered toxic by virtue of a retroactive catastrophe of knowledge; a traumatic reversal toward events not experienced as traumatic in the first place. If we are to say that to experience a trauma is to experience a causeless effect (causeless, because the traumatic event exceeds the subject’s capacity to experience it in the first place), then in this case there was, until recently, in a sense neither cause nor effect.13 Time and knowledge delivered both; not a history of disaster, but history as disaster.14 A history that consumes itself, its remembrance, its witnesses, and its evidence. Ghosts there are (not cinders, or pictures). This amounts to a paradigm, it seems to me, of the workings of ecological disaster. Something happens here and now, because it really happened over there and then. This, I would add, is par excellence the great conceptual achievement of ecological thought. Not the logic of the train wreck, the earthquake, or the flood – isolated events in time and space. In this the very structure and fabric of culture and memory are damaged, imperilled.

2.02 Rice Christians — Who Knew?

In a real sense the land does not lie; it bears a record of what men write on it. In a larger sense a nation writes its record on the land, and a civilization writes its record on the land – a record that is easy to read by those who understand the simple language of the land.15 The last great El Niño famine in China took place in the late nineteenth century, between 1875 and 1880. The British evangelical missions saw in this “wonderful opening of famine” an opportunity better even than war.16 They called the converted “Rice Christians.” Fifty years later, when Canada’s first radium boom took place, the Canadian federal department of Indian Affairs recognized the mining activity on Great Bear Lake as an ideal opportunity to involve the Dene in wage labour as the carriers of cargo. The Dene – “coolies” – were promised money, schools, and religion. In 1931, [t]he hazards involved in the handling of high-grade radioactive materials make necessary the adoption of certain precautions. By a careful check on the workers and the adoption of all necessary precautions, it is possible to reduce the hazards to a minimum. The fact, however, that radium or radioactive substances once deposited in the bone structure of the body are impossible to eliminate make the taking of every precaution a most necessary factor in the treatment of pitchblende for the recovery of radium.17 Uranium Christians.

2.03 Cargo Cult

In Vanuatu, the John Frum cargo cult is predicated upon a disavowal. On the one hand, it has to do with a cultural stain, an acquisitive imprint left in the wake of what amounts to a colonial occupation: they built landing strips and warehouses in anticipation of the arrival of more air cargo, more stuff. On the other hand, it is a reassertion of belief and an exercise in practical mimetics – which is to say, it a magical thinking of contiguity. If they build it, they will come. The Dene did none of this; as far as I can tell, they just believed that they were paid to move a cargo of ore for a few months of the year when the lake was clear of ice. That being said, there was perhaps also an exercise in practical mimetics; that is, the white miners were also unprotected.

2.04 Magic

Trauma, the very idea of trauma, finds itself in a state of indecision precisely with respect to the kind of association of ideas that founds it, that is, with respect to the mode of its derivation. On one hand, this is to situate the understanding of psychical trauma as a prolongation or continuation of the medicosurgical theory of physical trauma. On the other hand, to do so is to transpose, more or less, the elements of the later – the physical trauma – into a different sphere. “That of an extension through continuity, an imperceptible transition to an adjacent field; and that of a transposition through similarity into a field that is different but structured as analogous.”18 Here, rather than taking the retroactive explanatory force of trauma into an unknown region, I will make a slight shift into an adjacent field. Structurally speaking, sympathetic magic is founded on the same distinction between contiguity and similarity. Frazer in his Golden Bough (echoed by Freud in Totem and Taboo) explains that in the first mode of magic like produces like, the effect resembling the cause. In the second mode, “things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.”19 These accord to two principles, Frazer said: the Law of Similarity, and the Law of Contact or Contagion. “Charms based on the Law of Similarity may be called Homeopathic or Imitative Magic. Charms based on the Law of Contact or Contagion may be called Contagious Magic.”20 Frazer illustrates the Law of Similarity through the “Eskimo” prohibition against boys playing “cat’s cradle” on the grounds that doing so as a child would result in a similar, though catastrophic event as an adult – one might become tangled in a harpoon line whilst hunting whales.21 In this instance we have something that appears to be a taboo, but Frazer takes taboo to be a negative magic, the rules of which are simply founded on the same misapplication of the association of ideas.22

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The Law of Contact or Contagion is found in a multitude of afterbirth and umbilical rites, the ongoing protection of childhood teeth from misadventure and contamination, and the care one takes with bodily impressions left on the earth. (One thinks of the Pythagoreans’ habit of smoothing the bedclothes immediately upon rising in the morning.) Footprints, it seems, are particularly vulnerable sites through which one’s enemies may inflict harm. That is to say: You are vulnerable to your route. The material in question, then, I take as an oddly empirical confirmation of the Law of Contact or Contagion. That is, it is a teratogenic index – from the Greek, teras, portent, marvel, monster. As to the Dene and the question of their trauma I am less certain. The performance of their journey to Japan suggests a kind of mimetic order of action. Since their actions at home had had such profound effects over there, perhaps their journey did have a kind of homeopathic quality.

2.05 Field Note: Two Contrasting Figures — May 2003

Radium Gilbert, Déline, 2002

Between the clear and the obscure, there are little transitions. halbwachs, Leibniz Between names and reality there lies an abyss. octavio paz

I Aground, in a shallow bay near the village of Déline, home to the Dene uranium workers, is the rusting hulk of the merchant vessel Radium

Gilbert — a ship that had plied the waters of Great Bear Lake with uranium ore since it was launched in 1946. The Dene would like it not to be there. As a ruin, it is an unintended or inadvertent monument to what had been a secret history. They now realize it is a source of radioactive contamination, and they wish it to be gone.23

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This is not a commemorative gesture; it is the threat of a repetition, a traumatic inducement to a memory not quite recalled. We might say that “[i]t ties an irrefutable past … to a future that cannot be anticipated.”24 This is the problem. Fear. And trembling. “We tremble in that strange repetition that ties an irrefutable past (a shock has been felt, a traumatism has already affected us) to a future that cannot be anticipated … I tremble at what exceeds my seeing and my knowing … a secret always makes you tremble.”25 II Fastened to the wall in the mine dry (the change room) near the central mine adit at Port Radium was a jar containing a curious artifact. It contained sand that had been fused into glass in the infernal instant of the Trinity detonation of July 1945 in the New Mexican desert.26 The absolute repose of the inorganic.27 I don’t know how it got there. Robert Jenkins mentions it — but he has no taste whatsoever for irony — or, for that matter, the grievances of the Dene. But this was a commemorative gesture. Certainly. It turned a wartime assemblage of complicity, exploitation, innovation, and production into an historical and productive sequence; a mute benediction of the beginning by the end. A trophy by other means.

Meanwhile. Today, the Radium Gilbert is no longer in Déline. It was cut into pieces and stored out by the airport for nearly two years, and then finally taken away – at considerable expense – to the south, over the ice road in the winter of 2005. Two pieces of the Gilbert sit in my university office on a shelf, beside a bag of trinitite, a belt buckle from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, a pair of Fat Man and Little Boy earrings from Los Alamos National Laboratory, a ten-inch piece of nylon deck rope, and a large and slightly twisted steel tap, snipped through on one side by the same cutter that cleaved the hull to pieces. In a sense, this is all that remains for me. In another sense, the disappearance of the Gilbert is an all-tooprecise performance of a curious leitmotif – a clue, and an instance. I don’t know why, but the Band Council of Déline had purchased the boat for one dollar in the 1980s. The Chief at the time had been a riverboat captain; perhaps that was it. In any case, it was for sale. They bought it. So there it sat. Waiting to be what it was already. A threat and a reminder. And now, a ghost. As to the curious glass memento, it is now long gone and I’ve no

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Commemorative plaque, Port Radium

idea where. Probably into the basement or garage of a miner or manager. But an image of it, at least, has emerged. In the fascinating private museum in Norman Wells there is a small permanent display about Port Radium. Amid the photographs, maps, and artifacts, there is a photograph of this object, which in the summer of 2005 the museum allowed me to copy. It is an overwhelming image that lays bare any and all pretensions to Northern exceptionalism, and its naive sense of isolation. Jenkins’ mention of this does not fully capture what is at hand. The trinitite that had made its way from the Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, deep inside the vast White Sands Missile Range, was not merely “affixed” to the mine dry, as Jenkins artlessly had it. It was designed as a centrepiece for a plaque – a plywood, commemorative plaque. “Fused Sand from First Atomic Bomb; Alamogordo, New Mexico, July 16, 1945; Eldorado, Great Bear Lake, December 13, 1945.” Not yet even called trinitite. We must assume that December 13 was simply the date of the presentation, or its arrival at Great Bear Lake, though truthfully I have no idea. The “trinitite” is contained in a jar (really, a jar), and sits atop a small shelf built onto the plaque. The jar itself is wired, in two places, through holes cut in the plywood. This is the detail that overwhelms me more than the shock of the overall image. I am affected by more than the intrinsically traumatic quality of the photograph, its retroactive capacity, its quality of “prophesy in reverse.”28 It is difficult

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to describe the effect of this commemorative bricolage, this Northern atomic vernacular. The perfect embellishment of the wire conveys a dad-out-in-the-garage kind of aesthetic, a high school science project, enhancing its uncanny quality. Indeed, this was a commemorative gesture (and someone’s dad did make it in his Northern garage). The image testifies – what else can it do? – to the connection it pictures. Its evidence, pictured, is the fused desert sand; its punctum, the wire securing the jar. The image proclaims “It worked!” through its picturing of this particular closed circle. Alamogordo and Eldorado, New Mexico and Great Bear Lake, joined. It is also, and perhaps foremost, an instance of the messy function of the index, the image as index, which both motivates and troubles work of this sort. “Look! Here. This.” The that was that the image asserts – its catastrophic noeme – is never as clear as it seems. Here I begin to see the infernal doubling of my knowing, and of my seeing. On the one hand, in my reading of him, Jenkins’ brief mention of the curious artifact fastened to the wall in the mine dry had already outstripped his blithe narrative of Port Radium; if his memoire has a punctum, this must certainly be it. On the other hand, the happenstance of my discovery of this image in Norman Wells secures (paradoxically) a disturbance that is purely in excess of both knowing and seeing.

2.06 Field Note: Tulita — 6 August 2003

I have come here in the hope that seeing and being in these places will contribute to my knowing something not otherwise knowable with my conventional scholarly practices. Nonetheless, I come to all of this from a very particular site, or set of sites. As a Canadian, as an interdisciplinary scholar working in the new humanities (dare we call this Cultural Studies?), and as a member of a European settler culture, located near the mythic forty-ninth parallel in North America. Never mind that most of Canada’s population is south of this line. Such details are powerless. Canada’s nordicity draws its legitimacy — epistemological and otherwise — its up-here-ness from this topographic misunderstanding. Here one must observe that the semantic freight of North is unmoored from latitude — its home is the imaginary, and is forged and fortified through a manner of colonial metonymy that both invents and ceaselessly ratifies figures of North from the equally imaginary site of southern Canada. It is a question of one and many Norths. Always. As with other parts of the world, Canada has a fraught relationship with its antipodes. Or Norths. There is of course the historical North, to which is tightly coupled the imaginary North. There is a real North, though this is far from clear; at least it isn’t from where I now sit in the warm light of subarctic summer. And then there is the North as it has been represented for those from elsewhere. But, foremost, for southern Canadians of settler heritage, North is a shifting and contested discursive field. The exotic North, the dangerous North, the paternalized North, the marginal North, the romantic North, the erotic North — those tireless tropes so intimately tied to equally tireless narratives of exploration, occupation, and wonder.29 As Marianna Torgovnick puts it, in a slightly different context, rhetorics of desire have come to replace rhetorics of control.30 And yet this desire is never quite certain, never quite able to leave behind its documents of barbarism. To all of this we might add another register: the traumatic North (trauma in itself as a raven on the discourses of the exception?).

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To go North always seems to require giving an account of what it is that one is doing there. What one seeks, I think, is a kind of southern “state of exception,” to the extent that this is possible. Or desirable. A suspension, in other words, of a certain set of southern institutional regimes;31 for the Northern traveller always tends to overpack, as it were. The idea of North is always in a way an experimental and empirical check on the suspicion that if world and language are in a critical and secret collusion, then seeking a different world might help invent a different and critical language; this is, on the face of it, a clearly utopian project, a project under which too many ships have set sail already. It is a project littered with boats and journals and bodies and poetry, frozen all and desiccated. And living people too, though not very many, the signs of whose occupation are nonetheless everywhere (if only because they have been there “forever”). The North, “a semiotic tragedy,” writes John Moss, is so freighted as North, that it is difficult just to be there.32 North as idea eclipses North as place.33 As Robert Kroetsch figured it, “to write, is in some metaphorical sense, to go North. To go North is, in some metaphorical sense, to write.”34 It’s a long way from here (or there) to Iqaluit. Of course, this does not leave much on the outside of writing (except Northness), or on the outside of North (except for writing); the page itself becomes a portal to the infinity of Arctic (read: white) space. But Kroetsch’s point is that one goes North at the moment where the word “is in the process of extending itself onto the blankness of the page.”35 So here writing not only invents North as site, but it evacuates it in the same gesture, in advance of itself as blankness. And here the exception is written, or the exception is in writing, and the upshot is a Northern aporia. Here the exception may simply devolve into a poetics of silence. Stefansson did the roughly the same thing some sixty years earlier when he concluded his Northward Course of Empire with the observation that it is simply a good fortune “that we still have our frontier land in which pioneers may struggle and build, where they may dream their dreams of empire, and eventually write upon pages now blank the story of those realized dreams.”36 Always writing the North, but in Kroetsch’s case, even with the cultural transactions of “deep story” that run through his works (influenced perhaps by his

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early close reading of The Golden Bough), there is the sense that the romantic, mythic mode of a national Canadian nordicity is always somehow staged to undo itself in the same breath.37 Accordingly, the genres of North – its imaginaries, its overdeterminations – are deeply imbedded in Canadian cultural productions. Going there only brings these things into an uncomfortable relief. The Highway of the Atom and its fragmented archive are likewise embedded within the network of these investments. In addition to the challenges of writing, this poses difficult questions of a reading practice in which transliteration is insufficient. It calls upon a manner of interpretation alive to the subtle hegemonies of Northern imaginaries.

2.07 The Idea of North

The year 2007 marked the beginning of the fourth International Polar Year, a global flood of Northern scientific research. As with previous polar-year initiatives – 1882, 1932, 1957 – this was a vast undertaking. More than sixty countries participated. With Northern and polar regions coming under intense scrutiny as particularly vulnerable sites of global warming, questions of sovereignty, diversity (species and cultural), and climate have become pressing. Within the El Niño of the humanities, North has also become an object of intensifying interest. Some of this interest has to do with questions of nation, with indigenous political issues, with settlement and resources. But perhaps the most interesting of developments have to do with work that addresses itself to questions of how it is that North, or nordicity, operates within a symbolic economy of cultural meanings, and how these meanings derive from specific social and political settings; that is, North as place, as an idea, and as limit. Indeed, this is precisely the problem with “North.” Which North? North as the inhospitable, dark, and cold frontier? As hinterland? As the True North, Strong and Free? As the principal cardinal point of Canadian-ness? As the tautology of face south, then go the other way? In writing ranging from Wacousta to the Bush Garden, Survival, In Visible Ink, and so on, North is foremost a fraught and difficult place.38 There are some maps. Not many. And not many good ones. Grace’s Canada and the Idea of North is one. It goes some way to disentangling all of this, and stands as an agenda-setting contribution to this domain of Northern studies. I read this text as a field guide to the representation of North, insofar as it attempts to actually reproduce the set of paradigms from which articulations and ideas of North are fashioned. I don’t recommend using it in lieu of a map (it does, however, include some beautiful ones) – that is, I don’t think it will help you find your way about in the North – but it is perhaps something you might wish to read if you happen to

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find yourself lost (paradoxical as that may sound) in the North. Or in the south, for that matter. Grace’s book helped me in the North. It helped me to organize my encounter; its near-encyclopedic quality helped me complicate my thinking about North and South, thereby allowing me to locate some of the hard (i.e., material) complexities entailed in reconciling archive and landscape, and the subtle hegemonies of nordicity – ongoing issues in this work. Consider the following: I do not see “the North” as an exclusively pernicious master narrative that has, in a postmodernist, poststructuralist, postcolonialist world outlived its purpose and can be/must be discarded. Neither do I see “the North” as a myth, if by that term is meant a fanciful narrative with no useful relationship to fact. There are many aspects of the representations of North that are destructive and repugnant. They are often racist and sexist and almost always imperialist, even when that imperialism is within the Canadian nation-state; they are by no means always positive adventures, uplifting encounters with mystic grandeur, and so forth. The representations of North are as beautiful, powerful, inviting, disturbing, exclusionary, and exploitative as the individuals creating and using them according to the accepted standards and ideas of the day.39 This is in no way an apology, or alibi, but rather Grace’s attempt to figure North as a projective field, a field – by which we may mean a set of figures, some actual, some virtual – determined according to specific and localized needs. She continues, My task is not to judge and lay blame but to try and understand a set of practices that has told us in the past and continues in the present and foreseeable future to tell us – as a people, as a nation – who we think we are. That certain aspects of these representations are, by today’s standards, factually wrong or morally problematic does not mean that we should reject the idea (or ideas) of North, even if we could. Not only are our “nordicity”… and our sub-Arctic and Arctic geography inescapable physical realities, but the North is deeply embedded in all that we do, even, I would suggest, when we flee south. North, I will argue, is fundamental

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to who we are, to that “imagined community”… of Canada, with all its contradictions, failures, compromises, and successes. We will not change Canada by jettisoning the idea of North but by interpolating new voices into the dialogue, by actively participating in the unfinalizable process of what I call the discursive formation of North.40 I quote her at length on the North quite simply because she writes at such length about it. Indeed. This quote sets an agenda for a project – part Foucault, part Bakhtin – to revisit the discursive formations of the “North” as a persistently Canadian set of figures (whatever we mean by “Canadian,” although that’s really the point). To go North (whatever we mean by “North”; also the point) we must first do our homework. And a great deal of homework Grace has done: that is, she has assembled a staggering array of southern and Northern cultural productions about the North, from the nineteenth century onward. Music, poetry, literature, drama, music, painting, photography, film, documentary, plus a selection of anthropological and ethnographic texts and journals. Astonishing. It takes a village to write a book like this. It is not merely scholarly, addressing a gap in the field; it is as I read it an attempt at a kind of reckoning, a therapeutics. It begins, appropriately enough, not on the stark rocky shore of an Arctic island, but in an art gallery – in Hamilton, Ontario, of all places – where Grace comes face to face with William Blair Bruce’s painting The Phantom Hunter – an image, incidentally, from my own Hamilton childhood. One notes that this North of Grace’s is not very cold, and you don’t have to get wet in it, or lost. Rather it is quite well-lit, and filled with books and papers and art and films; more like someone’s study, come to think of it. This is, after all, not an ethnography. It is the northern studium as composed and reflected from the site of the Canadian institutional (archival) south. What, she asks, is the significant array of representations of the North – the discursive formations – that has significantly inflected a cultural picture of North in and for the south? Good question. And although she is not the only one to ask it, this is the first book-length treatment of its kind.41 Since its publication, two other volumes have appeared: Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North, and Renee Hulan’s Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture. Davidson’s book is

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a lovely and highly idiosyncratic approach to a Euro-northern imaginary, and Hulan’s, rather punitively, is a detailed attempt to undermine the very nationalist myths that would look to the North as a site of self-realization in the first place.42

2.08 Naming The cartography of the northern imaginary … is a system of representation open to the endless remappings and subversions of our postmodern age. grace 43

What kind of map, then, does one require? Is it the kind of map that is itself concerned with systems of representation? Surely this would not merely be a substitution, logos for topos. Grace’s map leads the reader first into the methodological sweep of her study, revealing a tableau of theorists to whom she feels a connection, and for whom the reader may likewise feel a kinship. Bakhtin tells me how to deal with representation in discourse at the level of the multi-voiced word and why it is necessary to do so. Foucault tells me how to map the field, the terrain of representations of the North … Bourdieu tells me where to look for the social practice of a discursive formation of North and how deeply installed it is in our “imagined community” of Canada.44 The company Grace seeks are those who share a concern with the relation between world and representation (within which we find subject, agency, text, and language). This is not to say, she points out, that representation is the only game in town, but rather that by attending to the social dimensions of representation one may come to see complexities and relationships not otherwise apparent. Three levels of analysis, she tells us, characterize her study of North: macro, meso, and micro.45 One can think of these as a set of gradations between myth and critique. At the first level, one treats texts quantitatively to identify their constituency and the network or larger formation within which they are elements and to which they contribute. The shift to the meso level is a qualitative turn that seeks to account for the quantitative regularities afforded by the macro view, and the micro level marks the effort to account for particular statements (utterances) within a particular signifying network.

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To this we add another trinity, somewhat similar to the first, describing a widespread thematic of texts ranging from general works on the North that submit to or propose conventional mythological tropes of North (think of Frye’s Bush Garden, or the Northern writings of Harold Innis), to more “carefully situated studies” that engage with increasingly robust problems of ethnography, aesthetics, and so on (e.g., Moss’ Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape), to works that are “overtly theoretical and analytical” (e.g., Van Herk’s Places Far from Ellesmere, or Wiebe’s Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic, or the work of Marlene Creates).46 The first category, Grace tells us, “has contributed to a myth, a largely literary and pictorial one, of North as a negative, overwhelming presence.”47 This is the North that brought us the “Eskimo,” Nanook et al., and the very idea of “Canada as northern landscape.” This is an imagistic North (and Canada), one that plays on the ambivalence of desire: “attraction and repulsion, escape and freedom, failure and death.”48 With the second category Grace points to a “wide spectrum of analysis with greater concerns for the social realities of time and place and the practices of representation.”49 Here we have texts that focus on “problems of ethnography, aesthetics, and the representation of specific Arctic or sub-Arctic experiences and locales.”50 But it is the third category that invokes the theoretical and analytical evocation of North. “The third” she says, “returns us to a dreaming, contemplative subject for whom the meaning of North is a paradoxical reality conjured from the abstractions of philosophy, and its near cousin theory.”51 Although the question of why this may be a return is not entirely clear. Works in the first category – and surely they are “works” in the Barthesian sense – are those that have contributed to the formation of a Northern mythos or imaginary.52 Here, the ground of the discursive constellation of North is born. Once again, one notes that the semantic force of North is indifferent to latitude. This is Northrop Frye’s North. The North of the Group of Seven.53 Here we might picture Glenn Gould fidgeting in a motel room in Wawa, Ontario. It is winter. He is on the run, and he is in the “North,” his imaginary site or tableau, or notational staff. This is the North of the Torontonian. Never mind that, at just below the forty-eighth parallel, Wawa is geographically south of Victoria, bc: this is precisely the point that Grace wishes to make (and where she invokes Creighton’s Laurentian Thesis).54 It is this kind of imperial metonymy

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that invents North from the very site of the summer (Ontario) cottage and that has held sway for so long in the Canadian imaginary – the exotic North, the dangerous North, the romantic North, the erotic North, not much more than a hint of challenge and danger remains, except for the business about the melting ice. And, with all due respect to those not from the centre of Canada, this is the site of the machine that has been ceaselessly constructing, supporting, and ratifying the dominant figures of the Northern imaginary. That this imaginary is articulated around a concept of “wilderness” makes no difference; wilderness is a genre within the degree zero of nordicity. Reading can be such a narcissistic adventure, but there is something about how Grace writes that I find simply seductive. If the neurosis proper to theory truly is method, then this is a wonderfully neurotic work. This is not to say that I am persuaded by everything, or that I don’t find myself uncomfortable at moments. It is to say that this is a remarkable and powerful work of insight with moments of invention. This is all getting difficult. How can North come to resist its own figurations when North itself does not exist, and cannot exist without the ground of South? North is a kind of transhistorical call-andresponse in times of need and curiosity. Or a pliant surface amenable to all manner of impositions, superpositions, and “discoveries.” However, as Grace shows, the response might just be an echo, a phantastic echo – one that is audible even in the shift from the colonizing figurations of a cold and dangerous North whose denizens cling precariously to life, through to the confessional ethnographies and naive realisms,55 to the post-theorizing works that unsettle, complicate, or even reverse the relations between witness and North, as with Van Herk, who phantasizes a staggering reversal. “I am its text,” she writes, “impressionable, inscribable, desirous of contamination, a page open to its tattoo, marking.”56 Grace issues a plea to understanding that strikes me both as similar to my own suspicions about the collusion of world and language (see above), a plea that is utopian and quite probably pataphysical. She figures that if Frobisher Bay can become Iqaluit, then perhaps “we” can learn to see North from a non-exclusively southern frame of reference. As though one may transform the world through a trick of naming. Indeed. Naming, though, is perhaps a clue. It may lead us from the space of topos to place. That is, from a topography to a chorography. Walter writes that “a place has a name and a history.”57 But the substitu-

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tion of names, whatever the motivation may be, does not of itself accomplish this transformation. Bordo would call this the difference between a location and a destination.58 “That something is ‘brought’ to somewhere to make it a place might be called the site aspect of a place because it refers to all the investments that are brought from somewhere to a locality to make it a place. Those investments in relation to place are off-site to make it a place. In this convergence somewhere becomes a place. An address becomes a destination.”59

2.09 Field Note: Yellowknife, Explorer Hotel — August 2003

Inadvertent raven, Yellowknife, 2003

The North I am confronted with seems always structured on the familiar polarity (so to speak) between inside and outside and always founded on a kind of southern anxiety with respect to the foundations of inquiry. The North was always treated as a liminal region by the Europeans — the passage, the short cut, the secret route. Even the Bering Strait allowed the North to be seen as a passage, as a cultural conduit. So Wiebe is right when he insists on an idea of North that is not always about getting somewhere else.60 Interpretations of Northern cultural knowledge seem to oscillate between two modes. In the first sense, there is a construction of these knowledges as something intrinsically local; that is, bounded, particular, and situated. On this account, specific knowledges of the North are particular and not derivable via inductive procedures from elsewhere. Here the exceptional status is clear, embedded, and cultural. In the second sense, such knowledge is cast as universal, placeless, general, and secured somehow from a platform elsewhere; a more

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overtly colonial mode of the Northern exception of a non-particularity of knowledge. One might say that the mythic signification of North always has an alibi at the ready. Against an evolutionary paternalism, there is always a cultural relativism at hand.

Yes, North is special, but what we mean by special, exceptional, is obviously what ought to draw our attention. The Northern exception is itself (at least) an historical question. And it is constituted according to a set of needs that are determined by the actual site of history. The modalities of the Northern exception – whether cast as the strategic (similar but not identical to the pragmatic), the geographic, the techno-administrative, the political, the regional and the bio-regional, the local, and perhaps most recently, the climatic – are each determined according to specificities of and exigencies of what remains, in some significant manner, external to North itself. That is, the site of the exception is both internal and external to the exception itself.

2.10 Field Note: Northern Metaphor — Norway Point, February 2005

When one is speaking to students about metaphor one must take a very specific tack. They already know about it. They already have some idea: that metaphor is different from metonymy, and perhaps even something about the charging of a primary signifier with a secondary signified, or a recognition that a metaphor is a trope based not on contiguity, but on similarity or resemblance. But because they often have a commitment to some sense of what metaphor is and does, one must carry (appropriately) the definition elsewhere. I try to tell them that metaphor is to the humanities what the laboratory is to the sciences. This is hyperbole, but not entirely. I tell them that metaphor is a kind of onto-epistemic research and development laboratory: R&D for theorists and poets. I sometimes use the example of the juggler I read about in an amazing piece in The New Yorker a few years ago. The author was talking about the craft of juggling. It’s quite an extraordinary piece of writing, and he eventually got around to saying just what juggling really is: juggling, he said, is about freeing the fluid potential of solid objects. He wasn’t being metaphorical in the least. But we then make the next move and say: juggling is to objects as metaphor is to language. If we say that North is such an object, organized by metaphors and metonymies, a near-infinite field of potential interpellations, some conventional, some motivated, are we not at the same time wishing for some tropeless object-language that would provide unfettered access? Is this not a wish to speak the world, directly?

Let us just say that to go North is complex. It is a strange cartography for the southerner. A different logic of place, with different striations than South. A smoother space in a way, but not only that. Filled with phantoms, ghosts, and hauntings of all kinds. North is a repository for longing and revulsion, for anxiety and avarice. For hope. North for us is neurotic. It motivates tomes and tombs, treaties, treatises, and taxonomies. It may be that the best way to learn about this North is to go south – to return, that is, from the

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North. This is not irony, nor merely a trick of time and the pragmatics of travel for an academic and parent. And if you happen to approach the North as a European, as a southerner, as a practitioner, as an academic, it’s quite easy to just get lost. In fact it’s just quite easy to get lost (Empire’s phantasy, after all). Here, I am not being metaphorical. Fieldwork invents a kind of fiction – this is perhaps its particular haunting – a fiction that always writes against itself as a kind of testimony. Yet there is a tendency to want to forget this, and to still end up getting lost. I have begun to think of all this in terms of an indexical imaginary, a point I’ll come to later. The landscape of North, or that fraction of it that I happen to have seen, is difficult for the stranger; this would be its excess, its emphasis, its capacity to show. Of course, in this tricky terrain, metaphors abound. Accordingly, care is required. But there are limits to what care itself can achieve. It is clear that we will not alter Canada by jettisoning our ideas of North (pace Grace), any more than we will by changing the name of the Mackenzie to Deh Cho, Fort Franklin to Déline, or Frobisher to Iqaluit. These tricks of toponymy are aimed more perhaps at reducing the burden of residual, and southern postcolonial, guilt. An apology by other means. In any case, paying a debt (the countergift) is not the same as making an apology.

2.11 Field Note: Landscape — Yellowknife, August 2007

Landscape is the site in this case. Not wilderness. It’s not wilderness because, simply put, it is far too strange. And not just because the Dene have been all over the place for millennia — leaving a cultural mark, superimposed, as it were — but because a “landscape” needs a level of familiarity in order to activate the register of wilderness. Wilderness is the strange, but for beginners. So it needs to be thought about differently, perhaps in terms of speed, or better, velocity (that is, a speed and a direction). But this is perhaps overly metaphorical — it’s not actually moving anywhere. I think we need a concept of a static velocity as a kind of metabolic rate. To think of it, a metabolism, its rate, is really about the speed at which a body operates. A cellular speed, we could say, a visceral activity. In a word, heat. The heat of living. The metabolism of a landscape is all of that, yet it remains significantly inorganic; it is made up of speeds and rest, of motions and delays, equilibria and punctuated change. And much, I suppose, that without sustained attention over a number of generations, much that is simply not on the order of the visible at all. Indeed, for the route and for its beginning, the landscape events are impossibly slow. Everything is glacial. That is, everything operates according to a geo-logic, a geological time.

In relation to landscape more generally, Lyotard figured it thus, whenever the mind is transported from one sensible matter to another, but retains the sensorial organization appropriate to the first, or at least a memory of it. The earth seen from the moon for a terrestrial. The country for the townsman; the city for the farmer. estrangement (dépaysement) would appear to be a precondition for landscape.61 How, he wonders, “could we capture the breadth of the wind that sweeps the mind into the void when the landscape arrives, if not in the texture of the written word?”62 Good question … (a laughing meadow surely sweeps the mind). “[A] landscape is a mark, and it

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(but not the mark it makes and leaves) should be thought of, not as an inscription, but as the erasure of a support.”63 As a technique of understanding the estrangement of being astray in the landscape, the very operation of metaphor is key, for it is through its workings that we are invited to invent and experiment. To paraphrase Zwicky, the basic metaphorical claim that x = y is not at all a metaphorical claim unless it is also implied that x ⫽ y.64 The ground, in other words, of poetic disavowal. I know it isn’t true, but all the same … Metaphors, not simply the laboratory experiments of thought, are “the ravens of language,” as McKay puts it in a stirring passage about de Man.65 Both this and not this. The idea of the creative and inventive play of metaphor here stands against a dreary and debased notion of semiotic servitude whereby one speaks “only by picking up what loiters around in speech”: a kind of hunter-gatherer model of language.66 Far from it. On de Man’s account, it is not about ontology, about things as they are; not even close. Rather, it is about authority: things as they are decreed to be. (If there really is something we can call non-metaphorical language, it is certain that authority lives there.) Nothing, in principle, separates the naming of one thing from another.67 For de Man, this is to see ordinary language as a zone of “wild figurations.” This unruly wild[er]ness in language is traversed by tropes, and tropes, de Man he tells us, are also travellers.68 Metaphors, the travellers of language, tourists perhaps, visitors, or smugglers (another kind of tourism). To be clear, wilderness too is a trope, a traveller, and a raven in the metaphysics of Euro-American geography, but it has its proper place. On the lake and the river, though, a tourist in the North always knows too much and not enough.

2.12 Field Note: Tigullapaa — Nuuk, Greenland, 25 August 2008

As I was poring over a set of amulets this morning at the archives, I had a brief conversation with a linguistic anthropologist who works on the languages of the circumpolar North. She wanted to tell me a word that she thought described my otherwise wordless activity. It comes from Nunavimmiutitut, the Nunavik dialect of Inuktitut. Tigullapaa. As she explained it to me, it means roughly that she or he will take something — or is taking something — with the hand, and is manipulating it in order to find out about it. Lovely. As I think about the operation this word describes, it seems to spread out. Of course the something here could be an object proper — an amulet, a notebook — but why not an idea, or a feeling? Or something seen or heard. A place, a story or a song perhaps.

This seems to isolate a very particular moment. A reply to Blanchot when he asks: What happens when what you see, even though from a distance, seems to touch you with a grasping contact, when the matter of seeing is a sort of touch, when seeing is a contact at a distance? When what is seen imposes itself on your gaze, as though the gaze had been seized, touched, put into contact with appearance?69 Indeed. It is an active and embodied mode of empirical discovery in which the very experience of an object relays into a moment of its conceptualization. An inversion, we might say, of the conventional relations between theory and method. Similarly, perhaps, to the archaic Greek term theoria, it describes an encounter, an articulation of world and thought. A rhythm. Writes Walter, theoria is “a complex but organic mode of active observation … a perceptual system that included asking questions, listening to stories and local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing.”70 A refrain.

2.13 Field Note: Norway Point — April 2009

Searching for a through-line. A route. The Highway of the Atom is interminable. It seeks its sustenance from melancholy. Why is it endless? Why is it refractory to memory and to history? Each opening, each point in time where it might come into awareness, where it might become an issue, a question of concern, is met by a closure. The Highway is always caught short. Case in point: Wandering in my university’s very small bookstore not long ago, looking for something to prick me, I saw a most surprising volume. Five copies, no less. Uranium: War, Energy, and the

Rock That Shaped the World.71 A popular history of uranium! A fast look. Small table of contents. Interesting chapter titles. Small index. No endnotes. Then closer inspection. No Great Bear Lake. No Eldorado. No Dene. No Port Hope. No Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. No Marcel Pochon. No Gilbert LaBine. No indication of Canada as an historical source of uranium for the Manhattan Project. No mention of the fact that, without the Port Hope refinery, the Congolese ore that had been stashed in a warehouse on Staten Island when the Union Minière de Haut Katanga offices fled the German army could not have been processed. None of it. Indeed, the only mention of Canadian uranium is given as “a radium mine at the edge of Great Slave Lake in Canada.”72 Wrong lake. Close, but a mistaken piece of geography recast as a fact. A strange feeling to read this contemporary piece of history-writing that not only elides the deep story of the Highway of the Atom, but misses Canada altogether through a careless and generalized equivalence of geography. The adequacy of “up there.” The author has pieced together a history of the element from published materials without, apparently, having done any substantial archival work whatsoever. Astonishing. Again and again this history remains beneath the stories told of how the bomb came to be. The ongoing domestication of events surrounding the development of the bomb — the West’s theodicy, we might call it — has a strangely proprietary character to it. Foard notes the shift in sense of the term theodicy toward a culture’s attempts to make sense of suffering, to ascribe meaning to that which exceeds it.73 Here I take it as a mode of pious reasoning in which the

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bomb itself, its very impossible ethical grounds, remains both unspoken and diminished while at the same instant commending the positivity of the culture capable of producing it.74 Every measure of guilt and sorrow has its quantum of grandiosity.

2.14 Abduction

The multiple modes of inquiry of theoretical work place one in a constant state of indecision with respect to how to proceed – accordingly, one must reach for what feels right, being less concerned with the proper place of various academic discourses and traditions than with engagements and conversations that are salutary for thought. Methodologically, the Highway of the Atom demands a kind of complexity. It calls for an open kind of practice, where theory relays into method.75 It calls for something on the order of what Peirce had in mind with the term abduction. Peirce actually had a great deal to say about method. He often remarked upon the unlikely coincidence of the correct inference, the correct guess. “It is evident,” he wrote, “that unless man had some inward light tending to make his guesses … much more often true than they would be by mere chance, the human race would long ago have been extirpated for its utter incapacity in the struggles for existence.”76 And again, “Nature is a far vaster and less clearly arranged repertory of facts than a census report; and if men had not come to it with special aptitudes for guessing right, it may well be doubted whether in the ten or twenty thousand years that they may have existed their greatest mind would have attained the amount of knowledge which is actually possessed by the lowest idiot.”77 And finally: “Our faculty of guessing corresponds to a bird’s musical and aeronautic powers; that is, it is to us, as those are to them, the loftiest of our merely instinctive powers.”78 He continued: I suppose that if one were sure of being able to discriminate between the intimations of this instinct and the self-flatteries of personal desire, one would always trust to the former. For I should not rate high either the wisdom or the courage of a fledgling bird, if, when the proper time had come, the little agnostic should hesitate long to take his leap from the nest on account of doubts about the theory of aerodynamics.79

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Guessing, for Peirce, is a mode of reasoning. Not invention, not confabulation, but reasoning. He called it abduction (or occasionally retroduction, or hypothesis). It is founded by a “hope that there is sufficient affinity between the reasoner’s mind and nature’s to render guessing not altogether hopeless, provided each guess is checked by comparison with observation.”80 Whereas induction infers from one set of facts a similar set of facts (based on rules, and according to habit), and deduction merely relocates facts from the premises into the conclusion in order to decide a result (thereby introducing nothing that was not already present to begin with), abduction, in contrast, infers from facts of one kind, facts of another kind altogether. Abduction is this: The surprising fact, C, is observed; But if A were true, C would be a matter of course, Hence there is reason to suspect that A is true. Thus, A cannot be abductively inferred, until its entire content is already present in the premise, “If A were true, C would be a matter of course.”81 Formally, the abductive argument has the form of an inverse modus ponens, and logically speaking it is not a valid argument.82 One begins with a noteworthy or surprising fact, q. From here, one attempts to account for this fact with something already known, p 傻 q.83 The abductive result is therefore p. Anyone with children, or dogs, will immediately sense an affinity with this mode of reasoning. In fact it doesn’t feel like reasoning at all. The overturned chair, the broken water glass, the missing sock, the mysterious crayon hieroglyphs on the cover of a new book. The culprit is contained in the surprising fact not with the force of necessity, but with the force of a felt conviction that it is the case, that it could not be otherwise. “Even in cases that involve analysis,” writes Zwicky, “understanding is not knowing that if you follow a series of steps, you will get a certain result, but seeing how the result is contained in that series of steps.”84 “Abduction seeks a theory,” wrote Peirce.85 “Deduction proves that something must be; Induction shows that something actually is operative; Abduction merely suggests that something may be.”86 Abduction is the “sensuous element” of thought; it extracts something new from a state of affairs.87 Here we can see the connection

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– the kinship, perhaps – between abductive procedures and chorographic thought. Walter writes that, for “Plato, chora could be grasped not by sensation and not by reason but by sensuous reasoning – the curious, spurious child of reason and sensation.”88 So one tries to work backward. Not to build theory in order to find things to apply it to. But rather, starting with something, and then trying to figure out what state of affairs, if it were to be the case, would make the surprising fact less surprising. We could say that the basic surprising fact for Peirce was that, given an infinity of possible causes for things, we ever get anything right. And yet we do, sometimes. Peirce likened this capacity to il lume naturale (Galileo), a “natural tendency toward an agreement between the ideas which suggest themselves to the human mind and those which are concerned in the laws of nature.”89 And further, “man’s mind, having been developed under the influence of the laws of nature, for that reason naturally thinks somewhat after nature’s pattern.”90 Abduction, one notes, is itself abductively accounted for! This might appeal to some, but I would suggest a slight substitution here such that rather than a biological and evolutionary propensity – the spectres of which already occupy such considerable ground in social and political thought – one thinks instead of il lume culturale.91 So, rather than saying that the competencies of the mind to make ideas is like – i.e., homologous to – that of nature, we might say that the competencies of the mind to make ideas is in some fashion homologous to cultural processes. In any case, it leads us to a point where we might observe that inquiry, our inquiry, is aligned within not a natural but an ethical register. Normativity flows not from the outcome of inquiry, as with the rarefied vision of a scientific and technological naturalism, but from the very conduct, the conceptual and material doing, of the inquiry. This suggests that an ethical thematic lies at the core of all inquiry and at the site of many intersections: that is, of the real and the symbolic, theory and the world, archive, memory and forgetting, the present, the future and the past. Liminal regions all, and a strange topography to navigate. This is close to what Hazelrigg has argued, and with which we will not quite agree. As he put it: [N]ature is a product of human making. Not merely the “idea of nature” or “nature as we think it is” or “nature experienced,” and not merely the making of a “theoretical product” or “discursive object” or “ideological formation,” but the concrete practical

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materiality, the substance and support, the actual and potential plenitude of the reality of nature – in sum the whole of the given being and the being-givenness of nature as it is – is a concrete production in/by human labour in the activity of making life.92 But this takes us too far back into an obsessive concern with our projects. I find the story with which Stephen Hawking began his Brief History of Time more compelling: A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, an old woman at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down.”93 For Hazelrigg the whole business is culture; that being said – and this is important (if vexing) – it makes nature no less real. Cut from the same cloth. Me? I like the idea of turtles. All the way down. Viewed in one direction, it announces the end of abduction, a terminus of turtles. But viewed from another position, this time as a starting point, it sets in motion a poetic cascade of stories and world views in relation to it. Abduction tells us how to begin.

2.15 Birth Order

In the strange alchemy of the radioactive decay sequence, radium is a daughter of uranium.94 In the strange mythology of the Greeks, Cleo, otherwise known as the Muse of History, is the daughter of Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory. And Imagination.

2.16 Vision

Port Radium, 1930s

“Eldorado, they call you,” I thought as I peered through the window of the plane for one last look back upon this place of difficult toil. That name implies the vision of desire. This Eldorado, for all its harsh surroundings, is well named, for it is from here, by this hard work, that radium which will bring relief for so many sufferers, goes out to an anxious world.95 So wrote Claudine Macdonald, a journalist, upon the occasion of her visit to Port Radium in 1938. It is said that prospectors would use photographic film to find pitchblende by its trace.96 In the days following the bombing of Hiroshima, a Dr. Shigeto discovered that all the hermetically sealed X-ray films stored in the

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basement of his hospital had been exposed by the detonation. “The exposure of photographic film was one of the criteria to confirm that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomic bombs.”97 One must always relay the invisible into the order of visibility.

2.17 Meanwhile

As the news of the pitchblende and silver finds at Great Bear Lake spread to the south, large numbers of unemployed miners, speculators, and other refugees of the Great Depression began to flood into the area. By 1932 there was, by any estimation, a prospecting boom on Great Bear Lake. In contrast to the bleak economic times in the south, the promise of riches in Great Bear Lake seemed intoxicatingly (if paradoxically) lush. By August 1932, Eldorado had secured a vacant industrial space in Port Hope, Ontario, where it began to construct a refining facility. By late summer, some 36 tons of high-grade ore had been mined, sorted, and shipped out by air and water to Port Hope. Also by the end of this year, there were three commercial boats operating on the lake. In addition to the Liard River, the Hudson’s Bay Company had added a second boat, the North Star, and Murphy Services of Cameron Bay had purchased the schooner Speed II. By 1933, Port Hope was producing 2 grams of radium a month – at $25,000 per gram – and was aiming for 100 grams per year. By 1938 this initial output had more than doubled.98 The production of the first ounce of refined radium in November 1936 was celebrated with a lavish event, attended by dignitaries such as Mackenzie King, Lord Tweedsmuir, and Charles Camsell, as well as a host of other political figures.99 Tweedsmuir said, “We are not met to celebrate the success of a commercial company … We are met to commemorate a great scientific and philanthropic achievement.”100 Yet even as they feted this achievement and all that it presupposed the lid was off the box: suddenly a long and onerous water and rail route was transformed into a corridor, into an atomic modernity. This tendency to fall into the figurative, to spread out, so to speak, only accelerated during the 1930s. Within a decade the Highway would continue its outward reach to include the central sites involved in the development of the Manhattan Project (Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico) and the various locations where the US Army stored the many tons

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of Canadian uranium. It also extended to Montreal, where the Government of Canada had a secret laboratory at the Université de Montréal, and to Ottawa, where the Canadian government engineered (under the direction, principally, of C.D. Howe) the reopening of the mine in 1942 and the subsequent controversial takeover of Eldorado as a Crown corporation in 1944. To this we must certainly add the retrofitted “seed-cleaning” plant at Port Hope, Ontario,101 the Trinity site in the desert of New Mexico, the heavy-water plant at Chalk River, the Union Minière mine in the Katanga region of the Belgian Congo, and the civilian populations in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then there is the memory of this history, imbedded in sites along the road and in the stories of the miners, the Dene, and others in the North, and of those, unnamed and unknown, along the extended route. The Highway of the Atom cuts a swath through the twentieth century, rendering present, if opaque, the “the proximity of the remote.”102 It is a question, of course, of finding (or making) a through-line of this route. This is, of course, a piece of invention. There is no such line, and as a result it is, of course, a kind of interpretation.

2.18 Radium

Earth Angel Arthritic Radon Gas Mine, Montana

[T]he people of Port Radium know now what Lord Haw-Haw may have guessed and feared – that the volcanic rocks of Eldorado held epic fires and that human intellect had fashioned a key to their release.103 The dream of radium was very much a nineteenth-century dream. It was impossible matter. Exotic, expensive, it glowed on its own. It could penetrate the body without entry. Invisible radiant energy. Action at a distance. The successive scientific elaborations of atomic theory only rendered it more opaque, more mysterious, more impossible. And more infinitely useful: “A tonic for research: Laboratory experiments are continuously revealing exciting possibilities in other industrial uses especially in working silk and glass, in canning foods and in stimulating plant growth.”104 That a woman played the role as central protagonist probably added to the mystery. In 1902, Marie Curie was able to isolate pure radium chloride from pitchblende and subsequently to establish the

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atomic weight of radium. She and her husband were working “for the beauties of science,” she is quoted as saying. Claudine Macdonald, the journalist and travel writer, added: “though they did not know it at the time, they were working to furnish ammunition for a war, a war that would save lives, not destroy them.”105 Dramatic irony: uranium was not nearly so interesting or exotic; not then. Radium, on the other hand, was extolled for curative powers that far exceeded even the treatment of cancer: Radium is used in treating birthmarks, eczema, ringworm, psoriasis, acne, warts, neuralgia, etc. Radium affects the enlarged thymus, dangerous to young infants, and the thyroid gland, or goitre in adults. Radium can be used to cause the menopause to be prompt and not distressing and to influence the action of the pituitary gland.106 The history of mining for radioactive materials is one involving many reversals, in which a flipping between sum and remainder became a pattern. It all began in Bohemia (now within the Czech Republic), on the southern slopes of the Erzgebirge Mountains. Joachimsthal – Saint Joachim’s Valley – was a small village that produced silver for currency. Since the late sixteenth century, pitchblende had been known for its association with metallic silver. As Zoellner has it, the German Pechblende derives from Blende meaning mineral, and Pech is both tar and misfortune, rendering “bad-luck rock.”107 Kupsch, on the other hand, has it that Pech is the word for black pitch, and that Blende comes from the verb blenden, to blind or “make unable to see … and consequently alluded to an ‘impostor mineral.’”108 It is from the 28.5-gram silver coins there produced – dubbed Joachimsthalers – that the word dollar derives.109 The otherwise useless pitchblende was thrown away. It was not until 1789 that the apothecary Martin Kalproth isolated the new element from Bohemian pitchblende samples and presented his finding to the Royal Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin.110 Taking the name from the recent discovery of Herschel, Kalproth proposed the name uranit, and subsequently settled on the name uranium.111 In the early nineteenth century, uranium itself attracted interest as a particularly vibrant yellow-orange pigment for use in ceramics, tiles, enamels, and porcelain. The silver dumps were then mined for the waste pitchblende-borne uranium. The radium was discarded.

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The pitchblende was of nominal interest as a novelty substance, a glow-in-the-dark parlour curiosity, with the miraculous ability, allegedly, to emit light. Oddly, though, pitchblende gives off no natural phosphorescence. It may be that the pitchblende in question contained impurities of zinc sulphide that could have become phosphorescent from the radioactive elements of the ore. In any case, the uranium derived from pitchblende has no such magic ability. This was a clue – that is, that the ore contained something else. And it was at this time that Henri Becquerel made his discovery of radium. In 1896, the Curies figured the clue out, at least in part, and the putative pan-curative powers of radium began to unfold in medicine, physics, and the popular imagination. As a result, the silver dumps, which had become uranium dumps, now became radium dumps. In the United States, small amounts of uranium were mined from the Colorado plateau (from carnotite and pitchblende) from about 1870 on. In the early twentieth century, interest in radium recovery from uranium ores and oxides renewed interest in the Colorado deposits.112 With this shift, uranium again became a remainder, and vanadium (previously considered a contaminant) became the object of interest. It wasn’t until the Manhattan Project was gearing up that uranium again became of crucial interest, such that vanadium dumps were re-mined for uranium, and a general uranium boom began throughout the Colorado Plateau. So, over the course of less than a hundred years, interest in uranium shifted from glass and ceramics, to radium, to vanadium, and back to uranium.113 Contrary to some versions of the popular story of Eldorado, at the time that LaBine and company made their discoveries at Great Bear Lake radium was already being produced in several locations around the world. By the early twentieth century production was well developed in France, thanks to the Curies, and was established in Czechoslovakia (Jachymow), Austria (from ninteenth-century uranium tailings), Portugal (Serra D’Estrella), England (Cornwall), Australia (Mount Painter), Russian Turkestan, Madagascar, and the United States (carnotite deposits in California, Colorado, and Utah). Until the production of radium from the carnotite ores from Colorado was developed (resulting in a spike in the world price to over US$100,000 per gram), France was the primary producer. All of this was to change when, in 1915, an agent of Cecil Rhodes located radium deposits in the west of Rhodesia. As it turned out, the deposits were just a bit too far west, and actually lay in the Belgian Congo. Within a few years, the Union Minière de Haut Katanga mine,

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Shinkolobwe, became the primary world radium producer; world price dropped to $70,000 per gram. Elsewhere, in Canada, there were known radium deposits in Lanark County, Wilberforce, and Mamainse Ontario, Murray Bay, Maisonneuve, Wakefield and Villeneuve in Quebec, and Quadra Island in British Columbia – however, none of these deposits were even comparable to the magnitude of that found at Great Bear Lake. Radium was fabulously expensive – the most valuable substance ever, at one point reaching US$125,000 per gram.114 Its discovery in the Canadian North was met with countless articles, stories, and broadcasts, many of which were breathless paeans to colonial purpose in the North. The march of progress signified by projects such as the Eldorado mine dovetailed perfectly with Canada’s vision of a “civilized” North – even though, in practice, this meant creating a sedentary indigenous population fit for productive labour. Richard Finnie wrote in the Canadian Geographic Journal: The wives of Eskimo hunters from far off Banks Island were induced to join the Women’s Auxiliary at Aklavik, at whose meetings they were urged to reserve winter evenings in their igloos for doing fancy work to sell, and thus raise funds for African missions. They were learning the ways of civilization.115 Although it is sometimes thought that the principle uses of radium through the early part of the century were medical, this is not entirely the case. It is true that radium cancer therapies were an extremely important market for radium producers, there seems to have been competition in the wealthy nations particularly between radium for cancer treatment, and radium for the painting of clock faces, signs, gun sights, and watches.116 Radium cancer therapy involved the implantation of radium-filled needles directly into cancerous tissue. Later, techniques for making a directed beam of gamma emissions were developed. Radium was also thought to have various other tonic properties, as witnessed in the incredible popularity of all things radium: not only radium spas, but also radium-infused cigarette holders, condoms, decanters, pills, suppositories, creams, pads, pillows, and so on. Through to the 1930s, radium and radon were used to treat an astonishing array of medical ailments. Gout. Rheumatism. Lumbago. Arthritis. Anemia. Leukemia. Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Arteriosclerosis. High blood pressure. Low blood pressure. Angina. Myocarditis

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and endocarditis. Phlebitis. Asthma. Hay fever. Sinusitis. Bronchitis. Pneumonia. Tuberculosis. Gastroenteritis. Gastric ulcers. Hemorrhoids. Constipation. Gallstones. Diabetes. Goitre. Multiple sclerosis. Parkinson’s disease. Epilepsy. Paralysis due to brain injury and apoplexy. Neuritis and neuralgia. Headache. Sciatica. Otosclerosis. Cataracts. Conjunctivitis. Insomnia. Neurasthenia. Schizophrenia. Menstrual and menopausal problems. Uterine fibroids. Sterility. Impotence. Syphilis and gonorrhea. Uremia. Kidney stones. Nephritis. Pyorrhea. Toothache. Peritonitis. Burns. Hives. Eczema. Acne. Insect bites. Poison oak and poison ivy. Seborrhea. Psoriasis. Breast cancer. Malnutrition and obesity. Senile, postoperative and general debility. Streptococcal infections.117 Radium by-products were also sold as health tonics for pet and farm animals, and radium emanators were used in livestock water tanks.118 Tailings from radium processing plants were (brilliantly) marketed as soil-stimulating “radioactive manures.”119 Kupsch notes that similar proposals were made in Ontario for uranium-bearing pegmatite tailings in the early 1920s, and that a Czechoslovakian company had already begun marketing radioactive fertilizers.120 Much of this was, of course, outright chicanery, and eventually legislation caught up with the florid growth of the tonic makers. Curiously, though, radon continues to hold a place in the alternative (if that’s the right word) medical world. At a number of sites in Europe and Japan one can seek treatment in radon-infused environments and radium hot springs. Closer to home, there are five or six active “Health Mines” in the Boulder-Basin region of Montana. All of these were actual working mines at some point in the past. Their reinvention as health mines apparently attracts visitors from around the world. Visitors to the Free Enterprise Radon Health Mine (established 1952), for example, are invited to enjoy a “proven modality for those seeking a complement or alternative to current methods of disease symptom management of immune system disorders.”121 Visitors to these underground mines – which range aesthetically from the austere and “authentic” to something approximating neo-trailer-park kitsch – are prescribed underground treatment sessions over the course of ten or eleven days – all of this with the continued blessing of the State authorities of Montana.122 Radium was also used extensively for luminous instrument dials, the story of which we have been reminded in recent years by way of the sad and fascinating history of the “Radium Girls.”123 From another account of this history: “It was a little strange … that when

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she blew her nose, her handkerchief glowed in the dark. But everyone knew the stuff was harmless. The women even painted their nails and their teeth to surprise their boyfriends when the lights went out.”124 In 1986, a documentary emerged that told the story of Ottawa, Illinois, home to a Radium Dial Company factory. In 1922 Radium Dial set up shop in the old high school and began hiring young women to paint numbers on clock faces; the company had a large contract with Westclox. The conspicuous lack of precaution around the use of radium-based paints resulted in so many cancers and deaths – and a high-profile lawsuit that focused on the emaciated, cancer-ridden body of a dial painter, Catherine Donohue – that the plant was forced to relocate out of state. It was quickly replaced (under the same ownership) by a new dial-painting factory, Luminous Processes. Carole Langer, director of Radium City, collected extensive testimony from many former dial painters and the families of those who had died, and details the historical and contemporary attempts of Ottawa residents to have the former, massively contaminated, factories removed and properly disposed of. Equally fascinating is the story of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Argonne National Laboratory. Between 1946 and 1993 Argonne conducted research on thousands of radium girls – living and dead – from across the United States.125 The American interest in these women seems to have had less to do with their particular tragedy than with the similarity between radium and plutonium (both are energetic alpha emitters). In other words, the radium girls presented a case study for the American military to understand the potential effects of plutonium production and plutonium-based bomb manufacture.

2.19 Sum and Remainder

The richest uranium-bearing ores are pitchblende-based, as in those found in the Czech Republic, the Belgian Congo (Katanga), and Great Bear Lake. The recovery rates that were possible from the Port Radium pitchblende ores were greater than anything previously seen. One gram of radium could be recovered from 6.5 tons of ore. A staggering yield. For example, the carnotite deposits in Colorado would produce the same amount from 128 tons; from the Belgian mine, the equivalent would require up to 40 tons (having declined from 10 tons per gram). The upshot was that the mine at Great Bear Lake, a vastly inaccessible property, poised to produce something that Canada had no particular expertise in producing (there was no refinery in Canada to process the ore, no technical scientific expertise in Canada familiar with large-scale extraction of radium from ore, and the global market was locked up by the Belgians), could be seen as being economically viable in spite of everything else.126 An interesting feature of radium mining from mineralized pitchblende is that the waste products tend to be dross containing a very high level of uranium. Yet, throughout the 1930s, the only pitchblende derivative that was of economic interest was the radium; the uranium, at the time, was of almost no value at all. Certainly, it was not valuable enough to be mined in such a remote location. What world demand there was for uranium – its use in ceramics and glass – was taken care of through existing production in Czechoslovakia.127 The ratio of radium to uranium in a sample of pitchblende is something on the order of 1:3,500,000 – accounting for the value of radium, as well as the vast amounts of uranium that were produced, incidentally, through the 1930s.

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3.01 Finding Aids

hollywood “finds” uranium – The life story of Gilbert LaBine, who made the famous uranium discovery at Great Bear Lake, will likely be filmed, according to Canadian Press. Leonard Haynes was in Edmonton recently after a flight to Great Bear Lake where he saw the Canadian government plant at Eldorado. Haynes says he plans to film most of the picture around Great Bear Lake. The screen story will follow the life of LaBine from boyhood through his early mining days in Cobalt, Ont., and Porcupine, Ont., to his discovery in the far North.1 Great Bear Lake was hardly terra nullius before the mineral exploration of the 1930s. The conventional toponyms of the five arms of the lake bear this out. Each refers to a Hudson’s Bay Company employee who had contributed in some way to Franklin’s second expedition: Peter Warren Dease, a Chief Trader; Robert McVicar, a Chief Trader; John McTavish, formerly of the North West Company; Chief Factors James and George Keith; and Chief Factor Edward Smith. Franklin was to spend the winter of 1825–26 near the head of the Bear River at what came to be called Fort Franklin, not far from the abandoned site of the trading post Alexander Mackenzie’s North-West Company established in 1799. In 1826, Richardson and Kendal surveyed much of the lake, and in 1836 Dease and Simpson visited the region as part of a survey to map the central Arctic. Fort Confidence was established by their party at this time; this site was to be used extensively by virtue of its proximity to the Coppermine River (and thus the Coronation Gulf) and the abundance of food supplies available there for over-wintering. Richardson again visited and over-wintered in the area in 1848–49 while he was engaged in the search for the ill-fated third Franklin expedition; by this time, little remained of Franklin’s fort on the lake. In 1863, the Hudson’s Bay Company established a trading post at the site of Franklin’s fort, and in the years following a mission was

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established by Father Emile Petitot (a familiar figure in the area, having made eight trips to the region between 1866 and 1879), who dubbed the area “cette caspienne arctique, ainsi que la region desolée qui l’entoure.”2 Thirty years before LaBine had arrived on the scene, Macintosh Bell of the Canadian Geological Survey had done, with Charles Camsell, a large-scale geological and topographic shoreline investigation of the northern and eastern portions of that lake, and had continued eastward toward the Barren Lands nearly as far as the Coppermine River. As they were returning, with the intention of getting to Rae, a storm trapped them for several days in the area of Echo Bay. As written in Bell’s report of 1901, we find the following and oft-quoted mytheme: “In the greenstones east of McTavish Bay occur numerous interrupted stringers of calc-spar containing chalcopyrite, and the steep rocky shores which here present themselves to the lake are often stained with cobalt-bloom and copper-green.”3 Although this evocative description conveys absolutely nothing about pitchblende, radium, or uranium, this significant document figures largely into the stories of how LaBine was to find the pitchblende deposits that would become Port Radium. It also set the poetic tone of much description that was to follow. “The pitchblende’s smoky black ore is found, underground, set in rainbow-hued rockfaces with the blood red of iron ore, and the viridian blues and greens of nickel and copper and cobalt bloom.”4 Stefansson was also in the area briefly in 1910, having come overland via the Coppermine River to the abandoned site of Fort Confidence (all evidence of which has long been scavenged by fly-in fishermen and other visitors). Before LaBine’s arrival in 1929, there was in fact ongoing southern interest in the Lake, although the story of Eldorado tends to eclipse all awareness of earlier occupation of this area (both indigenous and southern). A very interesting character by the name of Boland was a free trader on the lake into the 1930s. A prospector by the name of Charles Sloan (namesake of the river) was also active on the lake in the 1920s and had staked mineral claims (mostly copper) in the Hunter Bay area (not far north of what came to be called Port Radium at Echo Bay) well in advance of LaBine’s interest. Indeed, by spring 1930, there was a veritable rush on the east end of the lake. A previous prohibition against prospecting in the area had

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been lifted, and so arrived representatives of a number of Canadian mining companies, along with various riff-raff who drifted in looking for action when the Yukon gold rush drew to a close. “Charlie Sloan, an old timer in the district, staked for Dominion Explorers, and two Americans who flew in mysteriously from Los Angeles, also staked at Hunter Bay.”5 Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company (eventually, cominco), the Great Bear Lake Syndicate, and the Northern Aerial Minerals Exploration Company (name) were also working on the lake. No one, as far as I can tell, was on the lookout for pitchblende, but there was very active staking for copper and native (i.e., pure) silver. To read the papers of the day is to glean a slightly different sense of what was taking place on the lake. Numerous stories concern the Hunter Bay claims staked by Dominion Explorers and name, but the grail in this case was copper, about which there was considerable buzz in the popular media of the south. The idea that Inuit had been making copper tools without benefit of ore-processing technologies suggested that very high-grade copper must be available at the surface. The question was simply where to find it. In May 1930, the Toronto Daily Star reported that name and Dominion, together with Boland, had staked native copper on Great Bear Lake.6 So enthusiastic were reports at the time that the prospect of extending the railway from Waterways to Fort Resolution on the shores of Great Slave Lake was under serious discussion. Exploration work for this ambitious project had actually begun in 1929, but was delayed by a large-scale search – led by Col. C.D.H. MacAlpine, head of Dominion Explorers – undertaken to locate a large aerial exploration party that had disappeared en route to Bathurst. The ensuing search occupied virtually every Northern pilot of the day, and as a result exploration work was severely curtailed by a lack of aircraft support. By the spring of 1930, Western Canada Airways was plugging their service to “the big copper find” at Great Bear Lake with frequent flights from Fort McMurrary.7 The grim economic climate of the day, a popular and specialist metropolitan press anxious for “good news,” a pre-mythologized Northern imaginary and, to be sure, the ability of LaBine and company to exploit scripts of exploration, an empty North, and the solitary voyager – all of these contributed to the fabulous quality of Eldorado and, significantly, afforded these interests the luxury of cobbling together their own stories while eliding those of others. The evocative description of cobalt-bloom and copper-green noted

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by Bell simply became the founding poetic trope of radium and uranium on Great Bear Lake. One finds, in reading this literature, that there are many points when something just stands out. Pricks. I try to picture Bell and Camsell, in 1900, having just returned from an unsuccessful attempt to trek from the Dease River over the Barren Lands to the Coppermine River, having lost their men and then found them again. They are the real authors of the central piece of mythology that founds the Eldorado story and the silver/copper/radium boom of the early 1930s. In the greenstones east of McTavish Bay occur numerous interrupted stringers of calc-spar containing chalcopyrite, and the steep rocky shores which here present themselves to the lake are often stained with cobalt-bloom and copper-green. This beautiful piece of description, which is said to have led Gilbert LaBine and his sidekick, Charles St. Paul, to the pitchblende and silver find at LaBine Point, seems altogether too poetic to have had the capacity to point in the way it is presumed to have done. The fluidity of narratives for events so close to us in time is astonishing. Although it seems true that story-telling – oral narrative – always has a capacity to allow for the “continuous revision of history by actively reinterpreting events and then incorporating such interpretations into the next generation of narrative,” here I think we see a picture of how it is that story and history articulate.8 How it is, in other words, that knowledge may gather force from story.

3.02 Field Note: Cobalt-Bloom and Copper-Green — Echo Bay, 2003

The time Camsell and Bell spent looking for their men resulted in their missing a key rendezvous with Indians from the Franklin area who were to have met them in the south-east corner of the Lake on the fifteenth of August. Had all gone according to plan, their guides would have taken them south to Great Slave Lake. I shiver to think that they are operating here with no good maps. They have, of course, read all the journals they could locate of those who had been in the area, but what I find so fascinating is that they are actually following a procedure, cavalier as it was, that is designed in fact to produce maps. Their provisions gone, they lived on fish and anything else they could catch. While on their Coppermine investigation, one of their men abandoned them. He was a man named Sanderson, described by Camsell as “three-quarters Indian with some experience hunting on the shores of Great Bear Lake.” He had taken with him the only rifle for which they had ammunition on hand. He was, apparently, terrified of “Eskimos.” Fortunately, before heading inland they had cached rifles and ammunition with other equipment near Fort Confidence, at the mouth of the Dease River. Incredible that they could make a mistake like this — to attempt to travel overland to the Barren Grounds with a single rifle. Now they are in a tent, they have missed their rendezvous, and it is the twenty-fourth of August. They have been travelling with four people in a Peterborough canoe, having — again, incredibly — left the other canoe for the missing member of their party, at their Dease River camp. The temperature the previous night dipped to minus 14˚F, a bit unusual for the date, but a taste of the serious fall weather that would be on them in a few weeks. From observations recorded for that day, we can tell that they were in what is now called the Back Bay of Port Radium, in the same place I stayed with my brother in a very lightly contaminated school bus — the Yellow Bird — one hundred and three years later, as we made observations of our own. “We were windblown for several days,” wrote Bell in his journal, “the variegated mineral staining — red, black, pink, white and green, gave scintillating reflections in the deep, transparent water, suggesting a locality to lure the prospector.”9

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Even in peril, one must attend to the craft of writing. They had begun their journey in June from Fort Norman with two canoes, a party of five, and provisions sufficient for two weeks — flour, 50 pounds of pork, some dried moose meat, matches, tea, sugar, canned butter, beef extract, tobacco and ammunition, with the intention of living off the land when the supplies ran out. They also took with them “many pairs of moccasins.” Contrary to their planning assumptions, no boots were available to them at Norman. Overland trekking in moccasins; hard to imagine. That day in August, Bell and Camsell had a difficult, almost impossible decision to make. Their objective was Edmonton, over 1,000 miles to the south. They could go around the shore of Great Bear Lake to Fort Norman — although I’ve no idea how far a trek like this would be, or how long, with winter storms already blasting across the lake, this might have taken in a canoe. The best they might hope for would be to spend the winter in Franklin or Norman, and wait for the Mackenzie to open in the spring. Neither Norman nor Franklin were particularly enticing prospects, with no supplies, no winter equipment, and nowhere to stay. If, on the other hand, they headed south from where they were, they would have to navigate a virtually unmapped network of lakes and rivers with many dozens of portages, in order to get to Fort Rae, some 250 miles distant, on the north arm of Great Slave Lake. This route, well known to the Indians and used for centuries, was the Idaa Trail, a material and communications channel between the Dogrib Indians of North Great Slave and the Bear Lake Dene.10 However, with great fortune, that very day they were able to shoot a moose. And so, with bellies full, meat for a week or so, and moose hide with which to make new moccasins, they decided to invent a route and head for Rae: without guides, without maps, and with no idea of how they would proceed. Amazingly, they managed half the journey to Rae, through trial and error, by climbing heights of land to find their way, trying to put together written accounts they had read (Père Petitot, etc.), cutting portages, missing rivers, being lost. And all the while making detailed topographic and geological notes as they went. Finally, at Lake Rosamond, they met a group of Dogribs and persuaded some of them to guide them south to Rae, arriving there on September 20. From there they paddled across Great Slave Lake — a staggering accomplishment at that, or really, any time of year — arriving at Fort Resolution at the mouth of the Slave River on September 29. Without a pause, they continued on to Fort Chippewyan on Lake

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Athabasca, where they had to wait until the middle of November for the ice to allow them to continue on foot — meaning by snowshoe — to Edmonton, where they arrived in mid-December.

3.03 Pitchblende

It was not until the beginning of October 1930 that LaBine’s “find” of pitchblende was reported in The Northern Miner in this short notice: radium ore at great bear lake – Pitchblende, and ore of uranium, from which radium is derived, is reported to occur at Great Bear Lake. The LaBine discovery south of Hunter Bay shows several seams of a lustrous black mineral which is coated with a brilliant yellow weathering product. The black mineral is said to be pitchblende and the yellow mineral is probably an oxide of uranium.11 The question of how it was that LaBine decided to spend considerable time and money prospecting in such a remote region is difficult to answer. As reported in the first extensive piece of journalism on the matter, published in The Northern Miner, LaBine had spoken with his mail carrier in Manitoba, who relayed to him details of large mineral deposits near the “Black River” on Great Bear Lake. On the basis of this information, he decided to travel north, apparently supported by the directors of Eldorado. Of course, when he arrived by plane to Fort Franklin, he discovered that there was in fact no “Black River” on or near the lake. He eventually discovered that the mail carrier had never been there, or to the north at all. Undeterred, LaBine walked across the frozen Great Bear Lake and staked several copper claims at Hunter Bay. No mention is made of Bell and Camsell’s report, or of any maps. In a 1959 Beaver article, Peter C. Newman reports LaBine as having already been poised to stake radioactive properties for Eldorado: “He was resting between prospecting trips in Toronto during the fall of 1916 when he overheard two prospectors talking about a radioactive hill near Perth, Ontario. He jumped into a taxi and drove 200 miles to investigate the rumour. It was a false lead.”12

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Another version, written by LaBine himself, tells things differently. In the wake of the closure of Eldorado’s Manitoba gold concerns, he decided to go to the Northwest Territories and do some surveying. He came to this “having overheard conversations among older men regarding interesting geological areas in that field.”13 In yet another version of the story there is no postal worker playing oracle, and no older men speaking; instead, we have LaBine spotting the site from the air as he returned at the end of his fieldwork and relating it to a description he had read in a geological report. The report in question is that of Bell and Camsell. The canonical story (perhaps conventional is a better word) of Eldorado’s mine on Great Bear Lake involves a large cast of characters, among whom Gilbert LaBine plays the leading role. LaBine was a lifelong prospector who, with his brother Charles, created Eldorado Gold Mines Limited in 1926 on the basis of several dubious gold claims in Manitoba (at Rice Lake).14 These gold claims were exhausted within a few years, and operations ceased in 1928.15 So it was that in the lean economic times of 1928 Gilbert LaBine began to organize a trip to Great Bear Lake. In the earliest account I have come across by LaBine himself, the “facts” are as follows. In the summer of 1929, LaBine travelled to Great Bear Lake with an experienced Canadian Airways pilot by the name of Leigh Britnell. Britnell was engaged to assist LaBine in getting into the lake and pointing him toward the area he was interested in. Before this trip, LaBine had heard reports of “interesting geological areas in that field” and had secured maps of the area; he had no other assistance, “outside of the maps and the late Dr. Bell’s report of 1900.”16 After several stops, and a layover at Fort Franklin, LaBine was dropped at the mouth of the Sloan River. There he spent several days prospecting, until he met another party consisting of Boland and Sloan. LaBine mentions finding some highgrade copper ore, but does not mention having staked any claims. At some point late in the season he was picked up in the Hunter Bay area, not by Britnell, but by Punch Dickens (another legendary figure). As they flew south along the east side of the lake, LaBine reports that he “could see numerous gossand hill tops and the area appeared greatly fractured … [T]his area was one that I wanted to come back to, and I felt that I was justified from my observations in planning to spend at least one full season checking it over.”17 He returned to Winnipeg, and after consulting with the directors

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of his company received a favourable response to his proposal to return in 1930. The following March he and his assistant (or partner, or colleague, depending on the source), E. Charles St. Paul, headed north. He had also made provision for his brother Charles to travel by canoe from Alberta with two other directors of the company – Shirley Craig and Leo Seaburg – with additional supplies and food. They were to meet LaBine and St. Paul as soon as it was possible to cross the lake in the summer (i.e., after the ice breakup in mid-July). In the spring of 1930, LaBine and St. Paul were dropped near the Upper Camsell River with some 1,600 pounds of supplies and food, and a custom-made sectional Peterborough canoe. After a long and difficult trek across the frozen lake, they established a camp near the mouth of Glacier Bay, just east of the future site of LaBine Point and Port Radium. But then, LaBine encountered a “new and difficult obstacle” – although it seems ultimately to have been anything but an obstacle. “My assistant,” writes LaBine, “went snow blind.”18 That is, at the very moment when LaBine and St. Paul reached the mouth of Echo Bay, Point 66, as it was then known, on 14 May 1930, St. Paul was stricken with snow blindness. How this could happen to an experienced Northern prospector – who, if true to type, would have taken pride in his willingness and ability to adopt local Indian practices, from the use of dogs, to appropriate clothing and trapping and travel techniques – seems scarcely imaginable. That LaBine and St. Paul would not have used snow goggles, or charcoal smudged on their cheekbones to reduce glare when travelling on the lake at that time of the year is extremely difficult to believe. For example, Watt’s account of prospecting through this period is quite clear on the necessity of such measures.19 Nevertheless, LaBine’s story continued: In the meantime I left him at camp, and in prospecting the ground north east I discovered the first silver and other cobalt minerals, on a small island off LaBine point, and a short time afterwards in going over to the mainland I found more of the cobalt minerals along a cliff. In following along this zone I located the first pitchblende on the Point. Contrary to reports that have previously appeared in magazines and the press, this material … could not be seen from the air, and in fact could not even be seen where the ore

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was found. While the occurrence was naturally new to me, but the ore was of such a grade that there was no doubt in my mind that I had found a very rich deposit of uranium ore.”20 In any case, after LaBine applied a poultice of tea leaves to St. Paul’s eyes, he set off to prospect the immediate area. Almost immediately, he located native silver on an island just off what would become LaBine Point. In an after-dinner talk given by LaBine in 1932, he put it this way: As I looked over to the shore, a distance of 300 or possibly 400 feet, I noticed a great wall that was stained with cobalt bloom and copper green. I walked over to the place and investigated it carefully and found all the associated ores of cobalt, including some silver. Following along, I found a tiny piece of ore, probably the size of a large plum, and it was pitchblende.21 When he investigated the area further, he discovered a “vein of pitchblende, heavily impregnated with silver.” He continued: When I made these discoveries, I was alone and my thoughts were these: I thought of the late provincial geologist in the province of Ontario, Dr. Miller. In 1913 Dr. Miller had visited Europe and during that visit he had visited the pitchblende mines. He came back to Cobalt [Ontario] and told a number of us boys that we should pay more attention to the various ores in Cobalt.22 The fabulations of this story began almost immediately in southern Canada. An address given by Colonel George Drew at the Empire Club in Toronto had LaBine setting out by dogsled from Fort Rae.23 LaBine himself told the story in a number of different ways. Newman quotes him as saying: As I looked over to the shore, a distance of about 300 feet, I noticed a great wall. It had a strike of dark, greenish-black lava-like substance zigzagging through it. Near the water it widened into a three-inch vein. Following it along, I found a piece of ore probably about the size of a plum … it was solid pitchblende. I knew it because I felt its specific gravity.24

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A number of variations of this story pose the question of how it was that LaBine could recognize pitchblende to begin with, given that it was not a mineral otherwise common to Canadian geology. Some versions have him recognizing it because he was one of a handful of Canadian miners who had been shown a sample (either at the mining school in Cobalt, as above, or by a professor at Queen’s University). Newman writes that LaBine had been obsessed with pitchblende since having been shown the sample by Dr. Miller at the Haileybury mining school. Inglis concurs that LaBine’s teacher at the Haileybury School of Mines, one W. G. Miller, “held a theory that the silver bearing mineralizations of Cobalt [Ontario] might just contain radium bearing pitchblende.”25 And elsewhere: “One of the lecturers [at the School of Mines], Dr. Willet Miller, showed him a sample of pitchblende from Czechoslovakia and explained its virtues, which at that time consisted chiefly of its value in the making of radium.”26 In a story told to me by an old-timer in the airport at Norman Wells, and reported elsewhere, LaBine knew it was pitchblende because when he returned to the “dark shack” where St. Paul lay stricken, the sample “gave off an eerie sheen, somewhat phosphorescent.”27 Other reports have LaBine and his brother Charles, upon hearing of an alleged pitchblende find on the north shore of Lake Superior in the mid-1920s, purchasing a sample through a dealer in Belgium. The Northern traveller and chronicler P.G. Downes was extremely skeptical about the neatness of LaBine’s story, as am I. Downes notes in his field journals from 1938 that the then Minister of Mines had been LaBine’s next-door neighbour – a fact I have seen noted nowhere else – and that it was in fact an Indian who had led LaBine to this site – which agrees with the way the Dene see things. Downes’ contention is that LaBine had private sources of information that led him to the site of the find (including a suggestion that Hornby had sent samples for assay from the very same site considerably earlier).28 What seems clear is that LaBine staked at least two claims at this time: “Cobalt” on 18 May, (or 16, or 19, depending) and “Cobalt I” the next day, before he and (a now healed) St. Paul headed for Hunter Bay.29 Quipped one magazine writer: “[I]f Charlie Saint Paul hadn’t gone snow blind, Hiroshima would probably still be perpendicular.”30

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It is curious that he staked only two claims at this time. If the find was as significant as all the reports say, if he knew that what he had found was pitchblende, or even if he had recognized the silver alone, why would an experienced miner and prospector and the director of a barely solvent mining company not stake his remaining claims (and those of St. Paul as well)? LaBine’s later claim that he was simply being prudent, not wanting to draw attention to the area, only adds to my sense that this was an enormous and well-crafted performance staged by a seasoned prospector and business person. But this may be to give far too much credit to LaBine. Another way to construe things is that Eldorado was from the outset a foundering operation, a company that was never far from insolvency, that never once paid a dividend on its shares, and that trafficked in any mining mythology with a whiff of nordicity. It was run largely by exceedingly incompetent men, and entered into a nearly unending series of catastrophic business deals for reasons that are largely opaque. The succession of stories about the founding of the company’s mine at Port Radium, the vainglory in its work supporting the bomb, the profusion of miners’ stories – all this helped to support the otherwise precarious business. Canada was spun, quite literally, into the atomic age. By the mid-1930s Eldorado had contracted the services of the Institute of Public Relations, Inc., of New York. With the goal of increasing the value of Eldorado stock, this pr firm took tight control of the Eldorado narrative, controlling as well press access to the mine, its directors, and its management. All of the narrative slippage and multiple plot lines eventually became absurd enough that even Eldorado ceased to believe them. In 1976, Eldorado undertook a wide-ranging and quite critical look at its own history. The document “Eldorado’s Historical Resources,” (largely the work of Jane Mingay), is a survey of the company records and other published materials.31 It appears that Eldorado had begun to consider the possibility of a corporate history, and set about to do the initial research itself. The multiple story lines continue with LaBine returning from his silver and pitchblende find to tell St. Paul about only the pitchblende. He concealed the fact that he had also found silver; and he did not, he says, disclose this information to anyone until the following year. LaBine and St. Paul moved northward to the Hunter Bay Area, where they were joined by LaBine’s brother Charles, Craig, and

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Seaburg. They then returned to Echo Bay to examine the claims, but no mention by LaBine is made of any further staking. It is unclear how the silver could have been concealed from what was now a fully sighted party of five. However, it came to pass that by the end of the 1930 field season the Eldorado contingent had staked twelve claims in and around the initial find.32 Samples of the pitchblende find had been sent to Hugh Spence of the Mines Branch in Ottawa in June, and in August word was received back by radio that the mineral assays conducted on the samples contained over 50 percent uranium oxide. (Spence’s grandson notes that the relayed radio report effectively blew the lid off any hopes of secrecy for LaBine and company.) The publicity around the find was given professional credence when Spence visited the site in 1931 to investigate the find; he published his report the following year.33 LaBine returned in 1931 to stake an additional group of claims (reportedly between 37 and 150). At this point, the course of the development of the mine was fixed. There was a virtual museum of minerals at the Port Radium site. But, foremost, it was to become North America’s first radium-producing mine. By the end of the field season in 1931, the Hunter and Echo Bay areas of the lake were a hub of staking activity. The attention of the press in the south had been captured by the possibilities of this northern El Dorado. Exploration syndicates were being formed in New York, Montreal, Toronto, and the United Kingdom. The Northern Miner estimated in September 1931 that between 600 and 800 claims had been staked. This is a lot of country. Claims in this part of the world were normed at 1,500 feet a side, making them 51 rather than the conventional 40 acres.34 Activity increased through 1932. The Northern Miner reported that on a single day in the middle of February ten dog teams arrived from Fort Norman, a 300-mile trip. “They started staking immediately.” By May, there were 2,500 registered claims.35 “The Trail of ’32,” so called.36 Cobalt bloom.

3.04 Congo

If the discovery of the Great Bear Lake radium and uranium reads like a set of contending stories anxiously seeking the requisite elements for their writing into history, the Shinkolobwe uranium find carries no such anxiety. It is quite simply recorded in a kind of goodtimes in the colonies memoir entitled Early Days in Katanga, penned by one R.R. Sharp, a British “chap” who found himself in the Congo after having finished up at Oxford in 1904 with few prospects apart from some well-placed family connections. The book reads like a boy’s adventure tale of big-game hunting and entitlement, told with that particular British colonial sense of jovial social blindness. Occasional passages describe prospecting and mining as it was undertaken there in the first decades of the twentieth century. At the time of his discovery, Sharp was in the employ of the Union Minière, checking and marking boundaries of company claims. It was in 1915 that I found myself working on some of the properties of minor importance to the south-west of Likasi. I was idly poking about on the top there when something yellow caught my eye, and I picked up a small heavy piece of stone and idly [again] examined it. To the prospector weight is nearly always the first indication of mineral value and my interest was at once aroused … I sent samples of the ore down to Likasi where my original suspicions were confirmed … [I]t is, I think, an open secret that material from there made it possible to manufacture the atomic bombs, which ended the war against Japan.37 Concerning his duties and the site of the find, Sharp writes: “A central beacon carries a large sheet of zinc, on which various details of the registration have to be inscribed, including that of the mineral. Consequently, Shinkolobwe bore a placard with the word Radium in letters six inches high.”38

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Period. That’s it. His job, the marking procedures, Japan. Then he moves on to other matters. Amazingly, even the understated, factual quality of this story by Sharp lacks sufficient world-historic quality. Citing the same source, Zoellner relates the story somewhat differently. After mistakenly identifying Sharp’s “bush” name as Mlundavalu (it should be Mlundavialu), he has Sharp taking a penknife to a found zinc plate on which he scratched out the word radium.39

3.05 White Myth

How this all began poses itself as a kind of hermeneutic impossibility. Less than a hundred years old, it reads as a homeless narrative with no sure origin. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter. Perhaps even then no one was concerned with telling the truth about any of this; after all, what would it matter? The many versions of LaBine’s story portray him as either familiar with the Bell report before his first trip North in 1929, or not. Some reports have LaBine seeing the “cobalt-bloom and copper-green” from the window of the plane on the way out in 1929, and vowing to return to inspect it further. Others do not. There are other stories, though. Local stories. One in particular that has never circulated in the south, as far as I am aware, is told by the Dene. So much of the Dene’s involvement with Eldorado concerns what happened after: after the mine had closed, after they had come to understand what had taken place. Very little that has been told – to me at least – concerns how it all began. I have been told very little about the very early days of the white occupation, and it is too late to find any first-hand accounts. The single account, the only story of which I am aware that encompasses the white discovery narrative (apart from Blondin’s prohibition story, discussed earlier) with the perspective of the otherwise invisible occupants of the area in question, is, fittingly, about a theft. This story has LaBine stealing a “rock,” along with knowledge of its provenance, from a Dene man by the name of Beyonnie. Although I heard this story a number of years ago, I wasn’t aware of its significance to the Dene community until I was sent a copy of the Déline Uranium Team’s 2005 oral history volume If Only We Had Known: The History of Port Radium as Told by the Sahtuot⬘ine. The Beyonnie story recurs throughout the oral histories collected in this volume. Beyonnie’s son says that he travelled to Aklavik in the attempt to obtain acknowledgement and compensation from the territorial and federal governments. So here we have an actual grievance concerning ownership of the mine. A fascinating development,

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but the archives being mute, and the Beyonnie story having insufficient narrative power on its own, it remains as one of the multiple entry-points into the founding moments of Port Radium.40 Indeed, the only point at which the southern imaginary grants a strange legitimacy (or legitimacy of strangeness) to an Aboriginal presence at Great Bear Lake occurs as a form of atomic synesthesia. As though gesturing toward a lack in the midst of all this, Spence included the following in his report on the mine: In order that the romantic element shall not be lacking in connection with discoveries made in this northern field, it may be stated that this particular find is said to have occurred through the agency of smell. Tradition states that Indians, who have been accustomed to camp at LaBine point long before it was thus named, claimed to have noticed a particular smell. They reported they had noticed a similar spot at Beaverlodge Lake, and offered to show a prospector the place. This was done, but as it was midwinter and the ground blanketed with snow, no outcrops were visible. The Indians insisted that this was the spot, however, and lo and behold, when the snow was cleared, there was a vein of pitchblende.41 And similarly, from Maclean’s magazine, There is one oddity about Canada’s known pitchblende which lies somewhere between the realms of Indian superstition and scientific knowledge. Indians of the area traditionally insisted that there was a peculiar smell to the atmosphere at LaBine Point. After the find they decided that this was due to the radium, a theory that caused some merriment especially since our white man could not spot the alleged scent at all. But when the Indians declared that there was a similar smell at a point on Beaverlodge Lake about 100 miles south one prospector listened. He made the trip with them in winter and marked the location. When the snow cleared away in the spring, pitchblende was definitely found.42 The uncertainty of pitchblende – Can you smell it? Can you see it? Does it glow? Was it stolen? – only redoubles the immateriality of what it contains. The “Indians,” deprived of the power and knowledge accorded to sight, are given over to the romantic, as Spence has it. What is actually very interesting in all of this, is that

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apart from the racially stereotyped characterization of the Dene contribution to prospecting, it does in fact disclose a Dene presence at the scene of the so-called discoveries. They were there. The white prospectors were listening to them, asking them questions. If nothing else, this places their invisible presence within and around the activities of these southerners on their land, the Denendeh.

3.06 Oh Canada — More Silence

Uranium hexafluoride container, Port Hope, Ontario

The administrative and bureaucratic relationship between Eldorado and Canada became rather complicated after World War II. Once Eldorado was made a Crown corporation (Eldorado Mining and Refining [1944] Limited), it was never able to disentangle itself entirely. Indeed this relationship began well in advance of the Order in Council of January 1944. The Government of Canada began to purchase blocks of Eldorado stock in 1942 and was able to acquire about a quarter of the stocks then issued. Gilbert LaBine, on Howe’s orders, set about purchasing – privately, so as not to disturb the stock market value – as many stocks as he could and transferring these to the government. For a whole slew of very complicated reasons (which Bothwell sets out in painstaking detail)43 involving a botched attempt at a three-way cooperative venture between the Americans, British, and Canadians, it was eventually decided that the incremental approach of purchasing stock on the qt was less efficacious than an outright nationalization of the company. Eldorado’s contribution to the war

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effort had already begun well in advance of the awareness of the Canadian government. The first order of uranium oxide with the then-civilian US bomb project was negotiated in 1941. This was followed with an order of an additional 60 tons in early 1942. This second order was apparently sufficient to justify reopening the Port Radium mine. And it was at this juncture that the wartime government – controlling, as it did, all supplies of resources and labour – became involved. Eldorado needed permission. At this point the story splits. One version has it that C.D. Howe summoned LaBine to Ottawa to ask him to, in greatest secrecy, reopen the mine. The other has it that LaBine went to Ottawa seeking assistance to do so. In either case, the reopening of the mine was given high priority and extraordinary assistance. By July 1942, men and supplies were arriving at Great Bear Lake. A tangle of technical problems presented themselves. The mineshafts, which had been filled with water for nearly two years, were in bad shape. Fuel for the pumps was in short supply. A steady source of labour was difficult to secure (there being nearly full employment in the south, living at Port Radium was clearly not as enticing as it might have appeared during the Depression years). By 1943 the mine was producing ore at top speed. In addition, ore that had been stored at the mine when it closed, along with other ore warehoused at various points down the Highway, was brought to Port Hope. In addition, Eldorado had agreed to two additional contracts with the Americans, making its total obligation 850 tons.44 Amundson figures that about 86 per cent of the uranium required for the Manhattan Project was secured from Eldorado and the Congo.45 Eldorado was in no way able to meet its production targets for the now vast American orders. Mine production was feeble. Enter the Belgian ore. The Union Minière mine at Shinkolobwe had closed at the same time, and for more or less the same reasons, as Port Radium. In anticipation of the Nazi occupation of Belgium, the director of Union Minière, Edgar Sengier, had expeditiously relocated to Manhattan, and in 1939 had arranged for some 1,250 tons of uranium ore from Shinkolobwe to be transferred from the Congo to a warehouse in Staten Island. A lucky accident, as Zoellner puts it. In the summer of 1942, Eldorado’s world sales agent, Boris Pregel, attempted to purchase these Belgian ores from Sengier, the idea being to export it to Canada for processing at Port Hope. As Bothwell tells it, Pregel’s attempt to secure an export permit triggered automatic

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interest from the freshly formed Manhattan Engineering District. When Groves caught wind of the easy availability of high-grade ore sitting basically in the middle of Manhattan, he moved immediately to secure it. There was an immediate and pressing need for ore to contribute to the atomic pile at the University of Chicago. And so it was that the ore came into the possession of the Americans. The great fortune of Eldorado was that it owned and operated the only processing facility that was capable of quietly rendering the sufficiently pure uranium oxide required for the Manhattan Project facilities. The plant at Port Hope underwent considerable development through this time. Rail shipments to the United States were discreetly loaded in small packages, addressed to the attention of “Mr. Bishop, Black Rock Terminal, Buffalo ny.” How these packages were handled on the other side of the border is unclear.46 With its previous orders already on the books, and now with the Belgian ores to be dealt with, the Americans had effectively monopolized the entire output of the Port Hope refinery and would continue to do so until some time in 1946. The Americans had fixed the problem of the slow delivery from the mine, and in the process had effectively cut off the British from receiving processed uranium for their bomb-related work (codenamed “Tube Alloys”), and most particularly for the laboratory they had helped establish at the Université de Montréal to work out details of a heavy-water reactor design. The heavy water was initially supplied by the Americans, and then by a company in Trail, British Columbia. But the lab was starved for uranium (it estimated that 100 tons was required to sustain the project). None was forthcoming. The cooperative quality of the Anglo-American initiative was finally restored in 1942 with the signing of the Combined Policy Agreement at Quebec City. The peculiarities of the Congolese ore required quite a different treatment process, and as a result switching between Canadian and Belgian ores was time-consuming and costly. Zoellner’s version of the Belgian ore is, again, different. Sketchy on the geographic and political terrain located north of the mythic forty-ninth parallel in North America, he is as unaware of Pregel, and of Port Hope. Instead, he tells the story of a flamboyant Sengier attempting unsuccessfully to sell his uranium to the US State Department. It was only after Groves took control of the Manhattan Project that a deal was stuck.47

3.07 Field Note: Cameron Bay — August 2003

Branson’s Lodge, Cameron Bay, Great Bear Lake, 2003

I am at Cameron Bay with my brother. We are staying at Branson’s Lodge, an abandoned fishing camp. Our travelling companions — Morris Modeste, an outfitter and guide, Deb Simmons, and Ken Caine — have returned to Déline. Late last night we watched as their boat disappeared into the western expanse of the lake. As I sit here now in the midst of all these ruins (most of them invisible), I realize that it was about a year ago today that I found myself in the Prince of Wales archive in Yellowknife amid other ruins. I spent a remarkable few days poring through a scattered collection. Maps and photos and clippings and books, never enough. And one that I have with me is the diary of Irene Spry (née Biss), at the time closely associated with Harold Innis at the University of Toronto (since arriving there in 1929). Written in a difficult hand, in a School Work Book, she takes me through an impressionistic inventory of Cameron Bay at the time of her visit in 1935. It was almost fifty years later, and some fifteen years before she died, when she published anything to do with this fieldwork. In 1982, a short note appeared in the Musk-Ox journal summarizing her travels in the summer of 1935.

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Although the main repository of her papers is Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, she donated her handwritten journal from that summer and over six hundred of her photographs to the archives in the Northwest Territories.48 In 1933 the Canadian government surveyed a town site at Cameron Bay. Over the years it was known by a confusing series of names, some referring to the town proper, some to the post office, and some to the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals radio station: Cameron Point, Port Radium, Radium City, Great Bear, and, although I can’t confirm that this was not simply a typo that worked its way into usage, Fort Radium.49 This grew into a lively village with a cast of interesting characters. Because it was remote from the Eldorado mine site (though less than 10 kilometres), it was a public space. This place, she said, was a rich collection of buildings, tents and caches, tin huts and sheds. From where I sit as I write this, I can imagine just over there Vic Ingraham’s post office and pool room and the Musk Ox Saloon. A good deal of money is said to have changed hands there, according to the laws of chance. The sign on his door said “No person under 16 years of age, or treaty Indians allowed in here.” No blacks, no Irish, no dogs. Not far from Vic’s was the Arctic Lunch. Jessie Matthews ran it and sold a fair bit of booze on the side. Booze here was a central flow of the economy. The government declared that everyone was entitled to two gallons a year. Jessie did a good business. And just to the left would have been Gardiner’s Café: cheap food, hot coffee. Inside one might have found Anna Berquist, Swedish runaway and main squeeze of Chuch McLeod the prospector. Dr. and Mrs. Byrnes lived here, too, with their daughter Elizabeth. The Mrs. was apparently a bit “lushed, tanned and wrinkled.” And reports are that a number of people seem to have had very little confidence in the mine doctor’s professional skill. But people tend to talk too much. The radio station here was staffed by four radio boys. One would have wished them the best, I suppose … not long before the operator at Rae was burned to death when the station caught fire while he was asleep, and before that, another one managed to drown in the frigid spring waters. It was said that if a man were to fall completely under the waters of Great Bear Lake, he would not come back up. It’s just that cold. Henry Swanson had had a trading post in Fort Franklin. Upon hearing of the staking rush he made his way across the lake in the spring of 1931 and staked the entire area that was to become the town of Cameron Bay. It is said that well into the 1930s one could still find his claim stakes, inscribed “Anna,” the name of his daughter, the rightful and registered

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owner of the claims, the Anna claims. Over behind the Swansons’ house, near to the old lumber shed, is the Hudson’s Bay Company store. Andy Reid runs it, and Tommy Taylor, “a cheerful cherubic youth, very pink,” is the apprentice clerk. And next to that, the mining recorder and his “bloodless but well-meaning wife.” And there was Paul Trudell, assistant mining recorder, “a round bouncing little French Canadian.” D’Arcy Arden married an “Indian” woman. Elmer Baher was the RCMP officer; not a pleasant job, one would imagine. Jim English wants to be an electrical engineer, Mr. Langfeldt is the pharmacist, and Frank Causneau, a gambler, came here once the Yukon Gold Rush had exhausted itself. The Yukon seems to have spit out a number of alumni into the heady dream of the radium rush of the early 1930s, followed by the Yellowknife gold rush of ’35. Yukon Jessie (the aforementioned Jessie Matthews) arrived from the Yukon, having picked up a couple of working girls in Edmonton en route. Jessie was a large woman, apparently; this is mentioned by all who note her presence there, and the girls, poetically dubbed Zip and Zoom, were fast women, evidently. None of them ended up staying in town for long. Zip and Zoom found nice men to take them south (Zip to Toronto with a miner, and Zoom to Edmonton with a trapper, I believe), and Jess was flown south on the good will of a pilot with some extra space. Peet writes in a similar vein (so to speak). He tells of an orphaned lad of seventeen from Dr. Barnardo’s Homes in Britain, whose cheerful laugh endeared him to everyone; a crusty seventy-two-year-old carpenter from Victoria, British Columbia, whose temperament and traits were so adverse that no one would travel with him; a man with a wooden leg, and another who had competed in long-distance foot races. There was a white justice of the peace from Alberta, and a coloured refugee from justice from Alabama … an unemployed chemistry professor from Notre Dame, and a deaf mute from Manitoba. There were, of course, scores of others. But now it’s all gone. All but this second-order ruin where I now am sitting. Or squatting, more properly. In 1932 in Cameron Bay, one could find garden crops, grown on-site, on soils flown in from gardens in the south. Planted in June with ice still thick on the lake, there were potatoes, Swiss chard, lettuce, radishes, broad beans, turnips, beets and carrots.50 As I write this, there are a handful of buildings, some very old, some dating from the era of Branson’s Lodge, and many ruins. My brother and I have been staying in a bunkhouse here, making trips to Port Radium, and using the kitchen to make our fish. Fishing in Great Bear Lake is an embarrassment. And

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exhausting. One must work very hard to catch fish small enough to eat. This of course cannot be repeated elsewhere — apocryphal it sounds. But it isn’t. I have apologized to a lot of fish in the last few days, as I send them back into the deep. All too big, by any reasonable standard. What do we need 16 pounds of meat for? This evening, fishing for dinner. One hour, everything too big. Sorry. A caribou and her calf are surprised to see me apologizing to (another) fish and divert their path from the beach where I am standing, to the lake. They swim, side by side, over half a mile to a small island across from here where they climb ashore. This is where all the dogs from Cameron Bay were kept; Tin Can Island, they called it. I assume they are both fast asleep there as I write this.

And right now, if one looks at satellite imagery one can see many new structures, Quonset huts and docks and evidence of much renewed mining and exploration activity in and around the area.

3.08 Field Note: Bewilderment — Déline, 2003

Julie — my friend, research companion, and professor of Drama from Queen’s University — and I stay at the Grey Goose Lodge, now the only hotel in town. A small place, a dozen rooms, a restaurant, a gift shop, and a porch. This is the hub for interactions (formal and otherwise) between those from the community and elsewhere in the North and those from the south. Environmental consultants, lawyers and legal teams, civil servants, researchers. We began this work together, Julie and I, a couple of years ago. It started with a phone call. I wanted Julie to work with me to secure funding for a project about the story of the uranium, and how two academics from different fields might sustain a conversation about themes of memory, history, and ethics. We got the funding, began our work, and the conversation has continued. She has decided that the only way to respond to this story we find ourselves tracking is to write a play. But both of us are here because we have been invited by the community to speak about our research, and to talk with people who know something of the history. We arrive in the middle of February, having fled our institutions in the period near the mid-term reading week. This is our first visit to the community, and we are a bit adrift. It is numbingly cold, and this places all movement outside into the mode of pure survival. Our contact in the community, Deb Simmons, has made our visit a piece of public knowledge; the community public-access television station flashes our upcoming community talk. We are here because the community is deep into revisiting the history of its involvement with radium and uranium mining. The Déline Uranium Team is busily gathering oral histories, assembling documentation, and trying to assemble a big picture of what took place. But, in doing so, they are also in a way inventing what took place, because very few people remembered much, and in any case, what is remembered does not have the added charge of what is now known about uranium and toxicity, the bombing of Japan, and so on. Consequently, their task is also to inform the community regularly of their findings such that people can, for the

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first time, know what has already taken place; a curious variation of the project of history. We speak at length with a number of people in town, informally, but we have been told that we will not be able to speak with any elders until we have spoken with the Chief. Our first meeting with him is quite remarkable. I am not sure how much information I will be called upon to give him, so I am prepared to deliver a long explanation of our research and interest in Port Radium and the rest of the historic transportation route. We arrive at the appointed hour at the offices of the Chief, and by this time I have discovered that one does not enter a home or a place of business such as an office in the winter without removing one’s footwear. (Indeed the entire politic of visiting reinforced our sense of being from elsewhere.) It is the habit of many to either carry shoes with them throughout the course of their daily travels, or to leave moccasins or shoes at places they frequent. But for some reason that day the Chief is wearing only his socks. And so am I. And so is Julie. There is something oddly levelling about such a meeting conducted in socks.51 We are greeted and led into his office. What am I doing there? I am asked. I explain my interest, and what had led Julie and me to begin this research. In particular I want to emphasize that we see a kind of southern deficit or debt in relation to the uranium history, and that we feel that, through our archival work in the south and elsewhere, we can contribute to their efforts to reconstruct this history. We describe to him the magnitude of the archival holdings in Ottawa, and the fact that so little of it has been consulted by independent researchers … that the histories written to date are not interested, not even slightly, in the Dene’s connection to any of it. Moreover, the body of evidence upon which the Dene could draw to support their grievances was mute with respect to their presence as historical actors. He is quite interested in this. Eventually we come to the topic of our wish to speak with community elders. We know this is a contentious issue; we are far from the first southerners to come poking around about all this. In the years subsequent to Peter Blow’s documentary work and the trip to Japan, the community had been frequented by journalists and others looking for testimony from ore-carriers and others. I made it very clear that we were not ethnographers or anthropologists, and that we had no formal interview scheme, and that we wished only to speak to those elders who wished to speak with us. Nothing more.

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We wanted conversation and information from those who were interested and able. We would tell them what we knew from the historical record, and speak with them informally about anything they wished to tell of their own experiences. This kind of explanation of our interest makes us appear as amateur (or naive), as in fact we are with this kind of thing, but he seems to feel that it is worthwhile work. And then he says, looking right at us, “You must be careful with the stories that the elders tell you … they do not want to repeat themselves.” This is clearly a significant thing he is telling me in that moment in his office, and it takes considerable strength to stop myself from pursuing it with him. Why, I wonder, would a story only want to be told once? This makes no sense. In fact, the only way to make sense of it is to see this injunction as not at all about stories, but about us, and about the elders. I will let you bother them once, but don’t do it twice … have the courtesy to remember. The group of people we are to visit this February are all very old, and most are not in very good health.52 In this setting, stories are gifts, and cannot be wasted on forgetting.

Other visitors to the community during our visit included several environmental consultants working with senes, at the time the main contractor involved in establishing the radiological situation and history at Port Radium and other significant sites; several academics from the University of Alberta; and the then lawyer for the land claim settlement, Geoffrey Grenville-Wood. With clearance from the Chief to speak with people in the community, we were able to set up several visits with elders. One of the conditions that we agreed on at the outset was that we would have no formal interview protocol, would not record any interviews (which were really just conversations), would not take notes, and would not cite people in any correspondence or publication that resulted from our meetings. During our time there we spoke with as many people as we could. I would like to note in particular the hospitality we received from six individuals who welcomed us into their homes. Elizabeth Kodakin, Theresa and Peter Baton, Rosie Sewi, Isadore Yukon, and Moise Bahya were gracious hosts and very patient with our questions and interest. I mention them by name here as a measure of my gratitude, but I will not cite them directly – none of them wished to be our authorities. There was an astonishing indirectness with which people dealt with our questions and conversation. I had come prepared only with

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a few archival photos and a set of maps of the lake, including the Bear River and Tulita. It seemed to me that having something to work with that pictured the lake and, in particular, Port Radium might make the process of talking about this long-ago time somewhat more straightforward. We hired a young translator, Mark Modeste, to help with the Slavey that invariably peppered the recollections from our hosts. What I learned from these visits was not at all what I had expected to learn. It didn’t really clarify any of the historical record, because none of what I was told was indexed to particular points in time. The reasons for this are many. Certainly, it has something to say about the retroactivity of this entire story. Things were not remembered clearly often because they were not experienced as significant in the first place. Things gained their significance only after the fact, and so for this reason it is as though all the valences of memory have to be reassigned and reconfigured in light of the recent revelations. It is to discover that what one was apparently doing was not in fact what one was really doing – a traumatic experience, and perhaps particularly so for the elderly. But it is also particular to a kind or mode of speech that the Dene used with me. I can’t exactly generalize this, and I am not the first to note it, but the kind of speech that I found myself involved with in my various trips to Déline had such an astonishing indirectness that I frequently came away from a conversation wondering about exactly what I had been told. When I asked a question of one of my hosts about where he lived when he was employed by Eldorado loading and unloading barges at the mine site – I know this from oral histories collected by the community – I was told that what I really needed to understand was something about caribou. He then went on to tell me a great deal about caribou and their movements on the east side of Great Bear Lake; how the caribou would move across from the Barren Lands, where the Dene would set up their camps, when they would be plentiful and easy to hunt, and where they would travel to hunt them. And none of this, on the face of it, had the slightest thing to do with details of life at the mine, the nature of the work, and so on. But it was as though the specific and located experience of knowing about caribou – of which my interlocutor knew very well I had no conceivable experience – was the kind of knowledge that one needed in order to approach my other question. In a way, this was not hostile in the least: such responses were a critical claim to an experien-

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tial authority that I did not possess. It is hard to imagine how one would approach someone so completely inexperienced. I began to get the sense that my hosts were simply telling me that there was a great deal to know before I could approach what it was I thought I was interested in, and that what I thought I was interested in could not be addressed directly. In this sense I was severely limited in what I would be able to glean from these conversations if, and I stress if, I were to cling to the idea that questions are the things that determine answers, whereas it may well be, to paraphrase Deleuze (that great Parisian questioner) that a question or problem always gets the answer it deserves. The universe of questions and expectations I had brought with me from the south did not correspond to the universe of answers available to me there. I received much the same kind of replies to my questions about place names in and around Port Radium. I knew there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Slavey place names that at least some of these elders would recollect, but no one was interested in speaking to them directly, even while looking at a map of the area. Toponyms, I was quickly reminded, are not just names – they are forms of knowledge that pertain to a way of life; they have their own stories, histories, and practices.53 Most of the elders I spoke with were very concerned to convey their sense of sadness and loss that their knowledge – about the bush, their language, places names, trapping and fishing, and their traditional way of life – was not being taken up by their children and grandchildren. Instead, they found themselves answering dumb questions posed by journalists, researchers, and others who somehow wanted to know things apart from the experiential knowledge that would make such things meaningful to begin with. Knowledge is embodied, accumulated through experience, and supported through narrative. This is not traditional ecological knowledge (tek), as it has come to be called. tek: a telling homonym, ironic, parodic, concealing perhaps just another kind of discovery narrative, another gesture of cultural condescension, another gesture of the burden of residual and southern postcolonial guilt. Not tek, then, but listening and thinking and knowing that there is something to be learned that requires effort and willingness. This is the kind of listening that experienced fieldworkers such as Cruikshank and Ryan have spent decades problematizing and refining.54 It is no easy task.

3.09 Field Note: Grey Goose Inn, Déline — 25 July 2003

On preparations: How do you prepare for this fieldwork of words? What is the appropriate gear? Two days from now, I begin. Benjamin cautioned against beginning any project without the proper instruments at hand. What, then, are the proper instruments for exploring a route such as the Highway of the Atom? What preparations must one make? I have no idea. Not really. I have a full set of maps at various appropriate scales, a Geiger counter, a shotgun, a digital recorder, a GPS, a compass, a solar cell, a laptop, two cameras, a fishing rod, a loved one, and a knife … This may well be much too literal. Then one must speak of danger, of course, because the Highway of the Atom is a story about danger. And not just because of the danger it invented, and not just because of the danger it may now pose. It is a story about danger because it also has things to tell us about danger. This is the ethical itinerary of the Highway of the Atom: it has the capacity to do more than point. It is not an ostensive history that it draws on, at least not solely. It is not a history that exhausts itself in pointing. It also has a capacity to tell and to show. And the lake, of course, is the ideal precinct to begin a discussion of danger. The discussion moves outward, in waves, to the danger in settings elsewhere. Along the Highway and its workers, and to all of the other stations, for which only the “motley list” can suffice. Sawmill Bay and the antlers, obviously. The mine site and the back bay. (We cleaned up the abandoned school-bus, aka, the Yellow Bird motel.) The tennis court, the RCMP cabin and monument. The portage around the St. Charles rapids, and the Bennett and Franklin landings, and several areas around Tulita. And further upriver, at Cache Island, at Fort Providence, and Wrigley and Bell Rock and at Waterways, and all the places in between where things began to leak.

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With danger always comes the question of conduct. How did we do? What did we do? So with the question of danger is raised the abiding question of the ethical. What happened? Well, we know that the Dene went to Japan. And when I said that yesterday this began with a trail of tears, with Indians and potatoes and Irish famine activists, I was really talking about the same thing. In the wake of their catastrophic walk (from Mississippi to Oklahoma — the Indian Removal Act), the Choctaw Indians, their numbers reduced by half, an event that has come to be known as the Trail of Tears, did almost the same thing (they reached out to the Irish). It may be too much to say that the Choctaw are to Ireland as the Dene are to Japan. There is something similar.

Until quite recently, the Dene of Great Bear Lake and many others along the Highway knew nothing of radioactivity. Why would they? “We would travel across the lake and watch them unload the [uranium ore] bags … lots of people handled the ore bags but it must have been dangerous so now people are talking more about uranium. In those days we never thought about the danger of uranium.”55 How would one even translate such a concept? In the Slavey language “there are no words for radiation, radioactive contamination, or risk.”56 In Inuktitut, I am told, the concept of half-life translates as half-human. In Slavey, the language of the Dene, there just are no words to translate this word.57 Today, that is, by now, many other translations have been invented, some conceptual and linguistic, and some decidedly material and corporeal. This of course is only one sense of translate. The bewildering discourse around the bomb itself poses a different sort of difficulty. From a press release delivered by C.D. Howe after the Japanese detonations: The real significance does not lie in the fact that this new bomb has accomplished an almost incredible feat of destruction, important as that fact may be; its significance is that the bomb is a sign in which all can appreciate that the basic problems of the release of energy by atomic fission have been solved, and that the unbelievable large amounts of energy which scientists have long believed to be associated with matter can now be made available for practical use.58 Practical use. In this, a terrifyingly sociopathic analysis, the problem

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of translation is given over to its status as sign. That is, it cannot be apprehended solely on the basis of its capacity for destruction; indeed, the very attempt to do so stood in the way of justifying its use to begin with. The conventional bombing of Germany and Japan had claimed far more lives than the detonations over Japanese cities.59 The question of the bomb’s proper signification, of its possible signification, is hardly settled on this account.

3.10 Field Note: Arctic Circle (66˚ 32´) — 1 August 2005

MV Radium King

I am sitting on the bank of the Mackenzie River at the very point that the Arctic Circle cuts its imaginary path across the North. I can’t see any difference. I have been trying to find as many routes into the North as I can and have just read a perfect poem by Al Purdy. In it, he declares that he was stupid. He says so. Not me. But I agree. Who knows if I could publish this poem of his, but writing it down here in my journal transforms its voice back to his, as I remember him from the days of his readings at the Red Dog Tavern in Peterborough.60

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Trees at the Arctic Circle (Salix Cordifolia---Ground Willow) They are 18 inches long or even less crawling under rocks groveling among the lichens bending and curling to escape making themselves small finding new ways to hide Coward trees I am angry to see them like this not proud of what they are bowing to weather instead careful of themselves worried about the sky afraid of exposing their limbs like a Victorian married couple I call to mind great Douglas firs I see tall maples waving green and oaks like gods in autumn gold the whole horizon jungle dark and I crouched under that continual night But these even the dwarf shrubs of Ontario mock them Coward trees And yet---and yet--their seed pods glow like delicate gray earrings their leaves are veined and intricate like tiny parkas They have about three months to make sure the species does not die and that’s how they spend their time unbothered by any human opinion just digging in here and now sending their roots down down down

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And you know it occurs to me about 2 feet under those roots must touch permafrost ice that remains ice forever and they use it for their nourishment they use death to remain alive I see that I’ve been carried away in my scorn of the dwarf trees most foolish in my judgments To take away the dignity of any living thing even tho it cannot understand the scornful words is to make life itself trivial and yourself the Pontific Maximus of nullity I have been stupid in a poem I will not alter the poem but let the stupidity remain permanent as the trees are in a poem the dwarf trees of Baffin Island61 Not satisfied with this confession of stupidity was he. He writes another poem as a postscript. Here he imagines the great temporal reach of the dwarf trees “before Chaucer and Shakespeare or Leif the Lucky took his first look at Vinland.”

a small green leaf appeared on the tundra and began to manufacture oxygen unnoticed by anyone its own witness a thousand years ago one day in August.62 Poor Al. He got it wrong again. They’re not as old as Chaucer. But those willows got him thinking. And me too. Forests are such a luxury of the southern imagination. Cruciform and phantastic, lush, intoxicated. The diminutive waifs in the North, however, those objects of Purdy’s scorn, these are the real trees, and not out of

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any Darwinian extremity. Settlers all, stunted, they wait for better times. Coniferous models of the messianism of the North. A gambit that appears to be paying off in the warm return of climatic change, one notes. Waiting. John Moss says something like, North is the metaphysics of geography. Perhaps this is why we are we still so neurotic when it comes to thinking about it. Is it just our lingering suspicions about metaphysics? Or metaphors? Lichens, like these “northern dwarfs,” have more than a passing affinity with duration. They can wait. This is also the tragic ambiguity of distance. Isn’t it? Too far, and too long. One we can manage, the time, that is. The other we cannot. One is approached with a shout or a shot, the other with a lament or by tears. But the two, once confused, have a particular affinity, precisely, for tragedy. Too far and too long. Duration is of course not the exclusive province of lichens and trees. Duration (both kinds, at least) is also the domain of the stories — not history – belonging to the peoples of the North and elsewhere. Those of us of European extraction (odd word, that) may find it strange that one might speak of having been around forever. In the same place. Very long and very close. But “we” don’t do this. And all this says, or all I am trying to say, is that we have before us a problem.

Purdy wrote some beautiful poetry that summer he spent up North. Parts of it are like clown ethnography, but I love the nakedness of his incomprehension. What he can do with incomprehension. His place was Prince Edward County, not Baffin Land, as he called it. I also love the weirdly improbable A.Y. Jackson plates that preface and unsettle the small volume of poems, depopulating the very place Purdy was struggling with. (Geriatric vomit done by habit, as he later described Jackson’s paintings in a letter to Margaret Laurence.63) He was there trying to write poems about where he was. The Inuit, their dogs, their life, the land, and the strange happenstance of his being there. For all the ink spilt on the mythification of the North by Canadian writers and poets, Purdy is one of the few who actually went there. This strikes me as significant.

3.11 Chorography

From Purdy I shift now to think of how we come to write of such places as the North and stories like that of the Highway of the Atom; real places, with real stories. The abductive leap required takes us to larger questions of how one approaches the representation of such places and such stories. The antiquarian distinctions between modes of worldly representations – that is, between topos, choros, and geos – arose out of “three very different ways of conceptualizing space and place, three different ways of gaining knowledge of them, and three different ways of representing that knowledge.”64 It would be quite incorrect to assume a simple scalar relation between these terms, as though they described a movement from the very large (geos) to the very small (topos). Of these three, chorography has all but disappeared in the conceptual and discursive reshuffling of these terms. One path of derivation here is to follow the chora itself. Walter does this, although rather than chorography, he is interested in deriving a chorographic practice he calls topistics. It requires a particular approach, and a particular mode of reasoning that, after Plato, he likens to dreaming with open eyes: “Plato tells us that to grasp the nature of place, ‘we must try to express and make manifest a form obscure and dim.’ It lies outside both reason and sensation, to be apprehended by some kind of sensuous reasoning. ‘Some sort of bastard reasoning, which is hardly trustworthy,’ Plato writes, gives us the knowledge of place.”65 Walter continues: Chora, which may be translated as either “place” or “space,” depending on context, is one of the independent, eternal modes of experience – one of the three types of Being in the universe. One type of being refers to the eternal ideas, the changeless forms or models of things apprehended by the reason – the domain of concepts. The second type of Being includes the transient copies or exemplifications or the eternal forms, meaning perceptual phenomena, which pass from birth to decay – the domain of sensory

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experience. The third type of reality, chora, is the receptacle of sensory experience and the seat of phenomena. Whereas the eternal models exist without specific location, every instance of sensory experience must emerge in a place.66 The chora, which Derrida enlivens from Plato’s Timaeus – as a kind of third mode between being and becoming – shares a similar but not identical derivation.67 Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language was perhaps the first major contemporary theorization of chora.68 Also working from a reading of the Timaeus, Kristeva takes the term chora as something pre-positional, non-axiomatic, non-representational, neither model nor copy, as that which “precedes and underlies figuration” and is “analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm”; that is, repeatable, and separable.69 And it is this rhythmic space (i.e., articulation) – modelled as analogous to the unconscious of the Freudian subject – as the semiotic chora that suggests a very tricky kind of place. Not at all a determined place, which would be a topos, but a manner of spacing in which things may come to take place. As a pre-ontological site that is yet somehow a receptacle, its relation to nominability itself is of course paradoxical, as she notes.70 Of particular interest here, however, is the idea of chora as “a modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as an absence of an object”; this suggests not a Lacanian real, but rather a productive locus of invention.71 The other line of derivation follows chorography as a practice or art. There was a particular place for chorography as a qualitative mode of picturing the world, an attempt to “capture a more subjective dimension of spatiality in specific rather than in generic terms.”72 In his Geography, Ptolemy compared this practice to a kind of painting: “Geography looks at the position rather than the quality, noting the relationships of distances everywhere, and emulating the art of painting only in some of its major descriptions. Chorography needs an artist, and no one presents it rightly unless he is an artist.”73 Contemporary readings of chorography take this into a domain of the rhetoric of invention, as a mode of generating method from theory.74 An interesting inversion, from which one might derive a unique method of approach that could be called a topistics; that is, a mode of theory that retro-navigates an idea of place as inseparable from experience.75 In a word, theoria.

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Theoria did not mean that kind of vision that is restricted to sight. The Greek work for exclusively optic perception is opsis. The term theoria originally implied a complex but organic mode of active observation – a perceptual system that included asking questions, listening to stories and local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing.76 For Gregory Ulmer, chorography, also a mode of theoria, is “a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory.”77 The writer will “store and retrieve information from premises or places formulated not as abstract containers,” he writes, “as in the tradition of topos” – that is, a “collection of commonplaces”78 for the purposes of argument, a place “where a plurality of oratorical reasonings coincide”79 – but as means of writing and reading a stamp, or imprint. It is tactile and subjective, decidedly non-Aristotelian, and aims at something between description and explanation. One proceeds with ideas and feeling and citation, not with a compass (an often unreliable instrument in northern latitudes anyway). Walter illustrates this sense of method through a story: “Thales, one of the Seven Sages, while observing the stars fell into a well. A Thracian slave woman laughed at him, saying he wanted to know what happened in the heavens, but failed to observe what was in front of his own feet. In this simple way, she exposed the predicament of a theorist who loses his ground.”80 Chorography is a kind of memory art for the engagement with place or region. It is a mode of finding one’s ground. To Yates’ ars memoriae, it posits an art of the practice of place. Its apparent similarity to choreography is but a pleasing coincidence. And so, one might add, is the relation between theoria and therapeia; that is, the therapeia of place means “close attendance” or “caring.”81 To “write with the paradigm” is the method proposed by Ulmer. We could call this a monstrous writing, or a teratological writing, as Barthes had it; a kind of contamination.82 The oppositions and differences characteristic of the paradigm (“the mnemonic treasure,” that which “normally” remains unified in absentia) are rendered monstrous (Barthes says transgressive) when they come to be expressed syntagmatically (that is, in praesentia).83 To move the paradigmatic onto the syntagmatic is to move speech closer to a metaphoric order, through the “removal of a kind of structural censorship,” not unlike that of dreams.84

3.12 Field Note: Port Radium — 30 July 2003

Dump, Cameron Bay, Great Bear Lake

At Port Radium, there is an abandoned tennis court. It stands atop the sheer granite cliffs right at the point where they plunge into the blue unfathomable depths of Great Bear Lake. This court, this ruin, is surfaced in a remarkable concrete made from pulverized uranium mine tailings. It overlooks another ruin: the decommissioned — that is, bulldozed and abandoned — uranium mine. Homo ludens meets Homo faber. It is difficult to convey the strangeness of standing here, listening to a Geiger counter rendering sonorous the material history of this place; 1,200, 1,400, 1,550 microrems per hour. Translating the abstract invisibility of energetic matter seeking its own repose, struggling toward the mute lifelessness of lead. (From my notes I can tell that I stood mid-court, and searched briefly for a line about love and danger.) Long before the tennis court, Camsell and Bell were here, writing, mapping. In the greenstones east of McTavish Bay … And so it all began. To stand here is, quite literally, to glimpse the uncanny of landscape, “the proximity of the remote,” the oikos haunted by its history.85

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Is this, I wonder, the emphatic geography I had imagined? Port Radium, formerly Great Bear, then Cameron’s Point, then Cameron Point, Echo Bay, and (briefly) Radium City. And depending on when we are looking at it, it is a radium mine, a uranium mine, a silver mine, or a ghost town. Now, today, it is really a ghost town – the monument reads, in part: “It is not possible to count the number of people who have called Port Radium home over the 50 years that mining has taken place.”86 It’s just not possible … Anyway, this was hardly a discovery on my part. It had been noted in numerous radiological surveys, and in anecdotal reports from those who had visited the area. In advance, I knew exactly where to find it. One must climb the bulldozed, talus slope at the south-west corner of the mine site. I knew that, from there, I would see a panorama of the lake to the west, to the south and to the north-west. I would see the only remaining structure on the property – the former rcmp cabin, dating from the late 1930s. To the east, I would see the opening to Echo Bay, several kilometres from the former town site of Cameron Bay, a wild-west radium boomtown in the 30s, where Irene Spry spent a summer pretending to be Harold Innis, where Zip and Zoom, two diasporic sex-trade refugees from the Yukon gold-rush lived and worked, where pitchblende was smuggled and mineral claims traded. All of this I knew before I had arrived. Yet the very notion of preparation, the question of its sufficiency, or scope, was not the problem here. It was not a problem of description, it is not that one thing cannot describe another; indeed, this may be all that one thing can do. Rather, it is about a bodily encounter, a moment, an event. And whatever else an event may turn out to be – in all of our interminable hand-wringing about such things – it is simply not something that can be experienced in advance of itself. The encounter or event I refer to is lost in the very moment of recognition and reconciliation, the moment where archive precedes landscape, where the testimony precedes the witness. A moment of seeming reversed causality. That odd sensation of visiting a region that is already symbolically imprinted (archivally, discursively, textually, practically) in one’s awareness, in one’s work. I know what happened here! I recognize this place. Some would call this factchecking. But this lacks precision. And imagination. It can just as easily be seen as the troubling of indexicality; a near-approximation of the indexical imaginary.

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The index tell us that it’s okay to be a “realist” in polite company, and in the woods. It has no truck with mimesis, that cheap trick of the cinema and the cave. No unconscious operating beyond the limit of detection as the secret guarantor. The index seduces with the sensation of competence. Surely this is one of the extra-textual, seductive pleasures of doing fieldwork to begin with. Yet there is something unsettling about all of this. To be in the field is not about the factual confirmation, arbitration, and correction of the textual. It is about an encounter – the mark is always produced in the encounter – where the territory asserts a nonconformity with its varied representations, where indices betray. Suspension. False memory, bad data, forgetting. And yet even a misalignment is identifiable as such only in relation to alignment itself. Misrecognition is a kind of recognition, and can ultimately be referred to error; always a manner of adjustment, recalculation, and correction. The trouble, though, pertains to the hard bits, the pieces that resist, that fail to fail, so to speak. Knots of bewilderment, these are sites – keeping places, perhaps – places marked by a radical non-registration of the ontic and the epistemic. It is an open question. A problem is produced between a knowledge and a place, a witness and a landscape; a chorographic procedure. It is neither the confirmation of knowing (the positivism of method), nor the pretense of error (right, again!), but the abyss and the silence of no language game, no tacit abridgement in advance. Invention. Abduction. Writing and reading. It is not that one searches for ciphers of the real – this is merely what one ends up with, even while a complacent sense of indexicality is palpable. A cipher is not the thing you can’t understand because of its complexity, ambiguity, or incomprehensibility. A cipher is that which you think you ought to understand precisely because it appears to be about understanding, or beyond it … the obvious. It goes without saying. This is the problem with indices, isn’t it? On the one hand, they demand a form of knowledge. One must know that the flash of lightning shares an existential bond with the clap of thunder that follows. But, on the other hand, this is only one way of describing things. The agitated clicking of my Geiger counter as I circle the ancient tennis court in Port Radium surfaced with radioactive concrete is a sign. Clearly. I am in no doubt that there is a semiological relation between the radiation and the clicking. This must be an index. The child who places her hand on the door of the still-warm oven is en-

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gaging in a piece of semiotic learning. She is about to learn the sureness of the index. A tekmerion, a sure sign. A tekmerion is an odd species of sign, a necessary sign. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle put it: “Necessary signs are called tekmeria … when people think that their arguments are irrefutable, they think that they are bringing forward a tekmerion, something as it were proved and concluded.”87 If threats share an affinity with a mode of signification, it is certainly the index. But they are tricky. They are indexes, indices, only after the event. That is, threats become indexes. Prior to the event, that is, until the event takes place, whatever it might be, unimaginable as it might be, the existential connection that bonds the smoke to the fire, the wind to the weather vane, was not present. Until the event, there is no movement of effort and resistance, and it does not pertain to a “universe of existents,” as Peirce would have put it.88 And, he might continue, that “secondness,” this idea of effort and resistance, “is the predominant character of what has been done.”89 Secondness as such is a report on a state of affairs. But – and this is key – for the index to be a sign, for it to constitute an interpretant, requires knowledge. The burning red on the stove element as the kettle is removed from the heat is the perfect instance of secondness, of effort and resistance. But to the unknowing hand that reaches up from below, it is no such thing. After the first time, yes, but not initially. Until the event it is a secondness before the sign. And she is also about to invent an idiom. Henceforth the warmness of the oven will signal its object clearly with the ontic commemoration of pain. The first time, though, the first time one is free in a sense from that knowledge that ties things together. Thereafter, things can never be the same again. The indexical imaginary is precisely the phantasy that one is, in this sense, free. The archive asserts its tyranny through the phantastic seductions of metonymy. Yet, as with tekmeria generally, certainty, necessity, we would say, is predicated upon knowledge – a public knowledge, a manner of ratified belief, and a knowledge that is precisely at issue. The tekmerion reaches its limit in making an “irrefutable” claim, in telling us that something is the case. Not why. It makes no explanation. This cancer is malignant. That oven is hot. This tennis court is hot. But it can make no explanation; this is but the retroactive projection of a knowledge unsure of its grounds. It is demonstrative first, and then, and therefore, persuasive. Here there really is no why. Until there is certainty, there is no tekmerion; it is, as Barthes put it, “suspended.”90 And this suspension of the tekmerion may well be a matter

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of cultural investment. Consider, for example, the dispute between neo-Darwinists and young-earth creationists concerning fossils; emphatic trickster objects for sure. Although the fossil record is strong indexical evidence (a tekmerion) of deep history from an evolutionary point of view, for the young-earth creationists it is merely evidence of a Noachian catastrophe some 6,000 years ago. Or, for the Canadian government, the residual radioactive contamination at Great Bear Lake is simply a perfectly reparable inconvenience, one of thousands of contaminated sites bequeathed to the present by an era of unregulated industrial development. For the Dene, or those that spoke with me, something has happened to their land, their lake, and their health, and they were involved. Here, as perhaps elsewhere, landscape and differend are closely aligned.91 There is no way to resolve conflicts of interpretation. The tekmerion on the one hand, and the index in suspension on the other. It’s hard to tell the difference. The imaginary, the pre-verbal, Lacanian imaginary we could describe as the pre-symbolic subject’s spectral identification, and over-estimation. It is a misrecognition of one’s coherence, one’s power. The attraction of the ego as an other. In this sense, the indexical imaginary could be described as the sign presumed to be configured as a necessary semiological coherence, and as possessed of a “natural” capacity for testimony that it may not in fact possess. It is not secular, it “implies a type of apprehension in which factors such as resemblance and homeomorphism play a decisive role, as is borne out by a sort of coalescence of the signifier and the signified.”92 The indexical imaginary exists amid this ambiguity when one confers upon the sign in suspension a capacity to reveal a truth. It is in the very instant of this ambiguity that one may become lost.

3.13 Field Note: Déline — August 2003

Have just made it back to Déline. On the return my brother and I spent three nights with a group of Dene at an abandoned fishing camp before setting out across the lake. We limped back, really, with a damaged prop on the outboard rented from Morris — bad luck: probably the only rock in the bay near where we cached fuel for the trip home. Good luck: had the presence of mind to order a spare prop months before the trip from a dealer in Thunder Bay. More good luck: the rock strike had not bent the drive shaft; we weren’t marooned and I wasn’t on the hook for an expensive replacement. We arrived at Déline in the late evening, 11:30 pm, frozen stiff from the final three-hour sprint across open water from the gas cache. And of course it is still light. The town is hopping, vibrating. Kids everywhere. Trucks cruising. Saturday night in Déline. Something is going on, clearly, but as usual I have no idea what. Having arranged no place to stay upon our return, we start walking across town to the Grey Goose hotel. Part-way there a tense situation unfolds. A group of people emerge from a house and begin to get into a truck. Drunk/stoned young man weaves right for us. “Gimme five,” etc. Asks why we are there. Good question. We tell him we’ve been on the lake. This fact escalates something in him. My brother is a bit oblivious to this. I try to push on, but my brother lingers, mentioning the amazing fishing. “Leave my fucking fish alone,” the young man shouts. He is furious, wasted, and we’ve just spent two weeks on his lake eating his fish. A woman standing off to the side walks up to us, takes my hand, shakes it pointedly and politely, and says, “You guys should walk away, right now. Just Go.” Thank you. We did. Knowing when to walk away. We pass the cultural centre, doors wide open, a dance going on, our friend Deb visible inside. She offers us her floor to sleep on. We return to the boat, leaving most of our equipment in Morris’ boat garage, lugging the rest to Deb’s house. So much daylight really changes the rhythms of a community; I had never realized this. Without the punctuation of darkness the body rhythms can go feral. Prior to leaving for Port Radium, I had been asked and agreed to update the community about the purpose of our visit, my ongoing research

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interests in the issue and what I had seen on my travels. One day now to prepare for this. The next morning our dreams of a real breakfast at the Grey Goose are dashed — we have left our wallets locked in the boat garage and we have no way to get the key. Today is the Dene Games, a likely source of some of the vibe we sensed upon our arrival last night; many visitors in town. The games are amazing, people there competing from all sorts of different communities in the western Arctic. Tug-of-war, pushing a big pole, dizzy stick, tent set-up race. Sadly, the moose call and love song competitions did not take place. Had whitefish gonads, lake trout, and tea. The next day I arrive at the cultural centre early to meet the translator. I have been appended to the agenda for a meeting about the upcoming Spiritual Gathering planned for later in the month. There is no translator. No one knows where the translator is. Calls are made. “No, he’s out on the land, or fishing isn’t he?” Better drive over and see. Not home. Mother not sure where he is. No translator. The chief, Raymond, arrives and agrees to translate for me. “Make sure you don’t talk too fast,” he says. He places me at the very end of the agenda, after his tourde-force, fifty-minute, off-the-cuff, in Slavey (with English words like “Wednesday” and “Edmonton”) report on the Spiritual Gathering planning process, including unveiling a huge organizational structure chart. Impressive talk. My words, by comparison, judging by the apparent reaction, were far less interesting. I try to convey something about why it was important for me to have gone there. Mindful of the force of experience that had been impressed upon me in my conversations with elders earlier that year, I mention how I had been thinking about a story retold by Alfred Masuzumi about the orphan boy who outwits the bad medicine man. Through a piece of magic the boy kills the medicine man by draining his blood away one drop at a time. I try to use this as a segue into the value of an incremental approach to change. I tell them about Port Radium and the other areas we visited, and about how being there, and seeing the actual place meant more than I could say. I thank them, and tell them that their lake has a lot to teach. It is clear to me that I’ve not even begun to penetrate the surface of this community. I think of Kristeva’s description, in her book on China, of arriving in a remote village. She says something like their eyes are calm, not really inquisitive but slightly amused or uneasy, piercing at any rate, and sure of belonging to a community with which we shall never have anything in common. This seems both wrong and true. One can’t just

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wander in and out like this and expect to be something other than what I am. A stranger. Another white guy with “an interest.” We return to the Grey Goose, where we will spend our last night in town before the trip south. I am again reminded of the utter division between white and Indian that exists in this community. The hotel manager makes a point of telling me about the parties “they” have periodically at the RCMP ’s place with all the confiscated booze. The reason I am being told this by someone completely unknown to me, a perfect stranger, is all too clear.

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4

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4.01 The Stones Are Speaking Now

In a brilliant text published in 1958 concerning his “ethno-metaphysical” work with the Ojibwa in the Lake Winnipeg region, Alfred Irving Hallowell recounts a moment where, out of the frustration of incomprehension, one of these crazy ethnographic moments, he attempts to put a difficult question directly.1 Often a bad idea. He is trying to understand the Ojibwa’s extraordinary linguistic and ontological relations with the other-than-human. So, bluntly, he asks the question: “Are all the stones we see about us here alive?” His friend reflects for a “long while” and then replies: “No! But some of them are.”2 Hallowell’s question contained the very cultural premise he sought to put in contrast with that of his interlocutor. Categories, things, either do or do not have certain properties: stones are, or are not, animate. But as Hallowell works away on this problem he realizes that “the Ojibwa do not perceive stones, in general, as animate, any more than we do. The crucial test is experience. Is there any personal testimony available?”3 As Tim Ingold puts it in a passage on Hallowell’s stones, “animacy … is a property not of stones as such, but of their positioning within a relational field that includes persons as foci of power.”4 So the answer that Hallowell received to his question is not just the logic of not all; it is also about persons, particular persons, and their relationship to particular stones. Knowing about this is the only way to answer a question about stones. But we don’t think like this, generally. I don’t know what “we” I am referring to here, so I’ll say instead: I don’t think like this. The cultural logics that I invariably take North with me – because that is what I am equipped with in the south – have a lot more to do with the kind of stones that Freud wrote about in 1896: Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with the remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and

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unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants – perhaps semi-barbaric people – who live in the vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him – and he may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are selfexplanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure-house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built. Saxa loquuntur!5 Freud’s stones are clearly not Hallowell’s stones. Freud’s stones are archival and archaeological. But Hallowell’s – ah, those are lovely stones, performative in a way, stones that signal his own incomprehension, and my own. To me, this wonderful performance of Ojibwa cultural difference captures the kernel of the problem posed by indigenous knowledge for those of us of southern settler culture. Euro-Western modes of rationality run into difficulty when they are confronted with the logic of “not all.” Indeed, the repertoire of Euro-Western responses has been exceedingly small, and have not been particularly forthcoming with respect to motivations. These responses have cast such knowledge as primitive superstitions (as with early anthropological studies), ancestral wisdom (as with more contemporary environmental positions) or traditional ecological knowledge, tek (as it is tirelessly chanted in myriad resource management plans pertaining to Northern regions).6 Foremost, what we are speaking about here is the ongoing project of the commoditization of a way of life – that is, an Aboriginal way of life in which the communicative practice of knowledge is embedded in practices of living. A language game is always, and foremost, an abridgement of a concrete practice. We might say that the disembodied idea of knowledge particular to southern modes of

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living, the idea of knowledge without a knower, is the knowledge mission of a particular project of modernity. We might also call it nonsensical, absurd. Knowledge is not a thing; it is always multiple, already hybrid. This helps to explain why oral traditions do not resolve themselves into writing traditions without a certain violence. The deep and intransigent Euro-Western cultural commitment to a particular idea of communication – that is, to a transmission model – frustrates attempts at understanding. The idea of communication that was fashioned quite instrumentally in the middle of the twentieth century, and was epitomized by the works of Shannon and Weaver, is a tyranny replete with conceptual and ideological errors. Messages do not simply move from mind to mind, and it is not about connecting souls. Communication under a transportation model is understood as “simply the transfer of content from one location to another.”7 Accordingly, one needn’t be troubled by the status of things such as sources or receivers, as such things simply pre-exist the message and the transfer. Three assumptions, we might say after Angus, render this vision of communication unworkable. The first has to do with the conceptual status of a channel in the first place. In the Shannon and Weaver universe, content and channel are completely unrelated. Indeed, as Angus points out, the only possible contribution of the channel is “noise” (and its contradictory relation to “information”).8 Second, the subjects of communication are not troubled by the communicative act; they are simply sites of a transaction in which their status as sending and receiving subjects pre-exists. They are givens. And, finally, questions with respect to the effect of communication are reduced to the effects of individual messages. In other words, one cannot speak about a general social effect of communication – this would be mythology – nor of a social effect that may derive from the emphasis of particular media (the abiding contribution of Innis).9 It seems to me that if science does not have a proprietary relationship to knowledge, then one needs to proceed from the conviction that it is not simply a matter of what counts for knowledge – as if this were a category beyond analysis – but rather what counts as knowledge (for whom, for what purpose, and so on). And all of this is utterly bound up in a way of life. In other words, knowledge doesn’t cleave away from practice very well – Hallowell’s stones tell us this much – and this stands in stark relief to European enlightenment traditions, in which thought itself does not need a body to think it. Whether this may be reduced

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to questions about cultures of orality versus cultures of literacy is less important than the mere fact of this astonishing difference. And this astonishment leads me to describe my position as a researcher, as a concerned other, as one wishing for a kind of complicity with the project of remembrance being undertaken around the mining issue, as bewildered. I remain palpably aware that this carries with it a sense of wandering, of being out of bounds, away from the correct path; astray, in a word. Attempting to figure an approach to understanding this aspect of Dene history, my incomprehension, and my inability to create direct mappings and translations into my intellectual space have come to reassure me. It is not that I am certain that I cannot understand, but that I have grown suspicious and impatient with my own need to understand, my need to hold things in abeyance, to hold ideas and images and fragments of conversations and stories as though they were not simply propositions looking for arguments to complete, but gifts (or topics) or, one might say, disturbances. We may recall how Blumenberg sets out to account for the relations between metaphor and consciousness: “[M]etaphor is first of all a disturbance.”10 To this we may add the sense of carrying over: there is work being done, there is a mode of transmission taking place. As Angus puts it in relation to Innis, “the basic metaphor in Harold Innis’ communication theory of society is transportation, the traversal of space.”11 How it is that one thing carries over from one place or situation to another? This, as Angus notes, is also the intersection of Innis’ communication theory with the root metaphor of metaphor itself: carrying-over. In other words, travel. In a way, the apprehension of difference as difference operates in a fashion not unlike that of a metaphor, a figure, that we are at the moment incapable of resolving. One is affected by such a disturbance, whether that metaphor is in suspension or not, although it is obvious that the effect is different in the two cases. Let’s say, in homage to Barthes, that a metaphor in suspension is merely an operation in speech that is incapable, for whatever reason, of securing that diagonal leap between unlike signs, or language games. To put it obliquely, Quintilian’s example (again), of pratum ridet, “the meadow laughs,” works metaphorically only if it does. But in either case – whether it works or not – its homelessness disturbs us.

4.02 Phantoms

This could perhaps be read differently. We could think of phantoms, for example. As Abraham and Torok describe them, phantoms have no energy of their own; they cannot be abreacted, but merely designated. There. That comes from the dead. Phantoms pursue their “work of disarray in silence.”12 The point is this, writes Abraham: “In no way can the subject relate to the phantom as his or her own repressed experience, not even as an experience by incorporation. The phantom which returns to haunt bears witness to the existence of the dead buried within the other.”13 But it not only bears witness; it also calls out to us. It involves us by making a claim. Derrida writes: If death weighs on the living brain of the living … it must then have some spectral density. To weigh is also to charge, tax, impose, indebt, accuse, assign, enjoin. And the more life there is, the graver the spectre of the other becomes, the heavier its imposition. And the more the living have to answer to it. To answer for the dead, to respond to the dead. To correspond and have it out with obsessive haunting, in the absence of any certainty or symmetry. Nothing is more serious and more true, nothing is more exact than this phantasmagoria.14 Here the communicable traces of the dead impose themselves. The Highway of the Atom is a route along which the dead make a claim on the living. All of this makes a language of haunting seem perfectly reasonable. We are haunted intellectually, philosophically, epistemologically – the three great narcissistic wounds – by the projects of modernity, traces of which haunt and animate the Highway as I have been writing it here. These things are perhaps easier to resolve, easier to bring back to a life of awareness and memory than the other hauntings, the hauntings of the invisible, or the avisible. These are more difficult yet still weigh upon us. The contaminated

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body that will reveal its disease only through its progeny. The contaminated land that can reveal its burden only through transmission to something or someone else. The contaminated community that struggles to account for its damaged fabric. In each there is a mode of transmission, a kind of communicativity, even a significance; a disturbance, but no message.

4.03 Alibi

Almost at the very conclusion of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud made the link between individual development, vis à vis neurosis, and the development of systems of civilization. This wasn’t exactly the first time,15 but here it is a link he “could hardly evade,” for it followed smoothly from the connection between phylogeny and ontogeny: “If the development of civilization has such far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization – possibly the whole of mankind – have become ‘neurotic’?” [emphasis added].16 In any case, it is here that psychoanalysis steps out of the analytic configuration, although with a caution. In a sense, it is a purely formal or logical caution against the cavalier movement of analogies from their proper domain to another. Here Freud notes that individual neuroses of necessity presuppose a normalcy in the environment from which that neurosis may be distinguished. Figure and ground. Yet no such presumption could be made once the category of concern became a community, or a civilization. These are too unwieldy. In other words, “no such background could exist; it would have to be found elsewhere.”17 This elsewhere is the thing. It is and has been generally available, in both generic and various proprietary versions of the category “human nature.” Perhaps we see here Freud’s conflicted scientism – he knew very well where the “elsewhere” could be found. Nonetheless, he maintained an optimism that “one day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities.”18 Although I won’t explore it here, I would point out that he also issues a paradoxical caution that although it is not possible to move from the individual to the collective, such knowledge as might theoretically be had through this form of errant analogy could not be used because no one would have the authority to “impose such a therapy upon the

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group.”19 In other words, there is an interesting element here in the form of a first of all, it can’t be done, and besides, it won’t work. As we have seen from eugenics to National Socialism, to racisms of all kinds and, more generally, to various politics of identity, human nature is not so much a concept as it is a fiat for political endeavour. Or, better, it is an alibi in the precise sense of a place that is at the same time full and empty, linked by a relation of negative identity (“I am not where you think I am; I am where you think I am not,” quips Barthes: “[I]t is enough that [the] signifier has two sides for it always to have an ‘elsewhere’ at its disposal.”20) A present emptiness, or an absent plenitude. The ground is more than a metaphor.

4.04 Lieux de Mémoire: A Mnemonics of Catastrophe

In the bunkhouse, Port Radium

If the stones, or some of them, are speaking it is not history that is listening. Freud’s memory arts – the mnemonics of the unconscious – the ramparts of that particular palace, are, as Nora puts it, like “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.”21 When the sea of living memory has receded … here Nora is not talking to us, but to Maurice Halbwachs. In the midst of his explorations of the workings of collective memory, Halbwachs offers an image of sea waves breaking on a rocky shore. As the tide rises, the rocks are immersed in the advancing sea. But with its retreat, what remains of the sea’s presence are only “miniature lakes nestled amidst the rocky formations.” In Halbwachs’s analogy, [and in Nora’s] the advancing sea is the tide of

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living memory. Its waves pulse forward, bearing toward the future the turbulent presence of the past. With the ebbing of the tide, only tranquil pools of recollection are left behind. In them the past remains alive, but with a diminished presence [emphasis added].22 The rocks here are the containers. The places of memory. It is a history – functioning not as the El Dorado of memory, but perhaps its El Niño – that both makes these places necessary and threatens to make them disappear irretrievably. The term – lieux de mémoire – has no English equivalent, says Nora. But in the note appended to the English translation of “Between Memory and History,” he gives us at least a clue. It derives, he says, from the work of Frances Yates. This makes such extraordinary sense. In The Art of Memory, Yates resurrects the Greek traditions of mnemotechnica – the ars memorativa – and tracks them through time. Pausing occasionally for a brilliant harmonic leap, she shows how these arts (right from the start, in their probably apocryphal beginnings in a catastrophic banquet survived by the poet and clever mnemonist Simonides) were based on the elaborate articulation of a dual repertoire: imaginary memory places (loci), and images. The central repetitive analogy of memory in antiquity was that of a seal or stamp and wax. Properly trained, the mnemonist could navigate the lush, well-lit, comfortably spaced architectural places of memory to retrieve the images therein consigned. The memory arts were based on this elaborate system of double displacement.23 In this very telling note, Nora suggests that perhaps the memory places – stones and Highways included – must be understood as part of a larger mnemonics – no longer quite life, not yet death. His project begins with a rubric of places, and works outward to memory, the pools of recollection. The route – the Highway – also suggests an art of memory. But in reverse. That is, the question is not one of finding a place for the memory, but of finding a memory for the place. The loci are not only imaginary, they are not only mental constructions, they really are places.24 I don’t know the extent of memory of the Highway, but I do know that the Highway seems to be consuming its own travellers, its witnesses, or in other words the possibility of memory.

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The Highway, then, is caught in a secret and deferred action. It is opaque to memory and oblique to history. Perhaps not yet a lieu de mémoire – not for me, and not for you, not yet. It is the site of a slow and dispersed catastrophe, but one that unfolds backward in time. It is a case study in the analytics of the accident.

4.05 Abduction and the Accident

The question is, to which accident does the Dene’s disaster belong? How far must we circle outward, abductively trying to account for what took place on Great Bear Lake? How does their accident result in an apology? Where can our abductive procedure end? Surely the accident was not a pure contingency in relation to what took place. Nor the arrival of – or message from – the real. Nor was it simply wired into a concept of progress. And besides, there were (and are) too many accidents spun into existence as a result of the complex of causalities that we see set into motion at Great Bear Lake. Perhaps even more importantly, the kind of accident one ought to think of needs to have a kind of non-local quality; the accident was not only theirs, it belongs to others as well. Neither necessity, nor indeterminacy. It was in the early 1960s that the first of the Dene ore carriers died of cancer – several years after the first miner, apparently. Until this time, as far as I can tell, cancer was all but unheard-of among the Dene. In any case, more than 20 years and quite some number of cancer deaths would pass before the Dene came to understand that the cancers that were killing them, and the toxicity of their traditional lands, could be attributed to the rock they had carried for Eldorado and the Government of Canada. And, as we know, it was also about this time that they became aware that the rock that was killing them had been used by the government to make bombs that killed many Japanese civilians. What, then, would constitute a Dene model of the accident? It is that over which one has no control, and despite that fact – or, as I have come to suspect, because of it – it is that for which one comes to assume responsibility. Infinitely. Lateness, too or otherwise, is not a problem here. This is a promising and troubling distance from the real.25 “In the beginning was the Deed.”26 Perhaps some new metaphors are called for.

4.06 Shipwreck with Raven A whole mythology is deposited in our language. wittgenstein 27

Participant, observer, participant-observer, eyewitness, informant, deponent, interlocutor, watcher, spectator, onlooker, witness, passerby, stranger. Ghost. What is the relationship between words and watching, between archive and landscape, between language and the disaster? What really goes on when you pack your bags and head somewhere unfamiliar? Hans Blumenberg’s essay “Shipwreck with Spectator” is a strange and beautiful piece of writing that speaks to these questions and conveys something about how it is that things become constituted, retroactively, as preconditions for something else … a kind of historical carry-over, transmission, a Darwinism of the words, as he put it. I took from his book on the Copernican world view,28 rather [w]recklessly I now think, the concept of “paratheoretics” – a critical term to describe how the failure to assent to the truth of a theory (i.e., the unconscious) is taken to be a confirmation of the truth of theory itself – which he had applied, somewhat uncharitably I now think, to Freud.29 This was how I first came to know his work – as a kind of antidote to certain pretensions of theory. Skip ahead a decade or so. I was in Albuquerque, having just returned from Los Alamos – a kind of apocalyptic Mount Olympus for the exceedingly bright, if mortal – where I had spoken with a museum curator about the epistemological tenacity of nuclear imagery. After this conversation, I found myself in a used bookstore across from the university and was browsing in the sailing section – a place where one often discovers the strange geometry of footprints in the sand – when I found a little book on the persistence of a trope: Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence.30

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As I sat in my hotel room that night in Roswell, New Mexico – more sand, more footprints – and began to read it, George W. Bush was making an announcement from Japan; he had been touring the “orient” and was sending back media missives almost daily at that point. On this particular day he announced his intention to push Congress to approve (ergo, fund) the opening of a high-level nuclear waste storage facility on the area of Aboriginal land known as Yucca Flats. And I said to myself, “Yes, we are embarked.” I was taken by what Blumenberg was saying about theory. About its pretensions. About its situation. And, significantly, about its practitioner – who for now we shall designate by the term spectator. This is not weak theory, and not a theory of weakness – Blumenberg is not trying to make the weaker argument sound the better (e.g., the rhetor-lawyer Corax’s method31). This is crazy theory. The kind of theory that Holmes might have spouted had Conan Doyle been an historian instead of a doctor. Blumenberg writes like a much more severe and Germanic version of a Carlos Ginzburg. But what was he writing here? A tract on anthropological metaphorics? Or perhaps a treatise on the analytics of the wreck? Or perhaps it is just about the persistence of a trope. Or all of these things together. So that is the reason I swerved from the anthropological speculations of Freud to the anthropological metaphorology of Blumenberg, briefly but productively. But I also swerved because I wanted to reflect on the analytics of the beginning. I won’t attempt any kind of summary of operations, or to give to this text any kind of smooth explanatory power – indeed, in the end, one might come to ask if the metaphor itself does not come to suffer the fate that it itself plays upon. We may need to decide this. We may need to say: What is this writing? I know what it is about; it is about metaphor. And it is about paradigm. But where does this leave us? In addition, I want us to reflect on how we might summon the courage to imagine “beginning anew,” as Blumenberg puts it. Of course, I will need to explain why all of this is important to thinking about the Highway of the Atom.

4.07 Field Note: New Mexico — February 2004

Alamogordo is like a seashore town with no water. No sea. Just the waves of the desert lapping up over the Walmart parking lot, drifting down the streets. Yesterday, the Trinity site. Our host was a colleague from New Mexico Tech in Socorro, and our tour guide was a public affairs officer from White Sands. The site itself is closed to the public except on the anniversary of the detonation, but we had accessed a back door. Julie and I arrive after spending several days in Albuquerque at the Atomic Museum, listening to docents set the record straight. It’s all arithmetic for these guys. No ambiguity, no irony. A group of teenagers visibly yawning as they are told about the greatness of this achievement in American technical and humanitarian ingenuity. The kids’ boredom is a simple and effective Darwinian response to the lies of adults. One can only hope that the dream-bird of the imagination is not far off for these young people. White Sands is vast, and most of what goes on there now is secret, much as what has already gone on there is secret. Apparently a great deal of terrorist research is conducted here now. A lot of “optics and surveillance work,” I am told. “Purple Suit agency work” — not sure what this refers to. Army, Air Force, and Navy. We pass through a guarded gate and drive into the desert. It’s a hundred miles to the other end, with God knows what in between. About five miles in from the gate, I hallucinate what seems to be an antelope in the desert brush. Not a Serengeti mirage, I’m told. “Just an oryx.” It’s a toss-up whether the word “just” or the idea of an oryx is more disturbing. “They were introduced in the 1960s,” I’m told. Things were not weird enough. As we drive in from the north gate, somewhere out of sight is a scale model of the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building, otherwise known as the site of the 1995 Oklahoma bombing. As we approach the site itself, we can see the imprint on the land. A light stain, almost imperceptible in the hard desert light; elliptical, a slight change in the tonal palette of the land. A depression in the earth, or a change in the vegetation? There is a large parking lot for the buses that arrive annually with veterans and journalists and “radicals.” Off to

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one side is a large relic that turns out to be all that remains of Jumbo, the bomb enclosure that was never used. The Trinity obelisk stands off to the side within a large, high-fenced enclosure. Oddly. Is this to keep people in, or out? Antelopes? It’s much smaller than I had imagined — the obelisk, that is — but somehow this understatement makes it more, not less, hubristic. Perhaps seven feet? We are reminded that it is forbidden to take anything from the site, not that much remains. The ground, picked clean of the visible, still brings my Geiger counter to life. As we enter the enclosure we can see that the ground has already been picked clean. It is curated with documentary images and captions placed at intervals around the fence. One can see an image of the base camp as it existed in 1945; the Macdonald Ranch, where the detonator was assembled, and from whose vantage point the detonation was viewed; the control-point bunker; the fully uniformed Trinity Site Polo team; Jumbo atop a train car; four thousand boxes of TNT used in a calibration detonation; Dr. Ken Bainbridge, the test-site conductor; a sequence of five images of the detonation beginning at .006 seconds; two post-blast images, one aerial and one on the ground. A few hot spots, but nothing much. It’s all too powerfully understated. The effect is numbing. We return to Alamogordo, where we are to stay with relatives of one of Julie’s students. Upon hearing of our visit the mother of our host invites us to her mountainside home. She has something to give us, apparently. This turns out to be a bag of trinitite and a plate of Serbian cookies. Both have family ties. The trinitite has been in a shoebox under her bed since her husband died. He collected it back in the days when there was no fence. “Dear, you look like a geologist,” she said.

4.08 From Figure to Metaphor

I want to speak about figures. Figures and their persistence – although I suppose you can’t really have a figure if it isn’t in some sense persistent. Like a sign generally, one condition of which is to be recognized as the same sign on separate occasions. We might also call this a condition of being a language game. Blumenberg begins with a kind of abductive leap. It’s pure Peirce, really. We begin with a surprising fact: shipwreck as transhistorical and repetitive metaphor. How so? The reasoning is this: if the shipwreck metaphor were pertinent in a profound sense – I mean literally pertinent – then the very fact of its persistence would be a matter of course. It is persistent, therefore … So, we have this kind of transhistorical figure that moves onward from the Greeks. Here, Blumenberg identifies a “frivolous, if not blasphemous, moment inherent in all human seafaring.”32 Hardly an absolute foundation, and not without its essentialist dimension, but nonetheless. Terra inviolata has its own laws – a near-Kantian imperative to determine one’s conduct on the land: you must respect the distinction between land and sea. Or, put more appropriately, you must conduct your life in such a way as to stay dry. Always. All of this is put quite well by Gonzalo at the end of Act I, Scene i, in The Tempest: “Now I would give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground – long heath, brown furze, anything. The wills above be done, but I would fain die a dry death.” We are not Icarus. We are not Prometheus. Nor are we Daedalus. Or Zeno. Shipwreck as seen by a survivor is perhaps the figure of an initial philosophical experience, but it is certainly not the initial philosophical experience – even if such a thing existed. Nonetheless, it is from the Greeks that we discover that shipwreck is, par excellence, the metaphor to organize human existence. Shipwreck as raven. As a kind of trope, I mean by metaphor both the sense of a passage, and a means of getting from here to there, so to speak – so it’s

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both the route and the vehicle. This is pretty much, also, what I mean by figure. It is something that escapes. Something that escapes the concept, perhaps. Or something that is not exhausted by the concept.

4.09 Spectator

Sawmill Bay, Great Bear Lake

In every culture, what escapes the exertion of the concept – the perspective on the whole of reality, the world, life, and history – is handed over to long-term work on images.33

So states the publisher’s notice that appeared in the first German edition of Shipwreck. Long-term work on images. For Blumenberg it is against the “oppression of contingency” that we attempt (persistently) to institute the “absolutism of images.” So how do we understand this idea of metaphor? Let us say that, foremost, metaphor is to be understood as a kind of “disturbance.” It is an interruption to the smoothness of the flow of (non-metaphorical) language. It is a shift of analogy – the meadow laughs, as Quintilian put it. It is a challenge to the concept. It is a “resistance to harmony,” says Blumenberg, borrowing Husserl’s turn of phrase.34

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Like the virtual counterparts – that is, the counterparts of the virtual – of axiological isotopes, those semantic gravity fields of Greimas, such figures persist. Blumenberg calls this persistence of figures metaphor. Metaphor does not provide us with a path to traverse, backward, into a primordial associative stew. It is not a cipher, begging an anthropology of the genesis of a concept, but something else. What is this else? It leads us, he says, to the life-world. And to whatever it is about that that leads us to seek theoretical knowledge in the first place. Blumenberg calls metaphor a special case of nonconceptuality.35 (By which he means, I gather, a non-exclusive case of nonconceptuality; metaphors as the horizon within which concepts are formed.) Elsewhere he writes that “metaphors are fossils that indicate an archaic stratum of the trail of theoretical curiosity – a stratum that is not rendered anachronistic just because there is no way back to the fullness of its stimulations and expectations of truth.”36 So when Quintilian makes the leap – when he makes the meadow laugh – Blumenberg sees it thus: Metaphor captures what is not present in the qualities of a meadow when viewed objectively but is also not the subjective and phantastic addition by an observer who, only for himself, could find the contours of a human face in the surface of the meadow … It accomplishes this by assigning the meadow to the inventory of the human life-world in which not only words and signs but also things themselves have “meanings,” the anthropogenetic prototype of which may be the human face with its incomparable situational meaning.37 To speak about the witness, or the spectator as he or she is called, is to admit that the spectator is already there, was already there, only we hadn’t acknowledged it. It strikes me that we could describe the trajectory of the spectator as one that converges with the wreck. The spectator as a slow-motion catastrophe; slow, as we will see, in the sense that it takes a number of centuries for the convergence to occur. The spectator is of course merely a cipher for theory. Theoros – a looking at, viewing, contemplation, speculation, theory; also a sight, a spectacle, spectator, looker-on, and so on. An articulation of world and thought, the linking of witness, site and contemplation. A Greek version – from the proem to Lucretius’ Book II:

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’Tis sweet, when, down the mighty main, the winds Roll up its waste of waters, from the land To watch another’s laboring anguish far, Not that we joyously delight that man Should thus be smitten, but because ’tis sweet To mark what evils we ourselves be spared.38 This would be the better-you-than-me model. But it is also that the witness function becomes a kind of moral accomplishment. Or, if that’s too strong, that function is simply about a contemplative posture … a site; a templum, an open place for observation (and what better place than the sea or the seashore for this), “marked out by the augur with his staff.”39 The next version is one that sends the deck chairs spilling off the lido deck, and with it that impassive spectator, Montaigne. Here the pleasure of the spectator is not spun as a moral accomplishment – it’s malicious pleasure, purely – not excess, not jouissance, just enjoyment. Distance is rewarded with enjoyment; not happiness, just enjoyment.40 But this enjoyment derives through the spectator’s success at self-preservation. “He survives through one of his useless qualities: the ability to be a spectator.”41 For Blumenberg, it is Montaigne who comes up with the brilliant idea that in order to secure the position of spectator, one would be prudent to just stay in the harbour, on dry land. The skeptic’s abstention, as Blumenberg calls it. Eventually, Voltaire comes and undoes the unpleasantness of Montaigne by casting the spectator as a kind of victim of his own curiosity. Like strange marsupials, we watch. (Curiosity: the refuge and privilege of the safe.) We would help if we could, but the one thing we cannot help is our compulsion to watch the misery of others. For Blumenberg, it is Pascal who makes what appears to be a decisive move for the shipwreck metaphorics. Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. “No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.”42 Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Here we have the first inkling of the convergence between the spectator and the disaster. We may not, it seems, be sitting com-

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fortably on the shore watching the disaster unfold, nor be safely ensconced under a Hudson’s Bay blanket on the lido deck watching the sunset off the starboard promenade. Indeed, we may be in the surf already, clutching a plank. The metaphorics of embarkation includes the suggestion that living means already being on the high seas, where there is no outcome other than being saved or going down, and no possibility of abstention.43 Indeed, the very idea of a safe place from which some calamitous spectacle unfolds may be an illusion. As soon as we become conscious of our situation, we find ourselves on a more or less fragile ship, which is carried along on one of a million waves. But one could also say: We ourselves are this wave, in part.44 At this point, Blumenberg begins to tease out the precursors of the aesthetic turn in this whole affair. As he sees it, the key moment occurs with Abbé Ferdinando Galiani placing the shipwreck metaphorics into the comfort of the theatre. “The danger is played on stage, and the security is a rainproof roof.”45 Accordingly, the spectator “is withdrawn from the moral dimension; he has become ‘aesthetic’.”46 About this time, the shipwreck metaphorics get cut loose again from their moorings when maritime insurance is invented, and thus is constituted an insurantial imaginary, as Ewald puts it.47 This gives to the actual shipwreck a calculability (axiomatically, from the calculability of risk), and thus, on Blumenberg’s account, frees a quantum of metaphor for other uses (this being in some significant sense an economy). We end, if this is the correct word for it, treading water and building something out of the ribs of disaster. I look across the frozen bay at the rusting hulk of the Radium Gilbert.

There are surely a number of permutations of this figure as we move into the twentieth century. Martin Jay identifies two predominant aesthetic configurations.48 The first is a form of aesthetic spectatorship that still believes in the possibility (if not necessity) of a frame and, as a result, in the possibility (if not the necessity) of critical distance. The second, more or less in response to the first, is that there is little or no distinction between the wreck and the witness; at least, this response marks the desire to dissolve the distinction. This is almost

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like Blanchot, in that the disaster had already taken place. Again, you are (already) embarked. The forms of aesthetic spectatorship we see on this axis are purely at the level of suspicion – suspicion within the givenness of the waves, the historical supports of the very transmissibility of metaphor. (For example, at the level of spectatorship this is the barrel in which Baudrillard honed his ability to shoot fish.) Jay cites the beautiful poem, “Diving into the Wreck,” by Adrienne Rich.49 As Jay sees it, “her privileged identity as a survivor … can also be understood to express a widely shared impatience with the safety of spectatorial distance.”50 What becomes of the metaphor of the shipwreck when everything that supports it falls away? Firm land, the port, the spectator, and eventually the ship?51 “It betrays a yearning to conflate historical returns to previous wrecks with the vertiginous experience of being in an actual one here and now,” says Jay.52 He cites Walter de Maria, in 1960: I think natural disasters have been looked upon in the wrong way. Newspapers always say they are bad. a shame. I like natural disasters and I think they may be the highest form of art possible to experience. For one thing, they are impersonal. I don’t think art can stand up to nature. Put the best object you know next to the grand canyon, niagara falls, the redwoods. The big things always win. Now just think of a flood, forest fire, tornado, earthquake, Typhoon, sand storm. Think of the breaking of the Ice jams. Crunch. If all of the people who go to museums could just feel an earthquake.

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Not to mention the sky and the ocean. But it is in the unpredictable disasters that the highest forms are realized. They are rare and we should be thankful for them.53 This is the danger. We may wish to be wreck divers, and we may all be embarked, but the saving power expressed in the wish to be more than a spectator has within it a danger. To reduce (or efface) the distance, to wish to experience the wreck, may be a wish for an impossible immersion in the other’s disaster on the one hand (for Jay, the cinematic experience), or an aesthetic brutality on the other. To be a spectator, on the open seas, or on the ice (just water pretending to be land, after all),54 is not the accomplishment of survival, but rather the securing of the very possibility of a distance in which contemplation, and thus theory, is possible. Not the “vertiginous pleasures” of “virtual immersion in the simulated wreckage of pseudo-disasters,”55 but the sense that to begin again, to begin to renew, may be possible only with the remains of earlier wrecks. This is a real disaster, and there are real traumas. The catastrophe that is the history of the twentieth century as it bleeds into the twenty-first cannot be taken as mere astonishing instances of the nature batting last spectacle. We are spectators, and coming to understand what this means for those of us who wish to penetrate the surface of events draws us toward the abiding task of theory, Blumenberg would say. The danger lies precisely in the slippage into aesthetic modes of spectatorship, where the phantasy of immersion elides the real of the disaster. Disasters past, present, and future. The ocean didn’t want me today.

4.10 Ecology

To find our way back to the wreck of the twentieth century, and to the Highway of the Atom more particularly, and with the knowledge that there is no safe and comfortable distance from which to survey the scene (not the refuge of history, nor the pretense of disinterestedness), one must proceed in a way that makes sense only perhaps to the writing itself.56 There is no story; there are only stories in various relations of proximity. Tentative haunters. So writing is all that remains in many respects. As Maurice Blanchot put it, the disaster takes care of everything.57 But not everything. Conceptually, an ecological mode of reasoning suggests itself as antidote, as a way of securing a safe position for the spectator in the face of the wreck, the disaster. Yet the normative force of ecology, its therapeutic goodness, is derived in a curious fashion. In the frequently liturgical autism of ecological writing the term “ecology” is said to derive from a text by Haeckel published in 1866. But some ecological historians – Donald Worster, for example – see ecology, even then, as only a kind of operation of naming, an ostensive definition of what was already “familiar country,” as he calls it.58 Indeed it was already “familiar country,” said Worster, referring to the state of the map in the period between Haeckel’s coining of the term œcologie in 1866 and its appearance for the first time in the popular press (in 1892, in the Boston Globe quoting Ellen Swallow, otherwise known as “Mrs. Richards”), and the point at which the “Madison Botanical Congress [in 1894] acted on the recommendation of a Committee on Terminology of Physiology and adopted the term ecology, omitting the diphthong œ …”59 In an idiosyncratic – there’s nothing new under the sun – attempt to track the genealogy of the word ecology, Worster figures it this way: “Words are like empty balloons, inviting us to fill them up with associations.”60 But this attests to more than the weak power of simile. He goes on to suggest that there are concepts, out there, floating, that are like homeless signifieds, longing for the security of a proper signification. (Not exactly motivated; just open for suggestion.)

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He continues, “Putting a new word in the dictionary is much like writing a new name across a blank space on a map.”61 Okay. Taxonomy is to toponymy as toponymy is to? As Worster has it, “it is still a long way” – writing that is, on the map – “it is still a long way from exploring the wilderness the word signifies, from ranging over its landforms, and from investing the terrain with the associations generated by human familiarity.”62 So, from a signified that has no signifier, we move – through a founding but incommensurate inscription on a map – to a signified with just an inadequate, poorly developed, signifier. And, finally, we have a signified, and a signifier that – after a proper amount of use and development – is or has become, equal to it somehow. This is, of course, a cartoor topo-centrism in the extreme, but nonetheless. It seems to Worster that the maker of a word (and there is, he tells us, such a thing) operates with a much smaller version of that word – an impoverished terrain – than the subsequent users. Worster imagines that there is a wordsmith, and that this person – like a Columbus, he says – stakes out a place, a wilderness, before undertaking field explorations.63 Now this is an odd way to think about things (and one that stages its own wreck on the Wittgensteinian shoals of language use), for here the concept precedes the practice and the word. But what it does for Worster is to allow a whole series of posits to spread out behind him, as it were. The map, the blank space, the concept and the very practice of inscription. And underneath everything – everything – is the oikos. He doesn’t talk about this. He talks about ecology, but he brushes over the oikos in the way that environmental historians are wont to do.64 In the case of ecology, then, there was a concept long before there was a word. And even when there was a word – “the freshly christened science of ecology,”65 as he put it, adding a new, weighty, and telling term to the expanding table of values – the word was less than inadequate to its task. As a signifier, it was too small. In any case, what was perhaps familiar about this country is precisely that of the oikos.66 If something preceded the word ecology, it was not the map, and it was not a concept. It was the oikos. Understood as Nature the Good. Or something. This is what supports ecology. Home. This house is mapped onto an equally orderly State (of nature, or otherwise, according to taste and temperament). Oikos, a word repeated, mantra-like, as though to neutralize any residual strangeness it might have had.67

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From this point of view, not an uncommon one, ecology is the accident borne by the substance of the oikos. The oikos exists in an uneasy relation to the oppositions between culture and nature, inside and outside, presence and absence, the epistemic and the ontological. In one sense, the oikos consists in the corporeal and incorporeal furniture of the lived world. This is the oikos as a set of historically shaped social and cultural arrangements. But, in another sense, this oikos is both posed and presupposed by the house within which this furniture is scattered. Traditionally the domain of ecology proper, this dimension of the oikos is about nature as an ultimately limiting capacity with a certain degree of “flexibility,” as Bateson called it – where we understand flexibility as “uncommitted potentiality for change.”68 But since when is home such a good place? Not to put too fine a point on it, and I take my cue here from Lyotard, but first and foremost the “home,” the oikos, is a dangerous place; the dangerous place, the place of tragedy and trauma (incest, abuse, patricide, matricide). He continues: “the oikos is above all the place of tragedy, one of the conditions of the tragic enumerated by Aristotle is precisely the domestic condition: relationships are tragic because they occur in the family; it is within the family that incest, patricide and matricide occur. Tragedy is not possible outside this ecologic or ecotragic framework.”69 Parenthetically: it is specifically in this sense that the oikos is a doubly ironic choice of metaphor in the ongoing struggles for “nature.” The oikos shares a deep kinship with disaster and trauma.70 As Lyotard puts it, oikos is not “an Umwelt at all.” Rather, it is an “otherness in the core of the apparatus.”71 He doesn’t see this in terms of the haunting I have referenced, but rather as the result of a kind of hospitality: “We have to imagine an apparatus inhabited by a sort of guest, not a ghost, but an ignored guest who produces some trouble, and people look to the outside in order to find the external cause of the trouble. But probably the cause is not outside, that is my idea.”72 It is “the thing that has not become public, that has not become communicational, that has not become systematic, and that can never become any of these things.”73 In other words, the disaster always shows up where it’s not supposed to be. Ecology, writes Lyotard, is “the discourse of the secluded.” The oikos (home, state, or nature) is perhaps better conceived as an otherness at the core of it all. It cannot be described

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in terms of function, says Lyotard. It is entropic and dysfunctional. It is like the unconscious, the “dysfunctional entity par excellence.”74 So, whether through the unconscious (the oikos/wilderness of the subject), the (often violent) gyrations of the oikos of the family and the social, or the telluric movements of the earth (and its symptoms), the oikos erupts into life by way of trauma and disaster. For this reason, and this reason only, Donald Worster is almost right when he says: the “Age of Ecology began on the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945.”75 Trinity. We wound ourselves, each other, and the earth, and the damage and the suffering is (nearly) unspeakable. Yet to the extent that this is acknowledged, the predominate response is to maintain an indifference to this wounding through complex mechanisms of disavowal, denial, and forgetting. For me this constitutes, on the one hand, the most troubling dimension of ecological inquiry and, on the other, the very point at which the question of ethics must come into focus. How does this sense of oikos, and its relay into ecological thought contribute to a sense of ethical knowing? What manner of ethics must be thought in relation to these questions of the oikos?

4.11 Story

Eldorado Place, Port Hope, Ontario

It is clear to me that an adequate account of the function of story for the Dene is far beyond my abilities to present here, or anywhere. What I can speak to, though, is what took place in relation to my exposure to these stories. There are so many ways in which I think that one can misunderstand the function of story in this context. The first and most egregious is to see these stories as just culturally encoded information, as though their semantic freight is to be divulged purely through a process of translation or transcription. Descriptions of tek – traditional ecological knowledge – often strike me as holding to this sense of story. A naive sense of “symbolics,” one might say. Another way to look at this is to see stories as somehow propaedeutic to understanding something further, as I suggested earlier in relation to an ethics of knowing. This seems to carry with it a kind of cultural idea of the Aboriginal as teacher that I am not entirely comfortable with, even if this may be a mode that is used from time to time. The idea of the parable may in fact be of more use in thinking

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about this – at least, parable in the sense noted by John Peters, from its Greek derivation parabole, meaning to place side by side, and bole, to cast or throw. Together we get a sense of casting to one side, of the parable as cast off to the side. Peters draws this out from a biblical sense of the (meta)parable of the sower, but we may see his as a spatial-conceptual model, perhaps, of the story.76 However, what one fails to allow in these kinds of explanation is that the story is in itself a mode of communication. Albeit, one that is not about information, but something else. But this does not alter its communicative function. Walter Benjamin penned some interesting lines about the function of story, and although he tied it to the decline of story form, as he saw it in a European context in the mid-1930s, and to the rise of the novel form, a general reduction in the communicability of experience, and a general decline of boredom, his thoughts on the characteristics of story have influenced my thinking in recent years. In a classic text entitled “The Storyteller: Observations on the work of Nikolai Leskov,” Benjamin’s interest, wide as the sea as usual, is to track the storytelling craft from its roots in the epic, and its gradual transformations “in rhythms comparable to those of the change that has come over the earth’s surface in the course of thousands of centuries.”77 Along the way, he will invent a theory of mass-mediated forms of communication and, in particular, the role of the newspaper in foregrounding information over (and at the expense of) intelligence. “If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has played a decisive role in this state of affairs.”78 But what I find of such relevance to thinking about story, as I have been exposed to it over the course of my fieldwork, is the idea that the transmission of story is really about a kind of projection. It is not about a present, even though it unfolds very much in the present of the listener and the speaker. Nor is it about a kind of information, always subject to a regime of verifiability, and always in some sense “understandable in itself,” an instantaneous plausibility.79 Information effaces distance (both temporal and spatial, the exotic and foreign, and tradition, as Benjamin put it).80 And nor is it a mode of explanatory speech. The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its energy and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.81

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He then goes on to describe story as possessed of a germinative power, like the still-viable seeds of grain entombed in the pyramids. Yet this projective power is possible only when the story itself does not have responsibility for its own intelligibility, for its own “comprehension.” The story does not give the psychological (Benjamin’s word) connections between things; these are not forced upon the reader or the listener. Indeed, this is the work of the story for the listener; this interpretive freedom is an interpretive job. And this work is what consigns story so effectively to memory, without which it would be nothing outside of the moment of its utterance. “There is nothing,” he writes, “that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis.”82 In the expanded view of the pedagogical function of stories that attach themselves to questions, Smith notes that to explain too much “is to steal a person’s opportunity to learn.”83 People in Déline have told me, for instance, about why the moose disappeared from the shores of Great Bear Lake. It is a story told in different ways, but involves someone striking a moose on the snout with a stick, and all the moose simply leaving the area; they were shocked at this disrespectful, unseemly treatment. Similarly, when I was preparing for a trip across the lake to Port Radium in 2003, I had been interested to know about bears and the likelihood that such visitors might intrude into my camping. The explanation I received was, first, there were not many bears at that end of the lake anymore, and certainly no grizzly bears (although the large peninsula, Grizzly Bear Mountain, that juts into the southern portion of the lake gave me pause on that score), and, furthermore, such bears as might be around were not accustomed to humans and for this reason not at all likely to make themselves evident, much less troublesome. Nonetheless, I was told, one ought to be prepared; one ought to have a rifle at hand. But of course, no one should wish to kill a bear, I was told. But not because of any traditional reason, at least not that was offered to me, but because the administrative procedures that one is obliged to follow – as far as respecting fish and game regulations – were so onerous that one would be forced to either discreetly dispose of the body, or go through considerable hoops to make the proper disclosure to the proper individuals; whoever that might be, and wherever they might be found. And given that there is only one game officer on the lake, the chances of locating him in a timely manner were less than slight. But, and this was told to me by several individuals in Déline,

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apart from the difficult practicalities, one must never, ever, speak ill of a bear to begin with. This is the important thing. These stories, moose and bears, seemed to point to questions of conduct, about how one ought to behave and comport oneself in the bush. Don’t speak ill of animals; one ought always to be respectful. This was told to me as though having the right sensibility about bears was probably the best protection. The kind of story I am talking about here is the story in speech. The kind of story I was exposed to. Perhaps the most astonishing story I heard had to do with Port Radium (paraphrased earlier in § 3.05) This story was the central foundation myth in the first generation of the Port Radium story in Déline. It makes its first appearance in print in 1990, in George Blondin’s book of Dene stories, When the World Was New: Stories of the Sahtú Dene.84 Blondin is an extraordinary chronicler of Dene stories and myth and has published a number of books, the most recent of which is Trail of the Spirit, which goes a very long way to explaining, via several dozen stories, the very difficult idea of medicine power from a Dene point of view.85 The full story that concerns us here is as follows. In the old days, the Sahtú Dene used to travel across the lake towards the Barrenlands every summer, to hunt caribou. Some of these Dene hunters were paddling near shore on the east side of Sahtú (where Port Radium is today) and they came to a place where rocky cliffs rise high over the water. Like all Dene, they believed it was bad medicine to pass in front of this rock: it was said that loud noises came from within it. These particular hunters pulled their canoes out of the water, but decided not to portage … Instead they camped near the cliff. During the night everybody was awakened by the singing of the medicine man … In the morning, when the medicine man stopped singing the people at last spoke to him … “Why did you sing all night … ?” “I foresaw many things and I was disturbed,” replied the medicine man … The medicine man told them of his strange vision. “I saw people going into a big hole in the ground – strange people, not Dene. Their skin was white … [and] they were going into a hole with all kinds of metal tools and machines … On the surface where they lived, there were strange houses with smoke coming out of them … I saw … big boats with smoke coming out of them, going back and forth on the river. And I saw a flying bird

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– a big one. They were loading it with things … I watched them and finally saw what they were making with whatever they were digging out of the hole – it was something long, like a stick. I wanted to know what it was for – I saw what harm it would do when the big bird dropped this thing on people – they all died from this long stick, which burned everyone. The people they dropped this long thing on looked like us, like Dene … But it isn’t for now; it’s a long time in the future. It will come after we are all dead.”86 Two things need to be said here. First, this was the story that was foregrounded by the Dene when they came to realize what they had been involved with in their relations with Eldorado, and which they published in 1998 in a community-based report, “They Never Told Us These Things.”87 It is at once a kind of oracular speech, attributed to the greatly respected community prophet Ehtseo Ayah, Grandfather as he was called (1858–1940).88 We knew it all along. But also striking about this story is its instability; a prohibition – Stay away from this place – a transgression – Why did they camp there to begin with? – and a prophetic moment that results. The function of this story is so central that this tension is fascinating. As the story that comes into circulation at the very moment when the past, their past, is undergoing massive revision in the light of their actual involvement, it seems to say both that they already knew (through Ayah’s vision and story of the future), and that they should have known better.

4.12 Erasure, Redux

Some things we know. After their travels to Japan in the late 1990s the Dene attempted to establish a claim with the Government of Canada. They wanted to know what the government knew, and when, and why it failed to warn them. They wanted to know what legacy remains from this time. They wanted to know what happened, and why they were never told. After an appropriate period of stalling, the government agreed that some of the Dene’s questions deserved to be answered, and so struck a five-year inter-jurisdictional investigative mechanism, the Canada-Déline Uranium Table (cdut), which concluded its work in 2005.89 The terms of reference of this body concerned the remediation of the mine site and other contaminated areas, health and environmental studies and monitoring, and the question of compensation. All of this amounted to a very large piece of work in the community in an attempt to quantify and legitimate their resignifed history. That is, people came to understand that what they had actually been doing was quite different indeed from what they had thought they were doing; this in itself was cause for anxiety. The retroactive quality of this awareness is quite important to understanding the mechanism (poor word) of ecological disaster generally. Ecological threats fail to align with the traditional and conventional modes for understanding such things; that is to say, notions of risk, responsibility, reparation, causality, while appropriate to the nineteenth-century mishap, fail to correspond to the industrial/toxic threats of the twentieth century. The Dene’s return to their history is marked by this lack of fit between toxic events and modes of signification. In any case, this recent formal process culminated, as many northern events tend to do, in the production of a report: the CanadaDéline Uranium Table Final Report.90 It is a tragic piece of work that chronicles the disappointments suffered upon a community. Its main reported finding was that there was insufficient evidence to

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link the Dene’s work for the mining company, Eldorado, to the cancers experienced in the community. Sorry. The cdut concluded that all of the fear and anxiety that has gripped the community since their toxic history was revealed to them is groundless. No contamination of the lake would harm them, although considerable contamination was located: some 740,000 tons of mine tailings were deposited directly into the lake.91 No site contamination would affect the wildlife they depend on, although considerable site contamination was located: some 170,000 tons of tailings remain on the surface of the site at Port Radium, some buried, some exposed.92 Although the document identified specific areas that exceed allowable radiological activity, and several areas with other forms of metal contamination, no danger at the site would remain – once appropriate remediation had taken place, that is. Indeed, it turns out, their involvement living and working near the mine and along the transportation corridor could not be said to have exposed them to harmful levels of radiation (by today’s standards). The Port Radium mine was “generally in compliance” with regulations, they found.93 No Dene worked underground, they were not exposed to underground conditions (radon gas, in particular), which were certainly worse than those on the surface. This is a contentious point. Although it seems fairly certain that no Dene worked underground during the 1930s and 1940s, this is less clear for the final decade of uranium mining (up to the closure in 1960). It is also not clear with respect to the subsequent owners of the mine, Echo Bay Mines Limited. Given that the official fact-finder, Intertec, was not able to access key archival information, this question must remain open until such time as the Eldorado papers can be fully consulted. On the basis of informal conversations with elders in Déline, my sense is that there may have been periods during the 1950s when Dene men were in fact employed to work underground – but again, I cannot confirm this. Thus, the cancers that have claimed many of those involved cannot be linked to their Highway labour. A dose reconstruction that was undertaken determined that one or two additional deaths might have taken place over and above the “normal” expected cancer deaths for a similar statistical population. “It is not possible to know for certain if the illness or death of any individual ore carrier was directly caused by radiation.”94 An attempt was made to join this study to other research that has been done on cohorts of miners from Port Radium and other mines of

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that era. Even though the National Research Council published research to the contrary in 1935, the report claims that the understanding of radiation and health at the time of the mine was not advanced with respect to understanding long-term, sub-acute effects.95 So much for that. So, although the community has been injured because of radiation, concludes the report, it has not been injured by it. “One of the key findings by the physicians who conducted the assessments was a profound and pervasive fear of radiation and a tendency to blame any and all health problems on the mine and the legacy of the mining activities,” they wrote.96 Whether or not this is true, it has become so. It is a tragic state of affairs in which the community’s anxiety is at once acknowledged and invalidated – at least insofar as its ground lies not in the past, but in the present. A profound and pervasive fear of radiation. Should there be any other kind? From another point of view, one might well say that this is simply a refrain. Environmental and ecological threats need not be “actual” to be perceived as very real.97 But, whatever else one might say, the threats that pertain to the mine and the various sites associated with it, and the Dene’s history with these places, are exceedingly real in the community of Déline and elsewhere. That the cancer is a non-starter should not be surprising. Epidemiological arguments are a tough game that selects for aggregates, robust numbers, and rhetorically skilled practitioners. For example, between 1991 and 2001 there were forty-three deaths in Déline. On the face of it, this seems like a lot. The cancer-related deaths during this period were 5 per cent greater than in the total population of the Northwest Territories. This also seems like a lot. However, this difference amounts to only two excess deaths from cancer over a tenyear period. Aggregates in the North are just not that big. The numbers, as numbers, are too small to permit the necessary analysis within an epidemiological frame; you just can’t get there from here. In Henningson’s recent documentary, Somba Ke: The Money Place, Rosalie Bertell makes the argument that assessing the historical effects of uranium on the population of Déline cannot reasonably be done by using death records alone. To do so is to elide the burden of radiotoxicity that is already present as a function of their historical exposure. Bertell maintains that the only way to do this kind of investigation (she apparently offered this to the community) is to do blood and urine analyses, which would at least allow for correlation with exposure. For the Final Report, the only statisti-

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cally relevant expression of the Dene’s grievance with the Canadian government is a body count. Yet the testimony of their dead has proven insufficient. Once again, the living are passed over in silence. In any case, the upshot is that the community in such a situation becomes sick in another sense. One must begin to look to other causes, to disjunctures with traditional practices, to the histories of colonialism, to alcoholism, to nutrition, to traumatic stress, depression, and so on. But the specific practices around mining and transporting radium and uranium have now been officially exonerated. And the community is made responsible for its own misery. To read this document, the Final Report, is to remark how little the authors were able to discover about the mine and its operation. Even after engaging a fact-finding consultant, so very little was known to them.98 And yet the report is cloaked in a language of adequacy. It acknowledges that there is much more to be known, that many questions were left unanswered, but through the bureaucratic logic of the situation, and the instrumental demands of the mechanism, the poverty of facts became the facts nonetheless. So, in lieu of establishing the state of the archive (as per the terms of reference), “information about working conditions, and employment histories was largely gathered from oral histories,” that is, from community members.99 The fact that the report relies in this manner on the very testimony that was suspect to begin with – at least insofar as it was the specific recollections of ore carriers that the fact-finding sought to clarify from the outset – is simply ironic.

4.13 Equivalence

One must note, with spleen I think, what a terrible deal the Dene got with the “fact-finding” process, a mechanism that was designed to carry out the archival work and analysis for the final report. It was on the basis of this work that the Dene and the government were supposed to gain an understanding of the record of their involvement. What was their relationship to Eldorado? What was their working relationship? What exposures to radioactive and contaminated materials did they have? How many Dene worked, and where? The fact finder was charged with the task of gathering “all known information about this mine and its operations.” A large task. That the assembling and presentation of this information was undertaken in something like six months (leaving “about 5 days of time to research each of the 12 items contained in the consulting engagement”100) with no access to the Eldorado materials is just another in a long sequence of catastrophes. It is inconceivable to me how this happened, but the character charged with responsibility as the lead fact finder, a Walter Keyes of Intertec Management Limited, was hardly a disinterested researcher. Far from it. To begin with, he is vocally pro-nuclear and anti-regulatory, a former deputy minister in the pro-uranium Saskatchewan government (with Indian and Native Affairs, and Northern Affairs), an active member of the lobby group the Canadian Nuclear Association, and the editor of a pro-nuclear press. Here is an example of the position he advocates by means of a reductio ad absurdum: Although there have been no recorded deaths in North America from radiation exposures at either uranium mines or nuclear power facilities during the past 30 years, there have been enormous sums of money spent on regulation, inspection and enforcement. Yet, in contrast there have been 30 reported deaths in North America from vending machines during the past 20 years – and that’s from the machines themselves, without look-

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ing at what may be the hazardous contents of the machines such as cigarettes, food products and other items. Does this mean that government is over-regulating the nuclear industry or under-regulating the vending industry? Is this a case where the cumulative impact on the environment and public safety of vending machines has been overlooked because each incremental item is seen as being so very small without fully understanding the overall impacts?101 It’s hard to know what to make of this. If it were merely a rant on a blog somewhere, it might be amusing. Not long after the fact-finder’s report was released, Keyes published a review of Village of Widowers in the Canadian Nuclear Society Bulletin.102 He makes no mention of his prior involvement with the Dene as a consultant and fact finder. No mention is made of the poverty of documentation. Instead he tries to cast the film as a fiction dressed up as a documentary. The first factual flaw in Village of Widows is its title. According to StatsCan, there are more men in Déline than women, but somehow the name Village of Widowers wouldn’t work quite as well. The next factual flaw is in its opening scene, a mournful image of lovely old women at a funeral, burying “another” of the former mine workers who died of cancer. In fact the funeral was for a young man who died in a truck accident. But again, safe driving in a village with six kilometres of all weather road is not as good story material, so why not invent?103 No one ever said that the phrase “village of widows” was a statistical observation. Rather, it was intended to refer to the number of men formerly engaged in the transport of radioactive materials who had died. That there are more men in the community today is, again, a fallacy. Referring to the Final Report of the cdut, Keyes writes: “The report concluded that perhaps the largest health threat to the community was the fear that had been created by scary news reports and fictional events like those contained in Blow’s video Village of Widows.”104 This is not merely a distortion; it is not at all what the report concluded. Keyes continues: “The report concluded that no Dene people ever worked at the mine site, not one, ever, in the 28 years the project was in operation.”105 Again, not so. The report, to

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which he himself contributed the historical facts, concluded that there was no evidence to make this conclusion. Some thirty-five Dene men were employed as labourers at various points along the water route, though he makes no mention of this. It is true that there is still no evidence that any Dene worked underground at the mine. But in the absence of any employment records listing persons of Dene ancestry – either Eldorado’s or those of the Northern Transportation Company – one cannot be so sure.106 A closer reading of the head fact-finder’s contribution reveals an interesting oscillation between the meaning of no evidence, on the one hand, and we couldn’t access information that would assist in answering the question, on the other. Since Keyes and his colleagues were denied access to the principal historical archive, any and all conclusions with respect to these details are premature at best. Nevertheless, Keyes states: “A few Dene worked as part-time seasonal stevedores for about two months each summer, loading and unloading barges at three of eight sites on the river system. It [the Final Report] found that the Dene were treated no differently from any of the other transportation workers.”107 Again, there was no evidence to bring to bear upon this question, and accordingly there is still no basis upon which to draw these conclusions. A sad and tragic commentary on the professed wish to understand the past. A wilful and punitive misunderstanding recast as truth, and another region of silence to contend with.

4.14 Field Note: Black River — 3 August 2005

As I write this, I am on the Mackenzie River, steaming south at five knots toward the Arctic Circle. It will take eleven days to travel from the Mackenzie delta on the Beaufort Sea and up the Mackenzie to Hay River on Great Slave Lake. I am on board a passenger boat, the Norweta, owned by a Dene man and an Inuit woman; an Indian and an Eskimo as they call themselves — “still at war,” they point out. I am a tourist in the North; skilled, but perhaps useless. The other passengers on board are a strange collection of the “interested elderly” engaged mostly in forms of geographic free association. Have you been to the Falklands?, I am asked.

In a recent trip to the North, my travelling companion was also a ghost of sorts: Harold A. Innis. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he would undertake numerous field trips, visiting the Canadian margins (Lake Athabasca, the Yukon, James Bay, Labrador). This “dirt research,”108 as he called it, was aimed at understanding the productive relations between margin and centre, with a particular and abiding interest in the role played by geography in the course of empire; for Innis, it was precisely the emphatic quality of geography that issued an imperative to understand the local in order to think more broadly of the cultural. In any case, one needs company in this kind of work. And perhaps more importantly, one needs to realize that, like it or not, one always already has company; this is a problem. In 1924, the young Harold Innis also made a visit to the Mackenzie River basin. As was his procedure, he made copious field notes – typed, the Mackenzie notes run to some ninety pages – selectively detailing his northward journey.109 After a long train ride, he began his river journey on the Peace River and made his way to Lake Athabasca. Then he travelled on the Slave River to Great Slave Lake, spending some time in Fort Resolution (he counted 41 boats, 122 canoes, 6 scows, 12 birch barks canoes, and several Evenrude engines),110 then, boarding the

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Liard River, he crossed Great Slave Lake to the mouth of the Mackenzie (oddly, no mention of the congregation of cruciform white pelicans, although he did note two beavers), and the Liard did manage to strike a shoal, taking a side trip up to Fort Nelson, British Columbia, then back to Simpson, boarding the ss Distributor, and down the Mackenzie River to Aklavik, the now-decommissioned head of the Mackenzie delta, returning the length of the system to McMurray. “Certainly,” he wrote, “there is no river in Canada, the home of the canoe, better adapted for canoeing than the Mackenzie River and its tributary, the Peace.”111 It can be paddled by canoe with only two or three breaks, he figured. “Effective paddling begins early in the morning, or late in the afternoon.”112 Innis, it turns out, was not actually in a canoe on the Mackenzie River. He was, at some point, in a canoe with John Long, camping on the shore at night. It is difficult to determine details like this from his journal, but in a memo he wrote concerning wildlife conservation in the Mackenzie district, he states that he left Peace River by canoe and paddled through to Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake.113 His short published piece on his Northern trip makes no mention of this fact, propagating instead the fiction of a vast paddling journey, with him in the stern. In any case, he was, like me, a Northern tourist of sorts, a passenger on a boat (in his case, the D.A. Thomas, and the Liard River).114 Innis and me: migrant workers, itinerant labourers, les coureurs du stylo. His omission, though, the phantom canoe evoked in his field notes and hedged in his publications, added a certain gravitas to his travels and gives a clue to his ideas about North. I take my cue here from Mitchell: “[T]he tourist is one of the most hypertheorized figures in contemporary cultural studies. The tourist has been staged as nomad, detective, seer and prophet, cultural theorist and ignoramus … I like to think of my own form of tourism as that of the … migrant worker who brings nothing but some skills developed elsewhere, skills that may or may not be useful.”115 Innis was at work, certainly. Vincent Bladen reported Innis’ pleasure at having once been described as “[t]he best deck-hand in the North.”116 Loading and unloading goods, fuelling the Liard, earning his keep. Counting. But his tourism, like my own, was located in his distance, his curiosity, his writing. Innis’ notes from that summer are as difficult to follow as his most challenging published work; the through-line is buried under a succession of overlapping details that have more in common with

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the recursive quality of excited recollection than within the linear geography of the river. The dates that locate his movements northward in the early part of his trip just seem to disappear as he goes further north. One just cannot tell where he is. Or when. Skipping from Norman to Resolution, to Fort Good Hope and Chipewyan, to Wrigley (before he reaches Simpson), to the decline of beaver prices in 1875, detailed trapping methods for all manner of fur-bearing creatures, to the Indians’ dislike for light patterned prints; he gleans. Innis had gone North to explore the Canadian margins at the very moment that the North was, as it is today, a Canadian cultural preoccupation, a cardinal point du jour.117 A voyageur of sorts, and a voyeur, certainly (part Stefansson, part Call of the Wild – a screening of which he apparently attended in Toronto in the weeks prior to his trip).118 He was collecting instances and evidence of productive economic and social exchange in the North. He would gather firsthand data concerning the material practices of trade, the social relations within which it was manifest, and he would work on ideas about the Canadian North as a site of “national self-realization.”119 With a growing suspicion of centralized repositories of “metropolitan” knowledge – archives, universities, scholarly journals, textbooks, and so on – he felt that to understand adequately the relations between resources, geography (particularly rivers), and colonial space generally, one needed to start from the ground, the territorial archive. That is, to determine the relations between spatial organization, technologies of transportation and communication, and economic growth, one must attend to the dirt research. This work was not supplementary to the archive, but continuous with it.

4.15 Field Note: Mackenzie River — 3 August 2005

Ten-cent stamp, 1946: Great Bear Lake

“The river,” he wrote, “is a very important determining factor in the direction of economic development.”120 The river was the primordial fact of North. “The river holds sway,” he wrote. “Since the rivers are the Highways,” he wrote, “the buildings of the missions, the trading companies and the police, each with a separate landing, are strung along the banks. These posts have length but no depth.”121 No depth. He saw the river as the ideal precinct for the canoe. The river presupposes a canoe to paddle it. If there was a determinism at work in the Innis of this period (and it certainly was not the naive determinism that he has often — and carelessly — been accused of), this may be a clue. However, we may see it differently; that is, perhaps the canoe presupposes. A plausible inversion. But we might rather say that both the river and the canoe are produced in their use. A pragmatics of flow, matter, and use. Practice, in other words. I have come to think that Innis really saw it in this manner. In any case, the river has certain practical and theoretical difficulties for the would-be navigator; for instance, which river? The surface of the

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Mackenzie is in a constant motion of current. The undersurface shifts from year to year, from month to month — no meanders in the Mackenzie, the sedimentary archive is a dynamic and active repository, a territorial archive — so one really cannot navigate the same river even once, much less twice. Not here. One’s competence consists at least in part in knowing this.

It was about this time that Innis began to assume the role of a public intellectual of sorts; his excursions to the margins were of great interest in the south. He gave talks in church basements, and public schools, to Girl Guides, a furriers’ convention, to Rotary clubs, and the Brotherhood of the United Church of Davenport Road. Innis’ idea of North, his nordicity, was in many respects quite conventional. North as a dangerous, mysterious, and potentially productive margin, a hinterland of Canada. The men of the fur trade – and they were men as far as his notes are concerned – were preindustrial, solitary frontiersmen. Not surprising, really. North for the Torontonian of his time was more or less the direction and distance of Muskoka, or at the limit, Temagami, or even Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park with its wilderness-virtue camps for the affluent offspring of Toronto’s Rosedale. In any case, it is precisely this mode of colonial metonymy that both invents and ceaselessly ratifies figures of North from the equally imaginary site of southern Ontario.122 That this imaginary for the southern Canadian is articulated principally around a concept of “wilderness” makes little difference; wilderness here is but a genre within the degree zero of nordicity. At the time he visited the Mackenzie, Innis was compiling material for what would become two separate volumes on the fur-trade period. The first was The Fur Trade of Canada, published in 1927 by Oxford University Press in Toronto. Lamentably out of print, this work brought the fur trade out of the space of an imaginary past and placed it squarely in the present as a dynamic, reciprocal, and ongoing force shaping Canadian (and European) development. Three years later, he published his opus, The Fur Trade in Canada, with Yale University Press. Tracking the fur trade between 1497 and 1929 and sketching a vast and complex backstory to his previous volume, it is here that Innis’ sweeping and encyclopedic historical method came into view. The concept of a staple was a powerful template that allowed him to understand the relation between economies of the margin and

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central cultural forms. Empire, and the cultural logics of hinterland(s). Anyway, perhaps the claim is obvious: we have here a case study in the production of a twentieth-century staple.123 New staples produced periods of crisis, Innis said, and left painful adjustments in their wake. Coastal fisheries, furs, timber, placer gold, base metals, pulp and paper. Indeed, but there’s more. “Each staple,” he wrote, “in its turn left its stamp.”124 It left its stamp according to the kind of staple it was; in the move from trade proper (as with fur), to industry (as with mineral extraction). In the first instance, trade, there is commodity production and commercial activity. In the second, there are, as Mel Watkins observed, “two critical and traumatic adjustments”: the imposition of wage economy and the yielding-up of land ownership.125 But this is only part of the story. Staples have always accorded with trade routes, and these routes are many of them well-worn paths, both physically and epistemologically. As McLuhan put it, “the trade-routes of the mind” were extensions of “the trade-routes of the external world.”126 A nice line. He had lots of them – but it still begs the question of whose mind, whose trade-route, and whose external world. In any case, the production of uranium in the North of Canada has very much left its stamp. This stamp cannot be grasped merely as an historical or topographic question. Nor can the staple be understood in terms of a dialectic between a resource (natural or otherwise) on the one hand and the development of a productive (institutional) capacity on the other (staple-pull vs staple-push, if you like). It is more complex, and more diffuse, than that. The stamp is certainly material. But it is also narrative and traumatic, social and epidemiological (I believe that the Dene can attest to this, as can the miners), as well as political and historiographic, and memorial and discursive. Each of these modes is subject to the kind of decay that is particular to it. Nuclear, temporal; semiotic, narrative, memory, death. The stamp has marked the North, postmarked the North c/o the Dene, the miners, the folks along the Highway, and perhaps you and me as well.127 The staples of interest to me – uranium and radium – could hardly have been unknown to Innis in 1924, but I can find no evidence that they were of interest to him, although he did observe presciently that a mine is an “economic explosive.”128 Neither were they unknown to the Government of Canada, but they had yet to leave their

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particular stamp upon the North and elsewhere.129 It was just six years after Innis’ Mackenzie trip that the world’s largest deposit of radioactive pitchblende, the “mineral museum,” as it came to be called,130 was staked by Gilbert LaBine and his snow-blind sidekick Charlie St. Paul on Great Bear Lake, setting into motion a network of effects that reverberate still. It strikes me that the radium and uranium, as staples, marked a radical moment in the economic and cultural development of the North (and perhaps as well in the very conceptual development of “the staple”). These staples are different. Parasitic in a way, operating both anachronistically, through the re-animation of the furtrade river system (the portage, the York boat, the river boat, the barge, and so on), and through a succession of contemporary transportation and communicative systems (rail, air, road … wireless, telegraph, telephone), effectively activating various phases of Canadian economic, technological, and cultural development. For Innis, the penumbra of the staple, the technologies surrounding its setting and development – these are the field of the stamp, its imprint. For Innis, the staple exists within this field of development. For me, the penumbra of the staple is enlarged to encompass the future as well, creating strange loops in which the furtrade route bleeds into the Manhattan Project, for example. Or, when the Dene – stamped as they remain by the staple and its aftereffects – travel to Japan to apologize for their role (their labour, their land, their unwitting complicity) in the destruction of Japanese cities, things get complicated – temporally and ethically. As it turns out, this particular stamp is profoundly indelible. In 2000, uranium was worth about $9 per pound. In 2007, the price approached $140. Do the arithmetic – it is all happening again. It is estimated that only 50 per cent of the global uranium fuel requirements are met by existing uranium mining production, the remainder coming from decommissioned military sources; this shortfall is driving the boom.131 Alberta Star, a Canadian mining and exploration firm – owned, incredibly, by the brother of author Douglas Coupland – has, with the blessing of the Dene (or some of them), recommenced uranium exploration on Great Bear Lake and blanket-staked the entire area around Port Radium. The documentary – Somba Ke: The Money Place – retraces the story of Blow’s Village of Widows (without the courtesy of citation, one notes), filling in the decade that had passed since Blow’s film was produced. In particular, Somba Ke shows a community very much divided on

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the question of a uranium resurgence on Dene land, and underscores the tragic inadequacy of the Canada-Déline Uranium Table’s handling of the historical dose reconstruction. But, above all, it shows how at least part of the political apparatus of the community of Déline supports the renewal of uranium production on Dene land.132 Although Northern Saskatchewan remains the uranium capital of the world, uranium at Great Bear Lake continues to represent a significant resource.133 Even the tailings from Eldorado and the Echo Bay Mine are of interest. “Approximately 910,000 tons of uraniumsilver tailings are currently contained in the Radium Lake and Cobalt Channel areas and [an] additional 800,000 tons of silver tailings are stored in the McDonough Lake containment area. An estimated 170,000 tons of uranium tailings were placed in surface depressions and in the Silver Point area and the remaining 740,000 tons were placed in the Cobalt Channel area of the Great Bear Lake.”134 Exploration and drilling activity in recent years, involving not just Alberta Star, but a number of other exploration and mining firms, confirms the ongoing and future interest in Dene land at Great Bear Lake. Thus, to the strange loops mentioned earlier, we may add the staging of a traumatic return of the nuclear, capable of re-entering the market defensively through a back door, opened in part by the exceedingly short half-life of public memory and ironically (read: perversely) fuelled (so to speak) by such public spectacles as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.135 As I write this the Government of Canada has recently announced its commitment to nuclear energy as part of the nation’s energy future; Al Gore together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are recent recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize; and North Korea has just (in May 2009) conducted its second underground nuclear detonation, the first being a one-kiloton detonation in 2006, and the most recent, 20 kilotons. Thus we see the grounds of an emergent empirical argument – in the form of mean sea-level changes, images of melting glaciers, placeless polar bears, global urban-rural ratios, rising global temperatures (thermal and political) – favourably disposed to a renewed interest in and development of nuclear energy and security. India and China stand as two important constituencies in which converging flows of capital, population pressure, poverty, and politically unstable and/or diminishing fossil fuel resources all point toward a resurgence of the nuclear as a prudent, or necessary, choice. China in particular represents an almost unimaginably large

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market for uranium.136 It currently produces almost 80 per cent of its electricity from coal; making it not a particularly good citizen from the point of view of post-Kyoto carbon negotiations. “The country plans to build 27 plants to meet a target of raising nuclear energy output fivefold by 2020. India aims to build 17 reactors to triple nuclear power capacity by 2012”137 Closer to home (mine), the Ontario government has recently announced a plan to add two new reactors (to be running by 2018) to the Darlington reactor complex, and Bruce Power has just unveiled a proposal for two new reactors to be built in Saskatchewan. If the Bruce Power project takes place, these will be the first new reactors to come online in Canada since 1992. The most plausible future today is one in which commercial nuclear power generation is seen as a path to good carbon stewardship. Great Bear Lake seems destined to become part of the global supply chain.

4.16 Field Notes in the Margins

So, what is a margin anyway? Quips Jody Berland: “it’s where you write your notes.”138 Right. I had wanted to find myself in a kind of dialogue with my absent other, Innis, through his notes. Since his trip was motivated by an urge to understand place and relation, it seemed promising. In advance, I had felt in agreement with him on important principles. First, that space was not merely the milieu in which the events of history unfold, but that both space and events are produced and are generative in relation to concrete social practice. This also seemed promising. And, second, that cultural margins are a necessary and in any case rewarding site for understanding dominant historical and cultural forms. That is, for all its difficulties, fieldwork is necessary, fraught, and fruitful. Innis’ field notes, though, attest mainly to his practice of gleaning – he makes lists, he notes exchanges, prices, and trapping techniques, he takes measurements, makes sketches, counts boats and barges – all toward the production of a descriptive thickness. He sought the dirt on the place. But perhaps what interested me most, naively I suppose, was that we both found ourselves on the same river, at the same time of year, taking notes. Writing in the margins. Trying to make sense of things. Yet what I found in the Northern notes of Innis was a theorist who refused to theorize. I am not the first to make the observation that Innis had too little to say about methodology. Overstating the point somewhat, Wernick put it this way: “Considering that he wrote as a social scientist, and at that as a critic of the mainstream, he also had remarkably little to say about methodology, or indeed about theoretical considerations of any kind. On even such basic questions as the epistemological status of an historical approach to social science, the effectivity of economic factors, or indeed the precise meaning of key terms like ‘monopoly of knowledge’, he is virtually mute.”139 Although Innis did not devote a great deal of writing to methodological questions, entirely mute he was not. There is, for example, a fascinating and published exchange

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between Innis and Broek on the disciplinary formations of the social sciences in relation to concepts of nationalism, knowledge, the poverty of the geo-political move in geography, and specialization.140 Other examples of methodological and historical considerations may be found in his work on Veblen, and in his essay “On the Economic Significance of Culture.”141 One might move toward a more general claim that Innis was more apt at the ongoing performance of methodological invention than in a meta-theoretical elaboration or argument. The river for Innis was an opening, a corridor to a kind of southern induction.

4.17 Field Note: Tulita (Fort Norman) — 6 August 2005

Porthole no. 9, Mackenzie River

Innis is not good company. It is too easy to come to a dispute with him, to see his selectivity as an all-too-conventional optic of an indifferent euro-ethnography. A southern politics of Northern exclusion permutes into a historio-economic vision of a North morally and economically bound up in the formation of Canada. His vision though, precisely, is a problem. He seems not to like Indians, women, or Jews. However invaluable Indians were to his understanding of the dynamics of the fur trade, of colonial development, and the formation of “Canada,” they were not reliable witnesses for his territorial ethnography (quite literally a mode of nation-writing). “Half breeds,” apparently yes, but not the Indians. “Caribou-eaters,” he calls them. Or the Eskimos, the “Huskies.” Evenden, I recall, is much more damning in his reading of Innis’ race and gender issues; I simply find myself bewildered. This is in the background of my thinking today. More importantly, I have been invited to a wedding — the entire village of Tulita will attend. Today is the day that the church celebrates the transfiguration of Christ, apparently. It also happens to be the sixtieth

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anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The priest comments on both of these things as a way to make a call for peace. The groom is eightytwo years old and is dying from cancer. During the 1950s he had worked for Eldorado on the Bear River, handling bags of uranium ore. This total and bizarre connection remains unspoken. A strange nexus. I am weary of reading Innis’ notes, trying to invent the author as an interlocutor. Such is the transference of reading. This has turned into a point of departure for me: Innis was there as a reader; he did his real writing elsewhere.

4.18 Field Note: Tsiigehtchic (Arctic Red River) — 6 August 2005

The Norweta arrives mid-day. Fourteen eagles sunning themselves at the mouth of the river. I think it was fourteen (notwithstanding Borges’

Argumentum Ornithologicum). I can find no fish being smoked. No bales tied and waiting for transport to Aklavik (all that Innis saw on his visit). It is hot. There is an inviting pond on the large delta area at the confluence of the Red and Mackenzie rivers. High above stands the village. Walking through town, I stop and speak with an old woman who is standing near the church. I ask her about swimming in this pond. “No,” she says, and then tells me a long story. After one of the innumerable battles between the Gwitch’in and the Inuit, scores of Inuit were thrown into the lake, the wounded to drown, and all the bodies were just left in the lake. Ever since this time, she said, the eagles wait for the bodies to rise, but all that emerge are ghosts. The lake is full of ghosts, too full, so there is just no room to swim. She uses a Slavey word to describe when this happened; I think it means the really long-ago time. Too many ghosts.

This is it really. This is what Innis cannot see. What he has no eyes to see. These puncta, these ghosts. “Civilization spoils Indians for hunting,” he said.142 The studium that animates his practice can only ever let him experience, “in reverse” perhaps, his own culture.143 The emptiness of the landscape does not belie a human presence. This human presence is simply not available to that (southern) eye. He sees empty with a telos of filling, whereas one might have seen or heard something else. A grave, a story, a ghost. But not easily. (Odd, given his deep commitment to cultures of orality.) Chamberlin expresses the upshot of this problem clearly: “It is an assumption that understanding sophisticated oral traditions comes naturally to the sympathetic ear. It doesn’t. Just as we learn to read, so we learn how to listen; and this learning does not come naturally.”144 More than a sympathetic ear (or eye) is required. I ask myself questions that I can only hope to answer. What, then, might be the chorographic procedures for writing this landscape? How to write a landscape that is both ethically engaged and alive to

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the proximity of the remote? How to be in the field without recourse to the metaphors of colonial exploration, including of course the very idea of an empty landscape? How to narrate a place and a time as stranger? How to manage the indexical seductions of the institutional archive and the metropolitan knowledge it fosters, while remaining alive to the productive possibilities of the accident – “the unfathomable threads of causality” (Derrida, in Ulmer citing Kipnis, citing Derrida) – as a methodological axiom. How does one come to write with the paradigm; with all that remains unified in its absence?

4.19 Problems

I might ask: What, then, is the lesson of history here? Clearly, this is not just about a war, about a country, “ours,” a home and native land responding to decidedly real threats to freedom. The lesson here is both more and less than this, for it is not history that is doing the teaching; not directly, at least. Here, history and memory and trauma and land and ethics are terms in a strange algebra of invention; one that poses such questions as what it might mean to assume responsibility for events over which one had no control, or knowledge.

This problem belongs to all of us. It is a problem for memory. And it is (at least) twofold. First, how does one come to constitute in memory something that was not fully experienced to begin with, in the face of a history that consumes itself, its witnesses, and its evidence? Second, and perhaps even more pressing, how to bring into memory, and thus bear witness to, events that, culturally speaking, we do not wish to remember, or to be remembered for. But I will resist drawing conclusions here. My sense is that any critical engagement with stories – whether those leaked from metropolitan archives, or those told by peoples of the North – must stop short of interpretive closure. The ellipsis becomes a political and a critical act … that is, both deference and deferral. The strange objects of our time cry out for modes of conceptualization that might lead us to such questions; these questions yet to come. They might.

4.20 Field Note: (The Gift) Déline — February 2003

Port Radium, August 2005

I have brought with me a gift to give to the elders involved with the Déline Uranium Project, and more particularly, to their recently inaugurated Knowledge Centre. It is a small bag of sedimentary salt that several years earlier I collected from the underground nuclear waste storage facility deep beneath the New Mexican desert. This desert repository is now a perpetual home to some of the materials taken from Dene land. Another uncertain death, to be sure, but the symbolic quality of the gift appeals to me; the closing of the circle, the mapping of one particular cul-de-sac of the Highway of the Atom. After our community presentation, one of the elders reached into the bag and took a piece of the salt in his hand. And then he was silent for a long while.

206 / THE HIGHWAY O F THE ATOM

And when he finally spoke, he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, “but none of this can be good for their caribou.” Tigullapaa. Please follow me.

Notes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10

notes to part 1 See Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 253–64. Derrida, “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony,” 29–30. Ibid., 30. Ibid. I think here of Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. See my “Highway of the Atom: Recollections Along a Route,” 99–115. “Heterotopoanalysis,” as Casey puts it in The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (297). Although Casey understands the significant message of Foucault’s heterotopias – i.e., that “space itself has a history in Western experience” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 22.) – he is less than convinced that Foucault’s text makes sufficiently clear distinctions between space, place, location, and site (The Fate of Place, 300–1). J. Nicholas Entrikin, cited in Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, 40. Bringhurst, “The Meaning of Mythology,” 68. Among the numerous accessible documents pertaining to this history are Spence, “Grandfather and the Great Bear”; Bothwell, Eldorado: Canada’s National Uranium Company; Leitch, “The Romance of Canadian Radium”; Finnie, “Canada Moves North”; Jenkins, The Eldorado Epidemiology Project Health Follow-up of Eldorado Uranium Workers No. 3; Laytha, “Flying North for Radium”; Leitch, “Health Hazards in the Radium Industry”; Maclean, “A Strangle-Hold on the Great Bear”; Mingay, “Miscellaneous Newspaper Articles on Atomic Energy and Eldorado Compiled by Mingay”; Mingay, “Miscellaneous Newspaper Clippings on Radium Industry and Eldorado Compiled by Mingay,” Mingay, “Interviews with Alf Caywood, George Frank, Gordon Latham, Peggy Latham and Jack Love,” “Interviews

208 / NOTES TO PAG ES 9—12

11 12 13

14

15

16

17

18

19

with J.C. Burger & Dr. Mcderment,” “Interview with Paul Rodrik & Articles on Franz Johnston,” “Interview with Dr. Maurice Haycock”; Myers, “Uranium Mining in Port Radium, n.w.t.: Old Wastes, New Concerns”; Nininger, “Hunting Uranium around the World”; Peet, “Trail of 1932: A True Story of Early Days at the Settlement of Cameron Bay in the Northwest Territories of Canada.” The Access to Information Act (rs, 1985, c. A-1) and the Privacy Act (rs, 1985, c. P-21). Between 1988 and 1995, the cidc sold all the shares it held in cameco. Peach and Hovdebo, Righting Past Wrongs: The Case for a Federal Role in Decommissioning and Reclaiming Abandoned Uranium Mines in Northern Saskatchewan. In addition the Déline Uranium Team and others from the community of Déline, Indian Affairs and Northern Development, the Natural Resources Canada, Health Canada, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and the Government of the Northwest Territories Department of Health and Social Services participated in the Canada-Déline Uranium Table. In part this had to do with Eldor’s interpretation of the original 1984 agreement between lac and Eldorado, which stated that only accredited researchers would be granted access. Rebecca Giesbrecht, Archivist, Library and Archives Canada, Personal communication, May 2010. Interested researchers might want to make a formal request for the lac custodial files to sort through all this. See Canada-Déline Uranium Table, Canada-Déline Uranium Table Final Report, 24, and Intertec Management Limited, Port Radium Fact Finder Report, 6. “One organization, Canada Eldor Inc. (wholly owned by Canada Development Investment Corporation) declined to authorize the Port Radium Fact Finder access to the Eldorado Mining records.” Intertec Management Limited, Port Radium Fact Finder Report, 75. Bill C-2, The Federal Accountability Act. One of the provisions of this Act was to extend “the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act to cover all Crown corporations that were not already subject to these Acts, as well as to all wholly owned subsidiaries.” Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 36.

NOTES TO PAG ES 12—14 / 209

20 Wiebe, Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic, 82. 21 van Wyck, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat. 22 “Prior to 1944, Eldorado Mining and Refining Ltd. was a privately held corporation, incorporated under the laws of Ontario. On January 28, 1944, by Order-in-Council pc535, it became a federal Crown corporation, incorporated under the Dominion Companies Act (1934). This action was authorized under the War Measures Act. Coupled to this was a federal government Order-in-Council, in September 1943, appropriating to the Crown in right of Canada all radioactive substances on existing leases and banning all future private prospecting and staking for such materials on federal lands. The result was that Eldorado was the sole source of uranium in Canada. Virtually all of the uranium produced in Canada up to the early 1960’s [sic] was sold to the United States Atomic Energy Commission (usaec), an agency of the United States government, for use by United States ‘government programmers’ (i.e. national defense).” Peach and Hovdebo, Righting Past Wrongs: The Case for a Federal Role in Decommissioning and Reclaiming Abandoned Uranium Mines in Northern Saskatchewan, 13–14. 23 See, for example, Russ, “Radium: Its Growth in National Importance”; Gernsback, “Radium – Boon or Menace?”; Cowan, “Radium: A Romance of Fantastic Fact – the Story of How Canada Became the Most Active Producer of the World’s Most Precious Element”; Roberts, “Living on Radium”; Leitch, “The Romance of Canadian Radium”; Clark, Radium Girls, Women and Industrial Health Reform: 1910–1935; McLeod, “Radium Strike in Canadian Wilds”; Montanges, “Canada, Land of Gold and Radium.” 24 Examples of the range of literatures I am speaking of are Canada-Déline Uranium Table, Canada-Déline Uranium Table Final Report: Concerning Health and Environmental Issues Related to the Port Radium Mine; Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee, ‘They Never Told Us These Things’: A Record and Analysis of the Deadly and Continuing Impacts of Radium and Uranium Mining on the Sahtú Dene of Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, Canada; Déline Uranium Team, If Only We Had Known: The History of Port Radium

210 / NOTES TO PAG ES 14—17

25

26 27 28

29

30

31

32

33

as Told by the Sahtuot⬘ine; Elias, O’Neil, and Yassi, Wollaston Lake, the Uranium Mining Industry, and the Perceptions of Health Risks; Hatfield Consultants, An Evaluation of Environmental Conditions Associated with an Abandoned Uranium Mine at Rayrock and Echo Bay; Isacsson, Uranium (video); Nikiforuk, “Canada’s Deadly Secret: 50 Years on, the World’s First Uranium Mine Is Still Taking Its Toll on a Northern Community”; senes Consultants Limited, Report on Phase I, II, and III Investigations of the Historic Northern Uranium Transportation Network in the Northwest Territories and Northern Alberta; Sexty, “Stamping Our History: The Story of Canadian Business as Portrayed by Postage Stamps”; Spence, “Grandfather and the Great Bear.” See Bothwell, Eldorado: Canada’s National Uranium Company; Bothwell, Nucleus: The History of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. Nelles, “Eldorado: Canada’s National Uranium Company by Robert Bothwell,” 218. See Whyte, “Eldorado: Canada’s National Uranium Company.” Maclean, “A Strangle-Hold on the Great Bear,” 16. Note that several of Busse’s photographs are reproduced in the present text. See Peet, Miners and Moonshiners: A Personal Account of Adventure and Survival in a Difficult Era, and Jenkins, The Port Radium Story. See Inglis, “History of Eldorado Nuclear Limited and Northern Transportation Company Limted – ‘The Eldorado Story.’” Hanright, “Mingay Historical Project – ‘Eldorado’s Historical Resources’ – Report of the Jane Mingay History Project”; Mingay, “Interviews with J.C. Burger & Dr. Mcderment,” “Interview with Paul Rodrik & Articles on Franz Johnston,” “Interview with Dr. Maurice Haycock.” Evenden, “The Northern Vision of Harold Innis,” 165. Although Evenden here is writing in relation to Harold Innis, he captures well the national mood that pervaded Canada’s Northern aspirations at the time. See my “An Emphatic Geography: Notes on the Ethical Itinerary of Landscape.”

NOTES TO PAG ES 17—28 / 211

34 Barthes, “Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collège de France, January 7, 1977.” 35 For example, Yates, The Art of Memory. 36 Barthes, “Lecture in Inauguration,” 14. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 See van Wyck, “Highway of the Atom: Recollections Along a Route.” 41 McFarlane, “Censorship veil raised from Eldorado,” 12. See also Spence, “Grandfather and the Great Bear.” 42 Dwyer, “The Dialogic of Ethnology,” 205. 43 On this discursive shift, see Pratt, “Fieldwork, Reciprocity and the Making of Ethnographic Texts,” 27–50. 44 Simone Weil, quoted in Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor, § 50 rh. The citation continues: “Justice consists of establishing between analogous things connexions identical with those between similar terms, even when some of these things concern us personally and are an object of attachment for us.” 45 The route is here reconstructed from a number of sources, including: Bothwell, Eldorado: Canada’s National Uranium Company; Downes, “To Great Slave and Great Bear: P.G. Downes’s Journal of Travels from Ile À Crosse in 1938, Parts II, IV, and V”; Finnie, “Canada Moves North” and “A Route to Alaska through the Northwest Territories”; Jenkins, The Port Radium Story; Lancaster, “Great Bear Lake’s Remote and Changing Mine”; McNiven, “History of the Eldorado Mine, Port Radium”; senes Consultants Limited, Report on Phase I, II, and III Investigations of the Historic Northern Uranium Transportation Network in the Northwest Territories and Northern Alberta. 46 The film traces the northward maiden voyage of the Radium Franklin. Northern Transportation Company Limited, The Highway of the Atom. (Crawley Films). 47 Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, 217. “Though Niger is the fourth largest producer of uranium in the world, it sees almost none of the wealth. The French consortium [Areva] pays only 5.5% percent of its revenue in taxes, and most of it goes to subsidize elites in the dusty capital of Niamey.” 48 Innis, “Mackenzie River Trip Typed Notes.”

212 / NOTES TO PAG ES 28—33

49 Boland (1892–1954) is an interesting character. He was a presence on the lake from 1920 on, establishing a base and trading post at Fort Franklin, and another at Dease Bay. See The Northern Miner, “Pioneer Gives First Hand Facts on Great Bear Lake.” 50 Inglis, “History of Eldorado Nuclear Limited and Northern Transportation Company Limited – ‘The Eldorado Story.’” 51 Indeed, there is ample evidence that the Bohemians, French, Portuguese, Mexicans, Australians, and Russians all had proven ability to extract radium from ores of various sorts. 52 Hanright, “Eldorado’s Historical Resources,” 43. 53 Farmer, “Re: Report on Eldorado Mining and Refining,” 49–50. 54 Ibid. 55 Hanright, “Eldorado’s Historical Resources,” 41. Stock value for Eldorado between 1930 and 1944 in Canadian dollars: 1930 0.20 1931 1.68 1932 1.60 1933 8.10 1934 4.35 1935 2.92 1936 2.45 1937 3.65 1938 3.25 1939 2.36 1940 1.25 1940 0.52 1942 0.80 1943 1.62 1944 1.42 Farmer, “Re: Report on Eldorado Mining and Refining,” 12. 56 The first radiological exploration of the Northern route was published by senes Consultants Limited, in their Report on Phase I, II, and III Investigations of the Historic Northern Uranium Transportation Network in the Northwest Territories and Northern Alberta. 57 Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 53. 58 Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes 1–8, vol. 7, para. 667. Further citations to the Collected Papers (1931–1958) will follow the convention of indicating the

NOTES TO PAGES 33—9 / 213

59 60 61 62 63

64

65 66 67 68

69 70 71

72

volume number followed by the numbered paragraph, e.g., Peirce, 7.667 Chatwin, The Songlines, 108. Ibid. Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 9. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, 165–68. See Nora “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” and Bordo, “The Keeping Place (Arising from an Incident on the Land),” 174–75. Sometime in the 1940s – no one can quite remember when – a uranium barge struck a rock just downstream from Fort Providence. The barge and its cargo were left there until after freeze-up, when someone brought a sled team out from Providence and moved what bags of ore as could be found onto Cache Island. The processing facility at Port Hope has a fascinating history that deserves separate treatment. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and elsewhere. van Wyck, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat, 52. Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), 32. “To see in another register, to hear or smell an image, to touch it. So it is given to be seen, only somewhere else.” Ibid., 102. Blow, Village of Widows (video). Many of the Athapaskan-speaking peoples of the vast Mackenzie basin area identify themselves as Dene, and this area has come to be called, from their political point of view, Denendeh. There is, of course, an extensive anthropological literature concerning the Dene; I found the following helpful: Asch, “Slavey”; Gillespie, “Beak Lake Indians”; Helm MacNeish, “Leadership among the Northeastern Athabascans”; Howren, “Some Isoglosses in MackenzieDrainage Athapaskan”; Osgood, “The Ethnography of the Great Bear Lake Indians”; Savishinsky and Hara, “Hare.” Many sources documenting the state of knowledge about the dangers of radioactive materials, particularly radium, date from this period. In the United States, the industrial practices

214 / NOTES TO PAGES 39—45

73 74

75 76

77 78

1

2 3

4 5

for the use of radium resulted in a considerable body count, and a sharp learning curve (in that order, sadly). See Clark, Radium Girls, Women and Industrial Health Reform: 1910– 1935. See also New York Times, “New Radium Disease Found; Has Killed 5,” “Radium Victims Win $50,000 and Pensions in Suit Settlement”; and Evans, “Radium Poisoning: A Review of Present Knowledge.” In Canada, the federal government produced several key documents pertaining both to the dangers of and the best practices for handling such materials. See McClelland, “Precautions for Workers in the Treating of Radium Ore”; Timm, “Health Hazards in the Production and Handling of Radium”; Leitch, “Health Hazards in the Radium Industry.” Page, “The Northern Pipeline Debate of the 1970s: The Observations of an Academic Participant,” 219. See Rushforth, “Political Resistance in a Contemporary Hunter-Gatherer Society: More About Bearlake Athapaskan Knowledge and Authority,” 338–46. Fort Franklin Radio Society, “Great Bear Lake Oral History Project.” George Blondin died on 12 October 2008. Both he and his father worked at Port Radium. This particular story is attributed to the Dene prophet Louis Ayah (1858–1940), who was called Grandfather. Blondin, When the World Was New: Stories of the Sahtú Dene, 78–9. Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory, 152–4. notes to part 2 The miners have suffered, “both as victims of radiation exposure, and as victimizers who helped make the atomic bomb.” Kyodo News International, “10 Ex-Miners from Canada to Attend a-Bomb Ceremony.” See Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 41–3. I note one recent work that collects a number of significant English-language essays on Camera Lucida: Batchen, ed. Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 26. Ibid.

NOTES TO PAGES 46—56 / 215

6 Ibid., 27. 7 See Cox, “The Die Is Cast: Topical and Ontological Dimensions of the Locus of the Irreparable.” 8 Wiebe, Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic, 130 9 Ibid., 131. 10 Ibid., 141. 11 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, 21. 12 Derrida, “Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know).” 13 See for example, Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920]”; LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz; Laplanche, “The Derivation of Psychoanalytic Entities”; Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy. 14 One could think here of Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction. 15 Dr. W.C. Lowdermilk, 1953, former Assistant Chief, United States Soil Conservation Service. Cited in Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee, “They Never Told Us These Things.” 16 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, 77. 17 Timm, “Health Hazards in the Production and Handling of Radium,” 147. 18 Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 131. 19 Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 12. 20 Ibid., 13. 21 Ibid., 23. 22 Ibid., 22. Freud does not concur on this point. See Freud, “Totem and Taboo.” 23 senes Consultants Limited, Report on Phase I, II, and III Investigations of the Historic Northern Uranium Transportation Network in the Northwest Territories and Northern Alberta, Appendix. 24 Derrida, “Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know),” 53–4. 25 Ibid. 26 Jenkins, The Port Radium Story, 46. 27 As Laplanche and Pontalis put it in relation to the death drive. See their Language of Psychoanalysis. 28 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 87. “It is a prophesy in reverse: like Cassandra, but eyes fixed upon the past.”

216 / NOTES TO PAG ES 58—65

29 All of this has been carefully assembled and considered in the work of Sherrill Grace under the topic of the discursive construction of North. See Grace, Canada and the Idea of North. 30 See Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. 31 Agamben, State of Exception. 32 See Moss, Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape. 33 See, for example, Van Herk, In Visible Ink: Crypto-Frictions; Wiebe, Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic. 34 Kroetsch, A Likely Story: The Writing Life, 14. 35 Ibid. 36 Stefansson, The Northward Course of Empire, 240–41. See also Stefansson and Gísli, Writing on Ice: The Ethnographic Notebooks of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 73. 37 See Neuman and Wilson, Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, 94–7. Also Grace, Canada and the Idea of North, 38–41. 38 See Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature; Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination; Richardson, Wacousta, or, the Prophecy: a Tale of the Canadas; van Herk, In Visible Ink: Crypto-Frictions. 39 Grace, Canada and the Idea of North, 22. 40 Ibid., 22–3. 41 The precursors I have in mind here are Canadian texts such as Cavell, “White Technologies”; Collis, “The Voyage of the Episteme: Narrating the North”; Dickinson, “Documenting ‘North’ In Canadian Music and Poetry”; Hjaartarson, “Of Inward Journeys and Interior Landscapes: Glenn Gould, Lawren Harris, and ‘The Idea of North’”; McNeilly, “Listening, Nordicity, Community: Glenn Gould’s ‘The Idea of North’”; Moss, Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape; van Herk, In Visible Ink: Crypto-Frictions; Wiebe, Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic. 42 See Davidson, The Idea of North; Hulan, Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture. 43 Grace, Canada and the Idea of North, 75.

NOTES TO PAG ES 65—76 / 217

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Ibid., 26–27. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 32–4. Ibid., 32. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Barthes, “From Work to Text.” See Bordo, “Jack Pine – Wilderness Sublime or the Erasure of the Aboriginal Presence from the Landscape.” Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence. Hulan, “Literary Field Notes: The Influence of Ethnography on Representations of the North.” van Herk, In Visible Ink: Crypto-Frictions, 5. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, 117. Bordo, “The Homer of Potsdamerplatz – Walter Benjamin in Wim Wenders’s Sky over Berlin/Wings of Desire, a Critical Topography,” 96. Ibid. Wiebe, Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic, 122. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, 183. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 189. Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor, § 5 LH. McKay, Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness. Barthes, “Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collège de France, January 7, 1977,” 15. de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” 19. Ibid. Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, & Other Literary Essays, 75. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, 18. Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World. Ibid., 54. James Foard’s work focuses on Japan. See Foard, “Text, Place and Memory in Hiroshima” and “Imagining Nuclear Weapons: Hiroshima, Armageddon, and the Annihilation of the Students of Ichijo School.”

218 / NOTES TO PAG ES 77—83

74 A nuclear reactor is an improbable assemblage of radically non-related events. The activities of Fermi in producing such a technology are testament to a fantastic conjunction of such endeavours. Yet the tendencies for this all to fall on the side of commenting on the positivities of advanced cultural life are slightly misplaced. The domain of the natural reactor, or natural analogue, is an interesting topic. But it hardly resolves the dispute on the side of nature. See for example Cowan, “A Natural Fission Reactor.” 75 See Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. 76 Peirce, cited in Sebeok, “‘You Know My Method’: A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes,” 17. See also Peirce, “Guessing.” 77 Peirce, 2.753. 78 Peirce, 7.48. See also 5.604 and 7.280. 79 Peirce, 7.48. 80 Peirce, 1.121. 81 Peirce, 5.189. 82 I.e., the opposite of p 傻 q, p, ⬖ q. 83 For an interesting analysis of this mode of reasoning in relation to Poe’s Dupin, see Harrowitz, “The Body of the Detective Model: Charles S. Peirce and Edgar Allan Poe,” 179–97. 84 Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor, § 24 LH. 85 Peirce, 7.218. 86 Peirce, 5.171. 87 See Peirce, 2.642–3. 88 Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, 122. 89 Peirce, 1.81. Presumably one might also posit an evolutionary phototropism. 90 Peirce, “Guessing,” 269. 91 Cf. Bonfantini and Proni, “To Guess or Not to Guess,” 134. 92 Hazelrigg, Cultures of Nature: An Essay on the Production of Nature, 11–12. 93 Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, 1. 94 From U-238 to Lead-206, in 19 steps, with half lives ranging from billions of years to less than a millisecond, the nuclear genealogy produces only daughters. 95 Macdonald, “Radium Mining in the Arctic,” 45.

NOTES TO PAGES 83—90 / 219

96 See Spence, “Grandfather and the Great Bear.” 97 Oe, Swain, and Yonezawa, Hiroshima Notes, 46, 186. On the more general question of vision in relation to Hiroshima, see Maclear, Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness. 98 Habashi, “History of Uranium, Part 2: Uranium in Other Countries,” 101. 99 Leitch, “The Romance of Canadian Radium,” not paginated. 100 Ibid. 101 This, it turns out, is another piece of ossified myth. It was actually the former site of the Morrow Pea Company of Toronto (initially rented by Eldorado, and eventually purchased with Eldorado stock). And although peas are indeed seeds, this is another construction of the past peculiar to the Eldorado story. 102 Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 50–8. 103 McFarlane, “‘Children of Eldorado Mine Are Not Atom Conscious’ & Other Articles, Evening Citizen, Nov 17, & Nov. 24th, 1945” n.p. Mention of Lord Haw-Haw’s threats to Port Radium are also made in Spence, “Grandfather and the Great Bear”; McFarlane, “Censorship Veil Raised from Eldorado”; Honderich, “Eldorado ‘Elephant’ in 1940, Uranium Was Pottery Colour,” 14. 104 Leitch, “The Romance of Canadian Radium,” 20. 105 Macdonald, “Radium Mining in the Arctic,” 9–10. 106 Leitch, “The Romance of Canadian Radium,” 21. 107 Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, 16–17. 108 Kupsch and Strnad, “Uranium Bicentenary,” 83. 109 Kupsch, “From Erzgebirge to Cluff Lake – a Scientific Journey through Time,” 13. 110 Ibid., 8. See also Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, 15–18; and Habashi and Dufek, “History of Uranium, Part 1: Uranium in Bohemia,” 83–6. 111 Kupsch, “From Erzgebirge to Cluff Lake – a Scientific Journey through Time,” 10–11. 112 See Hahne, “Early Uranium Mining in the United States.” 113 Ibid. 114 Hanright, “Mingay Historical Project – ‘Eldorado’s

220 / NOTES TO PAGES 90—101

115 116 117

118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

Historical Resources’ – Report of the Jane Mingay History Project.” Finnie, “Canada Moves North,” 258. Russ, “Radium: Its Growth in National Importance,” 681–3. Landa, “Buried Treasure to Buried Waste: The Rise and Fall of the Radium Industry,” 34–35. See also Harvie, “The Radium Century.” Landa, “Buried Treasure to Buried Waste,” 36. Ibid. Kupsch, “From Erzgebirge to Cluff Lake – a Scientific Journey through Time,” 66. Free Enterprise Radon Health Mine, “Why Radon Therapy.” See Goin and Raymond, Changing Mines in America, 75–94. See Clark, Radium Girls, Women and Industrial Health Reform: 1910–1935. See Neuzil and Kovarik, Mass Media and Environmental Conflict: America’s Green Crusades. Langer, Radium City (video). See Haydon, “Re: History of Eldorado Mining and Refining (1944) Limited.” See Kupsch, “From Erzgebirge to Cluff Lake – a Scientific Journey through Time.”

notes to part 3 1 The Northern Miner, 9 June 1949. See also Bennett, “W.J. Bennett to E.B. Gillanders.” 2 Camsell, “Great Bear Lake: An Early Exploration and Its Sequel.” 3 Bell, “Report on the Geology of Great Bear Lake and of a Chain of Lakes and Streams Thence to Great Slave Lake,” 27. 4 Maclean, “A Strangle-Hold on the Great Bear,” 16. 5 The Northern Miner, “How Labine Made His Finds.” 6 Toronto Daily Star, “Native Copper Field Is Bared in Far North by Flying Prospectors.” 7 Toronto Daily Star, “Start Air Service to Copper Strike Early Next Week.” 8 Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination, 62. 9 See Townsley, Mine-Finders: The History and Romance of Canadian Mineral Discoveries, 239.

NOTES TO PAGES 102—10 / 221

10 Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, “Lessons from the Land: A Cultural Journey through the Northwest Territories.” 11 The Northern Miner, “Radium Ore at Great Bear Lake.” 12 Newman, “Gilbert Labine: Adventurous Bushwhacker,” 49. 13 LaBine, Five Page Undated Mimeograph of Talk Given to the “Institute,” 2. 14 Lonn, Builders of Fortunes: Portraits and Profiles of Men Who Made Fortunes from the Treasures of the Earth. 15 See Kupsch, “From Erzgebirge to Cluff Lake – a Scientific Journey through Time,” for a concise back-story of radioactive mineral development, and the parallel development of scientific theories of atomic structure. 16 LaBine, “Great Bear Lake,” 1. 17 Ibid., 3. 18 Ibid., 5. 19 See Watt, Great Bear: A Journey Remembered. 20 LaBine, “Great Bear Lake,” 5. 21 McNiven, “History of the Eldorado Mine, Port Radium,” 3. This passage is also cited, with slight differences, in Kupsch, “From Erzgebirge to Cluff Lake – a Scientific Journey through Time,” 54. 22 McNiven, “History of the Eldorado Mine, Port Radium,” 3. 23 Drew, The Empire Club of Canada Speeches, 1933–1934. 24 Newman, “Gilbert Labine: Adventurous Bushwhacker.” 25 Inglis, “History of Eldorado Nuclear Limited and Northern Transportation Company Limted – ‘The Eldorado Story,’” 9. 26 Roots Web, “Person Sheet: Family Guedry-Labine.” 27 Keith, “The Mine That Shook the World,” 6. 28 Downes, “To Great Slave and Great Bear: P.G. Downes’s Journal of Travels from Ile À Crosse in 1938, Parts II, IV, and V,” 69–70. 29 Keith, “The Mine That Shook the World.” 30 Ibid., 2. 31 Hanright, “Mingay Historical Project – ‘Eldorado’s Historical Resources’ – Report of the Jane Mingay History Project.” 32 Cf. McNiven, “History of the Eldorado Mine, Port Radium.” 33 Spence, “Pitchblende and Silver Discoveries at Great Bear Lake, North-West Territories.” 34 The Northern Miner, “More Than 600 Claims in Great Bear.”

222 / NOTES TO PAGES 110—27

35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44

45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52

53

The Northern Miner, “Season’s First Find at Great Bear.” The Northern Miner, “Edmonton Glad of Mining Invasion.” Sharp, Early Days in Katanga, 143. Ibid., 142. Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, 44. Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee, “They Never Told Us These Things”: A Record and Analysis of the Deadly and Continuing Impacts of Radium and Uranium Mining on the Sahtú Dene of Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, Canada. Spence, “Radium Discoveries in North West Canada,” 18. Cowan, “Radium: A Romance of Fantastic Fact – the Story of How Canada Became the Most Active Producer of the World’s Most Precious Element,” 75. Bothwell, Eldorado: Canada’s National Uranium Company, 117–54. Peach and Hovdebo, Righting Past Wrongs: The Case for a Federal Role in Decommissioning and Reclaiming Abandoned Uranium Mines in Northern Saskatchewan. Amundson, Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West, 8. cdf International Productions, The Secret Years of Eldorado. Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, 46–9. Spry, Journal. See also Spry, “A Journey ‘Down North’ to Great Bear Lake and the Yukon in 1935.” For example, the University of Alberta library has the following catalogue entry: “Oblates of Mary Immaculate, ‘Fort Radium – Mcmurray.’” The actual document has “Port Radium” in the title. Bethune, Canada’s Western Northland: Its History, Resources, Population and Administration, 79. On this point see Kulchyski, Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut. I note that the fieldwork I have conducted in the Northwest Territories was licensed through the Aurora Institute and cleared by my institution’s Human Research Ethics Committee. On this line of thought, see Collignon, “Inuit Place Names

NOTES TO PAGES 127—34 / 223

54

55

56 57 58 59 60

61

62 63

and Sense of Place,” and Müller-Wille and Müller-Wille, “Inuit Geographical Knowledge One Hundred Years Apart.” Cruikshank’s work sets the agenda for all contemporary approaches to the ethnography of story and the relations between traditional knowledges and scientific discourses. See Cruikshank, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders; The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory; and Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. See also Joan Ryan’s work on traditional justice in Ryan et al., Doing Things the Right Way: Dene Traditional Justice in Lac La Martre, N.W.T. Canada-Déline Uranium Table, Canada-Déline Uranium Table Final Report: Concerning Health and Environmental Issues Related to the Port Radium Mine. See also Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee, “They Never Told Us These Things”: A Record and Analysis of the Deadly and Continuing Impacts of Radium and Uranium Mining on the Sahtu Dene of Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, Canada; Déline Uranium Team, If Only We Had Known: The History of Port Radium as Told by the Sahtuot⬘ine. Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee, “They Never Told Us These Things,” 78. Ibid. Howe, “Press Release by Honourable C.D. Howe, Minister of Munitions and Supply,” 1. See Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction. I wrote to Howard White of Harbour Publishing (thanks, Sam), and he replied: “Permission granted for $100 and this credit: From Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy by Al Purdy, Harbour Publishing 2000. Used with permission.” Thanks, Al. Purdy, Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy, 102–4. Originally published, with slight and interesting differences, in Purdy, North of Summer: Poems from Baffin Island, 29–30. Purdy, “Postscript to ‘Trees at the Arctic Circle,’” in North of Summer, 31. On Jackson’s painting and field practice in the North – on the occasion of his visit there in 1927 – see Bordo’s essay “The

224 / NOTES TO PAG ES 135—9

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

Keeping Place (Arising from an Incident on the Land),” which draws from his own time in Pangnirtung in 1998. Curry, “Discursive Displacement and the Seminal Ambiguity of Space and Place,” 503. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, 121. Ibid., 122. See Kipnis and Leeser, eds, Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language. Ibid., 25–6. Ibid., 239–40, n13. Ibid., 26. Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, 39. Ptolemy, The Geography, 26. Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, 39. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, 5. Walter derives this particular sense of topistics from a reading of a Platonic theoria, through the quasi-romantic lens of holistic experience. He uses the “French” expression nostalgia de la boue (as “recherche de la boue perdue”). Interestingly, Rosalind Krauss points out that it is in fact not idiomatic French at all, but an anglophonic term “transposed into the magically resonant frame of a supposedly French turn of phrase.” Krauss, “Nostalgie de la Boue,” 112. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, 18. Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, 39. Barthes, “The Old Rhetoric: An Aide Mémoire,” 64. Ibid.; and Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, 33. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, 21. Ibid., 20. Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 86–88. Ibid., 58–62. Ibid., 60. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 50–8. Jenkins, The Port Radium Story, endleaf. There are several images of this plaque on the occasion of its official commemoration, 16 July 1978, in the Parks Canada fonds at the nwt Archives. The image on the cover of van Wyck, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat is also from this plaque.

NOTES TO PAG ES 141—56 / 225

87 88 89 90 91 92

1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20

Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, 27. Peirce, Collected Papers, 1.24 Ibid., 1.343. Barthes, “The Old Rhetoric: An Aide Mémoire,” 61. See Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 210. notes to part 4 Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View,” 24. Ibid. Ibid., 25. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, 97. Freud, “The Aetiology of Hysteria [1896],” 192. For a probing analysis of Freud’s use of the “archaeological metaphor,” and the probable resonances of the Latin phrase Saxa loquuntur, see O’Donoghue, “Negotiations of Surface: Archaeology within the Early Strata of Psychoanalysis.” The line of argument is brilliantly developed in Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination, and elsewhere. Angus, Primal Scenes of Communication: Communication, Consumerism, and Social Movements, 85. Ibid., 128. See ibid., 85–6. Blumenberg, “Prospect for the Theory of Nonconceptuality,” 82. Angus, Primal Scenes of Communication, 3. Abraham, Torok, and Rand, “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” 175. Ibid. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Freud makes a similar observation – albeit as a conjecture (“assumption”) rather than a “diagnosis” – two years earlier in “Future of an Illusion.” Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 338. Ibid. Ibid., 338. Ibid. Barthes, Mythologies, 123. See “Myth Today,” where he makes the leap into the spatial dimensions of the alibi.

226 / NOTES TO PAGES 157—69

21 Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 12. 22 Hutton, History as an Art of Memory, 73. 23 This persistent metaphor of the stamp occurs variously in Plato, Aistotle, Quintilian, Cicero, the Ad Herennium, Augustine, and Freud. For example, see Plato, “Theatetus (368 B.C.),” 294–5; Cicero, De Oratore, Books I-II, II, lxxxvii, 355; Quintilian, Instituto Oratoria, XI, ii, 4; Freud, “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ (1925).” The central work of scholarship addressing this theme is Yates, The Art of Memory. See also Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 24 See Chatwin, The Songlines, 279. 25 For example, “our distance from the Real is the measure of our sociopsychical development.” Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, 34. 26 Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 161. 27 Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, 10e. 28 See Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World. 29 See my Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject. 30 Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. 31 For reference to Corax and “weak” argument see, for example, de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, and Genosko, Baudrillard and Signs: Signification Ablaze. 32 Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, 10. 33 Cited in the translator’s introduction to Shipwreck, 1. 34 Blumenberg, “Prospect for the Theory of Nonconceptuality,” 82. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 84. 38 Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, Book II, Proem. 39 See Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary. 40 Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, 17. 41 Ibid. 42 Pascal, Pensées, § 233.

NOTES TO PAGES 170—4 / 227

43 Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, 19. 44 Ibid., 70. 45 Ibid., 40. 46 Ibid. 47 Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” 198. 48 See Jay, “Diving into the Wreck: Aesthetic Spectatorship at the Fin-de-Siècle,” 93–111. 49 Rich, Diving into the Wreck; Poems, 1971–1972. 50 Jay, “Diving into the Wreck,” 100. 51 See Adams, “Metaphors for Mankind: The Development of Hans Blumenberg’s Anthropological Metaphorology,” 162. 52 Jay, “Diving into the Wreck,” 100. 53 de Maria, “On the Importance of Natural Disasters,” 527; cited in part in Jay, “Diving into the Wreck,” 105. 54 Moss, Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape, 21. But I think Wiebe made this observation first. 55 Jay, “Diving into the Wreck,” 109. 56 This is the drift of the lovely essay by Dillard, “The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century’s Measure.” 57 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 3. 58 Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 193. 59 McIntosh, Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory, 29. 60 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 191. 61 Ibid., 192. 62 Ibid., 192–3. 63 Ibid., 193. 64 See for example: Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century; Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History; Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England; Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900; McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. 65 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 193. 66 See Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, 505.

228 / NOTES TO PAGES 174— 8

67 The place where everyone dwelt, “the former Heim [home] of all human beings, the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.” Freud, “The Uncanny [1919],” 245. 68 See Bateson, “Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization.” 69 Lyotard, “Oikos,” 97. “I want to begin here by saluting the mistress of us all in matters of ecology, Sascha, Deiter Beisel’s dog [Deiter Beisel was the editor of the journal Werk und Zeit] … She occupies a voice, an odor, a silhouette, a set of movements: such is the oikos. She takes no one to court to safeguard her property. She doesn’t need a soil, a blood … all she needs is to belong, oikeion.” 96. Under such conditions – that is, with the animal, the dog, that is – the local is the global. When writing about the North, even tangentially, it’s handy to have such a totem. 70 Reflecting on politics in Duras’ Hiroshima mon amour, Kristeva writes: “Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world wars, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation.” Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, 235. 71 Lyotard, “Oikos,” 100. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 105. 74 Ibid. 75 Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 339. 76 See in particular the Introduction to Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, 33–62. 77 Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” 147. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., 148.

NOTES TO PAG ES 179—87 / 229

82 Ibid., 149. 83 Smith, “An Athapaskan Way of Knowing: Chippewyan Ontology,” 422. 84 Blondin, When the World Was New: Stories of the Sahtú Dene. 85 Blondin, Trail of the Spirit: The Mysteries of Medicine Power Revealed. 86 Blondin, When the World Was New: Stories of the Sahtú Dene, 78–9. 87 Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee, “They Never Told Us These Things”: A Record and Analysis of the Deadly and Continuing Impacts of Radium and Uranium Mining on the Sahtú Dene of Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, Canada. 88 See Blondin, Yamoria the Lawmaker: Stories of the Dene, 109–13. 89 The participants in this mechanism were the Déline Dene Band, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (representing Health Canada and Natural Resources Canada), and the Government of the Northwest Territories. 90 Canada-Déline Uranium Table, Canada-Déline Uranium Table Final Report: Concerning Health and Environmental Issues Related to the Port Radium Mine. 91 Ibid., 4. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 27. 94 Ibid., vi 95 Leitch, “Health Hazards in the Radium Industry,” 11. 96 Canada-Déline Uranium Table, Canada-Déline Uranium Table Final Report: Concerning Health and Environmental Issues Related to the Port Radium Mine, 31. 97 This particular inflexion of threat is developed at length in my Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat. 98 Intertec Management Limited was eventually engaged as the fact-finding consultant. 99 Canada-Déline Uranium Table, Canada-Déline Uranium Table Final Report: Concerning Health and Environmental Issues Related to the Port Radium Mine, 27. 100 Intertec Management Limited, “Port Radium Fact Finder Report,” 10. 101 Keyes and Lawson, “Presentation to Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, Saskatoon, 29 February

230 / NOTES TO PAGES 187—91

102

103 104 105 106

107 108

109 110 111

112 113

114 115 116 117

2000. Walter Keyes, Dennis Lawson on Behalf of the Risk Assessment Society.” Keyes, “A Review of the Video ‘Village of Widows’: A Lesson of How Much More Powerful Emotions Can Be Than Facts.” Ibid., 45. Ibid. Ibid. “No direct employment records were available from Eldorado Gold Mines Ltd. for the period 1932–1944 or from Eldorado Mining and Refining Ltd., for the period 1945–1960, or from Northern Transportation Company or Northern Transportation Canada Ltd. to confirm who worked along the Northern Transportation route.” Intertec Management Limited, Port Radium Fact Finder Report, 21. Keyes, “A Review of the Video ‘Village of Widows,’ 45. See Creighton, Harold Adams Innis: Portrait of a Scholar; and Watson, Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis, 40. Innis, “Mackenzie River Trip Typed Notes.” Ibid., 15. Innis, “A Trip through the Mackenzie River Basin,” 151. As Jonathan Bordo suggested to me, it is therefore very interesting that Innis should invoke the beaver and not the canoe as the organizing and introductory figure for his Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. Ibid., 152. Innis, “A Confidential Memorandum on the Conservation of Wild Life in the Mackenzie District, Prepared at the Request of Mr. Hoyes Lloyd, and Submitted to Him by Mr. Harold A. Innis of the Department of Political Economy, University of Toronto.” Mitchell, “Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness,” 194. Ibid., 194. Bladen, “Harold Adams Innis,” 4. His trip was in the lead-up to the second International Polar Year in 1932, a multi-nation, collaborative scientific frenzy of Northern and polar research. Consequently, his fur-trade book landed in a very fertile time.

NOTES TO PAG ES 19 1—4 / 231

118 119 120 121 122

123

124 125 126 127

See Evenden, “The Northern Vision of Harold Innis.” Ibid., 165. Ibid., 170. Innis, “A Trip through the Mackenzie River Basin,” 152. Grace works this theme and its relation to Creighton’s “Laurentian thesis” of nordicity. Hulan addresses similar themes in “Literary Field Notes: The Influence of Ethnography on Representations of the North” and Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture. And from another point of view, working from image to site, Jonathan Bordo takes this up in his “Jack Pine – Wilderness Sublime or the Erasure of the Aboriginal Presence from the Landscape.” See also Bordo, “Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness.” These themes are developed further in his monograph in preparation, Bordo, The Landscape without a Witness – A Critical Topography of Wilderness. “Concentration on the production of staples for export to more highly industrialized areas in Europe and, later, the United States has broad implications for the Canadian economic, political, and social structure.” Innis, Empire and Communications, 5. Ibid. Watkins, “From Underdevelopment to Development,” 85–8. Cited in Cavell, “McLuhan and Spatial Communication,” 352. “The issuance of stamps for the first half of the period studied (1898–1948) reflected the staple theory of Canadian economic history. Innis … argued that economic history could be understood in terms of the dominance of a succession of staples such as fish, fur, timber, wheat, and minerals being produced and traded for manufactured goods mainly from Europe … It is interesting to note that the first Canadian stamp in 1851 featured a beaver, the main fur export at the time. The Three Pence Beaver was the first stamp issued by any of Canada’s founding colonies in 1851 … Stamp topics reflecting staple goods were prominent through to about 1948.” Sexty, “Stamping Our History,” 340. See also Evenden, “The Northern Vision of Harold Innis”; McNally, “Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism: Marx, Innis and Canadian Political Economy”; McNally, “Technological Determinism and

232 / NOTES TO PAGES 194— 8

128

129

130

131

132 133 134

135

136 137 138

Canadian Political Economy: Further Contributions to a Debate”; Neill, “Harold Adams Innis: Canadian Economics.” Innis, “Red Lake and Hudson Bay. Typed Notes,” 42. The only point at which Innis directly touches on the radium and uranium finds at Great Bear Lake that I have located is in the context of a book review of Laytha, Going North for Gold: Birth of Canada’s Arctic Empire; in Innis, “Recent Books on Arctic Exploration and the Canadian Northland,” 202. See, for example, Leitch, “The Romance of Canadian Radium”; Timm, “Health Hazards in the Production and Handling of Radium.” See Spence, “Pitchblende and Silver Discoveries at Great Bear Lake, North-West Territories,” “Radium and Silver at Great Bear Lake,” and “Radium Discoveries in North West Canada.” See the somewhat dated but extremely comprehensive Neff, The International Uranium Market, and also Owen, The Economics of Uranium. A more current global synopsis is given in Makhijani et al., Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects. Henningson, Somba Ke: The Money Place. See www.alberta-star.com. Alberta Star Development Corp., “Eldorado and Contact Lake: Uranium & Silver Tailings And Waste Dumps At Eldorado/Echo Bay Mine,” http://www.alberta-star.com/s/ Contact Lake.asp?ReportID=190613&_Type=EldoradoContact-Lake&_Title= Uranium-Silver-Tailings-Project. True, Al Gore is not a nuclear proponent, but the carbon hysteria set in motion in part by his film has done a great deal to bolster plans for a “clean” nuclear renaissance. Westinghouse, now owned by Toshiba, has several billion dollars’ worth of orders for new nuclear plants in China. Chambers, “Uranium Prices Are Set to Climb – Supplies Dwindle Even as Asia Builds More Nuclear Reactors.” Berland, “Space at the Margins: Colonial Spatiality and Critical Theory after Innis,” 65. This essay is reprinted in Acland and Buxton, eds., Harold Innis the New Century: Reflections and Refractions; and is now collected with a group of her essays in Berland, North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space.

NOTES TO PAG ES 198—202 / 233

139 Wernick, “The Post-Innisian Significance of Innis,” 130. 140 Innis and Broek, “Geography and Nationalism: A Discussion.” 141 Innis, “A Bibliography of Thorstein Veblen” and “On the Economic Significance of Culture.” 142 Cited in Evenden, “The Northern Vision of Harold Innis,” 167. 143 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 28. 144 Chamberlin, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground, 54.

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Image Credits

Tennis court, Port Radium. Author photograph. / 6 Untitled, Port Radium. George Hunter. nwt Archives n1998015:0275. / 8 Radium barge no. 423, Hay River. Author photograph. / 18 The Radium Trail, 1934. R.E. Harrison, 1934. / 25 Man on machine, Port Radium. Fred J. (Tiny) Peet. nwt Archives n1988-043:0021. / 38 Radium Gilbert, Déline 2002. Author photograph. / 54 Commemorative plaque, Port Radium. Henry Busse. nwt Archives n1979-052:4877. / 56 Inadvertent raven, Yellowknife, 2003. Author photograph. / 69 Port Radium, 1930s. Henry Busse. nwt Archives n1979052:3336. / 83 Earth Angel Arthritic Radon Gas Mine. Montana. From Changing Mines in America, 2004. Courtesy of Peter Goin. / 87 Uranium hexafluoride container, Port Hope, Ontario. Author photograph. / 116 Branson’s Lodge, Cameron Bay, Great Bear Lake, 2003. Author photograph. / 119 mv Radium King. Henry Busse. nwt Archives n1979052:0611. / 131 Dump, Cameron Bay, Great Bear Lake. Author photograph. / 138 In the bunkhouse, Port Radium. George Hunter. nwt Archives n1998-015:0070. / 157 Sawmill Bay, Great Bear Lake. Author photograph. / 167 Eldorado Place, Port Hope, Ontario. Author photograph. / 177 Ten-cent stamp, 1946: Great Bear Lake. Canada, Post Office Department. / 192 Porthole no. 9, Mackenzie River. Author photograph. / 200 Port Radium, August 2005. Author photograph. / 205

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Index

abduction. See reasoning Abraham, Nicolas, 153 access to information, 9–11, 18–19. See also Eldorado archive accidents. See disaster(s) Akaitcho (Dene leader), 46–7 Alamogordo, New Mexico, 14, 56, 163, 164, 176 Alberta Star Development Corp., 195, 196 alibi, 70, 156, 225n20 Amundsen, Michael A., 117 Angus, Ian, 151, 152 apology, 62, 72. See also Dene: apology archive: Derrida on the, 12; and Innis, 191; as site and practice, 16, 19; Taylor on the, 35; “territorial,” 19, 20, 35, 41–2, 193; tyranny of the, 141. See also Eldorado archive Argonne National Laboratory, 92 Aristotle, 141, 175 art and artists, 63, 134, 136, 171– 2, 223n63 artifacts, 55. See also “fused sand” plaque Art of Memory, The (Yates), 158, 226n23 atomic bomb(s): and ethics, 76–7; materials for, 13, 111; as a sign (Howe), 129–30; survivors, 24, 41, 42; and trinitite, 15, 55–7,

164. See also Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic decay. See radiation Atomic Energy Commission (US), 92, 209n22 Atomic Energy of Canada, 14, 15, 30 Atomic Museum (Albuquerque), 163 avisuality (Lippit), 37 Ayah, Louis (Ehtseo), 181, 214n76 Bakhtin, M.M., 65 Barthes, Roland: on the alibi, 156, 225n20; culture in reverse, 202; on photographs, 45; “prophesy in reverse,” 56, 215n28; semiologist as artist, 17; on signification, 156; on “suspended” tekmerion, 141; on writing with the paradigm, 137 Bateson, Gregory, 175 Becker, Cy, 28 Becquerel, Henri, 89 being lost, 5, 62, 72, 152 Belgian Congo: discovery of radium in, 111–12; Katanga mine, 86, 89–90, 93, 117; and Manhattan Project, 118 Belgium, 31, 108 Bell, Macintosh, 98, 100, 101–3, 105 Benjamin, Walter: and history, 3,

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12, 24; and story, 178–9; and writing, 128 Berland, Jody, 198 Bertell, Rosalie, 184 bewilderment, 5, 23, 140, 152, 200 Bladen, Vincent, 190 Blanchot, Maurice, 75, 171, 173 Blondin, George, 41, 180–1, 214n76 Blow, Peter, 38. See also Village of Widows Blumenberg, Hans: on images, 167; on metaphor, 152, 168; shipwreck as metaphor, 161–2, 165–6; on spectatorship, 169, 172 body counts, 24, 185, 213n72 Boland, A.W., 28, 98, 99, 105, 212n49 Bordo, Jonathan, 35, 68, 223n62, 230n111, 231n122 Bothwell, Robert, 14–15, 117 Bourdieu, Pierre, 65 Brief History of Time, A (Hawking), 81 Bringhurst, Robert, 8 Cache Island, 36, 128, 213n64 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 45, 215n28 Cameron Bay, 119–22, 139. See also Port Radium Camsell, Charles, 98, 100, 101–3, 105 Canada and the Idea of North (Grace), 61–3, 65–6, 216n29 Canada-Déline Uranium Table (cdut): and the Eldorado archive, 10–11, 188; fact-finding, 183, 185, 186–8, 229n98; final

report, 129, 182–5, 187–8; participants, 208n14, 229n89; radiation dose reconstruction, 183, 196 Canada Eldor, 10, 11, 208n15 Canadian Arctic Gas, 39 Canadian Geological Survey, 98 Canadian Investment Development Corporation (cidc), 10, 11, 208n12 Canadian Mining and Energy Company (cameco), 10, 208n12 cancer: and the Dene, 16, 39, 182–3, 184–5; and radium dial painters, 92; radium therapies for, 90 canoes, 190, 192, 230n111 carbon stewardship, 197, 232n135 cargo cult, 51 caribou, 49, 122, 126, 206 Casey, Edward S., 207n7 causality, 49, 139, 160, 175, 182, 203 certainty, and knowledge, 141–2 Chamberlin, J. Edward, 202 Chatwin, Bruce, 33 China, 50, 144, 196–7, 232n136 Choctaw Indians, 129 chora (“place” or “space”), 135, 136 chorography, 7, 67–8, 135–7, 202–3 ciphers, 140 civilization, 90, 155–6, 202 climate change. See global warming commemorative gestures, 55, 57 communication, 31, 151, 152, 178 compensation, 41, 114, 182 complexity, 71–2, 78

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contamination: of Dene lands, 39, 49, 128, 142, 183; and the Highway, 32, 36, 54, 213n64; and transmission, 153–4; and writing, 137. See also leakage; mine tailings copper, 99 corporate histories, 14–15 Cowan, James A. (quoted), 114 Cox, Robert (quoted), 46 Craig, Shirley, 106, 109 Creighton, Donald Grant, 66, 231n122 Cruikshank, Julie, 100, 127, 223n54, 225n6 cultural memory, 12 Cultural Studies, 22 culture: and difference, 149, 150; and images, 167; and knowledge, 150, 151–2; and nature, 80–1; and positivity, 77, 218n74; in reverse (Barthes), 202 Curie, Marie, 87–8, 89 Curry, Michael (quoted), 135 Czechoslovakia, 89, 91, 93, 108 danger: and the Highway, 128–9; of the oikos, 175; of radioactive materials, 39, 40–1, 49, 51, 129, 213n72; of spectatorship, 172. See also cancer; health and safety standards Davidson, Peter, 63 death(s), 49, 153, 184–5, 186. See also body counts; cancer Deleuze, Gilles D., 36, 127 Déline, Northwest Territories, 123–7, 128–9, 143–4, 205–6 Déline Uranium Team (dut), 113– 14, 123–4 de Man, Paul, 74

de Maria, Walter, 171–2 Dene: about the, 213n71; absence from “history,” 8, 16, 124; apology, 19, 41–2, 45, 46, 47–8, 53; and cancer, 16, 39, 160, 182–3, 184–5; contamination of lands, 39, 49, 128, 142, 183; and current mineral exploration, 195–6; and documentary, 48–9; elders, Déline, 124–7, 205–6; and the Eldorado archive, 11, 124; grievances, 113, 182–5; historical labour, 32, 39, 50, 183, 187–8, 201; historical presence, 46–7, 73, 114–5, 202; and responsibility, 160, 185; sources on the, 213n70; transportation routes, 28, 102; as victims and victimizers, 41, 214n1 Dene Games, 144 Dene knowledge: as experiential, 40, 126–7, 144; of radiation danger, 39, 40–1, 49, 51, 129; of radium mining, 123–4, 160, 181, 182 Dene stories: about animals, 126, 179–80, 206; about ghosts, 202; as gifts (to be remembered), 125; about radium mine origin, 9, 41, 113–15, 180–1, 214n76; understanding function of, 177–8 Department of Indian Affairs, 50 Department of Mines, 29, 110 Derrida, Jacques: on the archive, 12; on causality, 203; on the dead and the living, 153; on invisibility, 37; on the other, 47; on testimony, 4; on trauma, 48, 55 Dillard, Annie, 227n56 disaster(s): Blanchot on, 171, 173; and chorography, 203; and the

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Dene, 160; ecological, 49, 50, 182; and the Highway, 159; history as, 49, 172; natural (de Maria), 171–2; and the oikos, 175–6; and spectatorship, 168–71 Dogrib Indians, 102 Downes, P.G., 108 dreams, 135, 137 Dwyer, Kevin (quoted), 23 ecological disaster, 49, 50, 182 ecological threat, 13, 141, 182, 184, 229n97 ecology: as “discourse of the secluded” (Lyotard), 176–6; etymology of, 173–4; and the oikos, 174–6; sources on, 227n64 economics: of early radium mining, 29, 32, 93, 109; of processing Belgian ore, 118; and rivers (Innis), 192; staple theory (Innis), 193–4, 195, 231n123, 231n127 Eldorado archive: and access, 6, 9– 10, 14, 15, 18–19, 124; and the government, 10–11, 183, 188 Eldorado Gold Mines Limited: creation of, 105; and Dene labour, 16, 32, 39, 50, 201; discovery of pitchblende (1930), 97, 104–10; economics of, 29, 32, 93, 109; employment records, 230n106; health and safety standards, 30; and the modern North, 13–14, 90; mythology of, 8–9, 41, 99– 100; radium production (1930s), 31, 85, 212n55; sources on, 14– 16; transportation routes, 25 (map), 28–9, 31–2. See also LaBine, Gilbert; Port Hope, Ontario

Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited: corporate history, 10, 109; and Dene labour, 183, 187–8; employment records, 230n106; and the government, 86, 116–17, 209n22; uranium production (1940s), 117–18 Eldorado Nuclear Limited, 6, 10, 14–15 “Eldorado’s Historical Resources” (Hanright), 30–1, 109 “emphatic geography,” 17, 139 employment. See labour Entrikin, J. Nicholas (quoted), 7 epistemology, 153 ethics: and the atomic bomb, 76–7; and the author’s fieldwork, 222n52; and the Highway, 3, 22, 128, 129; and knowledge or inquiry, 80; and the oikos and ecology, 176. See also Dene: apology; morality ethnocentrism, 202 ethnography. See fieldwork etymology, 27–8, 88, 173–4, 178 Evenden, Matthew (quoted), 16 Eward, François, 170 federal government. See Government of Canada Fermi, Enrico, 30, 218n74 fieldwork: about, 4–5, 17, 20, 23, 128, 222n52; and active observation, 75; as encounter with place, 138–40; as fiction and testimony, 72; of Hallowell, 149; of Innis, 20, 198; of A.Y. Jackson, 223n63; of Kristeva, 144; necessity of, 198; questions about, 161; theorists, 127, 223n54. See also methodology

INDEX / 263

figures, transhistorical, 165, 166, 168 film, photographic, 83, 84 films: Highway of the Atom, 28, 211n46; Hiroshima Mon Amour, 228n70; An Inconvenient Truth, 196, 232n135; Radium City, 92; Somba Ke: The Money Place, 184, 195–6; about uranium discovery, 97; Village of Widows, 9, 38–9, 42, 47, 48–9, 187 Finnie, Richard, 90 Foard, James, 76 Fort Confidence, 97, 98 Fort McMurray, Alberta, 26, 27, 36 Foucault, Michel, 65, 207n7 Franklin, Sir John, 46, 97 Frazer, James George, 52, 60 freight, 29, 31, 32 Freud, Sigmund, 149–50, 155–6, 160, 225n5, 225n15, 228n67 fur trade, 97–8, 193, 230n111, 230n117 “fused sand” plaque, 15, 55–7 Galiani, Abbé Ferdinando, 170 geography: emphatic, and language, 17, 139; of the Highway, 26–7, 28, 31–2; and Innis, 189; of the North, 134; Ptolemy on, 136 geology, 98, 101–3 ghosts, 71, 153–4, 161, 175, 202 gifts, 125, 205–6 global warming, 22, 134, 196 gold claims, Manitoba, 105 Gordon, Avery (quoted), 86, 138 Gore, Albert Arnold (“Al”) Jr., 196, 232n135 Government of Canada: and Dene

grievances, 142, 182–5; and Eldorado company, 10, 86, 116– 17, 209n22; and nuclear energy, 196; and radium mining, 50, 214n72. See also Department of Indian Affairs; Department of Mines Grace, Sherrill, 61–3, 65–6, 67, 216n29, 231n122 Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories: field notes, 3–5, 119–22; fur trade history, 97–8; and future development, 197; geography, 26, 97, 98; mineral exploration, 85, 98–9, 120, 122, 195– 6; postage stamp, 1946 (image), 192; and transportation route, 28. See also Eldorado companies Great Bear River, 27, 28, 29, 31–2, 36 Greek mythology, 82 Greek philosophy: ars memorativa, 158; and chora, 135–6; and the shipwreck as metaphor, 165; and tekmerion, 141; of theoria, 75, 136–7, 224n75; and theoros, 168–9; and tragedy, 175 Grosz, Elizabeth, 226n25 Guattari, Félix G., 36 guessing, 78–80, 81 Halbwachs, Maurice, 33, 54, 157 Hallowell, A. Irving, 149, 150 Hanright, D.C. (quoted), 30–1 Hawking, Stephen, 81 Haynes, Leonard, 97 Hazelrigg, Lawrence, 80–1 health and safety standards: and the Dene, 49, 183; at Eldorado, 30, 39, 51; and the government, 50; at Radium Dial Company, 92

264 / INDEX

“health mines,” 91 “Highway of the Atom”: about, 3, 6–7; as disaster in reverse, 159; etymology of, 27–8; as historical geography, 26–7, 28, 31–2; as marginal history, 12, 13, 21, 24; and memory, 33–4, 86, 158–9; and modern history, 27–8, 86; problematic aspects, 6–7, 22–3, 27; sites on the, 85–6 Highway of the Atom (film), 28, 211n46 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 83–4, 86, 200–1. See also atomic bomb(s); Dene: apology Hiroshima Mon Amour (film), 228n70 historical practice. See fieldwork; methodology history: as disaster, 49, 172; effects of, 24; in Greek mythology, 82; philosophy of, 3, 33–4, 35–7; seeking lessons of, 204; Wiebe on, 46–7 Hornby, John, 108 Hovdebo, Don, 209n22 Howe, C.D., 86, 117, 129 Hudson’s Bay Company, 28, 85, 97, 121 Hulan, Renee, 63, 64, 231n122 humanities, 7, 22, 199 “human nature,” 155, 156 Hutton, Patrick (quoted), 157–8

imaginary: and the Highway, 158; indexical, 72, 139, 141, 142; insurational (Ewald), 170; and the North, 58, 59–60, 65–7, 193. See also North, the idea of imagination, 17, 82, 163 Inconvenient Truth, An (film), 196, 232n135 indebtedness, 47, 72, 124 index, the, 140–1; and the imaginary, 72, 139, 141, 142 India, 196, 197 Inglis, George, 16, 108 Ingold, Tim, 149 Innis, Harold A.: economic theory, 193–4, 195, 231n120; fur trade histories, 193, 230n111, 230n117; and the idea of North, 190, 191, 193, 200; Northern fieldwork (1924), 20, 189–91, 198, 201, 230n117; politics of, 200, 202; and radium/uranium, 21, 29, 54, 232n128; and transportation, 28, 152, 192, 199 International Polar Year (1932), 230n117 International Polar Year (2007), 61 Intertec Management Limited, 10, 183, 185, 186–8, 229n98 Inuit, 75, 99, 202 Inuktitut, 75, 129 invisibility, 19, 37, 153–4 In Visible Ink (van Herk), 61, 67

Idea of North, The (Davidson), 63–4 If Only We Had Known (Déline Uranium Team), 113–14 il lume naturale (Galileo), 80 images, 161, 167. See also photographs

Jackson, A.Y., 134, 223n63 Jay, Martin, 170–1 Jenkins, Robert, 16, 55, 56, 224n86 Joyce, William. See Lord Haw-Haw justice, Weil on, 211n44

INDEX / 265

Kalproth, Martin, 88 “keeping places” (Bordo), 35, 140 Keyes, Walter, 186–8 knowledge: and certainty, 141–2; and ethics, 80; Euro-Western concept of, 150–1; as experiential, 126, 127, 144, 149; indigenous, 19, 69–70, 127, 150; of radiation danger, 39, 40–1, 184, 213n72; theory of, 71, 153, 194, 199; and way of life, 150, 151–2. See also Dene knowledge; traditional ecological knowledge (tek) Korean hibakusha, 41, 42 Kovarik, Bill (quoted), 91–2 Krauss, Rosalind, 224n75 Kristeva, Julia, 136, 144, 228n70 Kroetsch, Robert, 59–60 Kupsch, Walter O., 88, 91 LaBine, Charles, 28–9, 105, 106, 108, 109 LaBine, Gilbert: in Dene stories, 41, 113; discovery of pitchblende, 97, 104–10; early business dealings, 28–9, 30–1; and mine’s reopening (1942), 116, 117 laboratories. See nuclear research laboratories laboratory as metaphor, 71, 74 labour: Dene as mine workers, 50, 183, 187–8; Dene as ore carriers, 32, 39, 50, 201; difficulties (1940s), 117; and the Eldorado myth, 16; lack of records, 230n106 Lacanian real, the, 160, 226n25 land(scape): and the human presence, 202; ice pretending to be,

172, 227n54; and language, 17; and metaphor, 73–4; “movement within” (Wiebe), 12; as territorial archive, 19, 20, 41–2, 191; as written record (Lowdermilk), 50. See also chorography; place language, 17, 161 Laplanche, Jean (quoted), 52 leakage, 19, 20, 36, 128, 204. See also contamination Leitch, John (quoted), 87 lexicography, 174 Library and Archives Canada (lac), 6, 9–11, 18, 120 lieux de mémoire (Nora), 35, 158, 159 Lippard, Lucy, 17 Lippit, Akira Mizuta, 37, 213n68 listening, 179 logic, 79, 149, 150. See also reasoning Lord Haw-Haw, 19, 87, 219n103 Lowdermilk, Dr. W.C. (quoted), 50 Lyotard, Jean-François, 73–4, 175–6, 228n69 Macdonald, Claudine, 83, 89 McFarlane, Leslie (quoted), 87 Mackenzie, Alexander, 27 Mackenzie River: field notes, 131– 4, 189, 192–3; and Innis, 28, 189–91, 230n117; navigation on the, 32, 192–3; “River of Disappointment,” 27 Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, 39–40 Manhattan Project, 85–6, 89, 117–18 mapping, 165, 205. See also chorography; geography margins, 198

266 / INDEX

Masuzumi, Alfred, 144 materiality, and history, 35–7 Matthews, Jessie (“Yukon Jessie”), 120, 121 McKay, Don, 74 McLuhan, Herbert Marshall, 194 medicine, 88, 90–1 memory: cultural, 12; in Greek thought, 82, 158; and the Highway, 33–4, 86, 158–9; and history, 35; metaphors for, 157–8, 226n23; problems of, 204; and story (Benjamin), 179 metaphor(s): Blumenberg on, 162, 165, 167–8; and communication, 152; Freud and, 149–50, 225n5; the laboratory as, 71, 74; for landscape, 73–4; life as embarkation, 169–70, 171; “the meadow laughs,” 152, 167, 168; and memory, 157–8, 226n23; need for new, 160; and the North, 59, 71–2; the oikos as, 175; shipwreck and spectator, 165–6, 170, 171–2; the wave as, 3–4, 5, 170, 171; wilderness as, 74; and writing, 59, 137 methodology: author’s, 6, 12–14, 18–20, 152; and chorography, 136–7, 202–3; historical, 24, 128; and Innis, 198–9; and theory, 75, 78; and writing, 5, 7, 17, 19, 20, 23 metonymy, 58, 66–7, 71, 141, 193 Miller, Willet G., 107, 108 mimesis, 4, 51, 140 mineral exploration, Northern: current, 195–6; historical, 98–9, 104–10; and safety precautions, 106

Miners and Moonshiners (Peet), 16 mine tailings, 36, 138, 183, 196 Mingay, Jane, 16, 109 mining, radium/uranium, 88, 93. See also Eldorado companies missions, Christian, 50, 97–8 Mitchell, W.J.T., 190 Montaigne, Michel de, 169 monuments: and the Highway, 35, 55; Port Radium, 139, 224n86; Trinity, 163–4 morality, 169, 170. See also ethics Moss, John, 59, 134, 227n54 mythology: of Eldorado, 8–9, 41, 99–100, 109, 113–15; Greek, 82, 137; and language (Wittgenstein), 161. See also Dene stories; stories naming, 67–8, 74, 83, 173–4. See also place names; toponymy National Research Council, 30, 184 natural disasters, 171–2 nature, 78, 80–1, 218n74 Nelles, H.V. (quoted), 14–15 neurosis, 67, 71, 134, 155–6 Neuzil, Mark (quoted), 91–2 Newman, Peter C., 104, 107, 108 New Mexico, 161–2, 163–4 Niger, Republic of, 28, 211n47 Nikiforuk, Andrew, 48 Nora, Pierre, 35, 157, 158 Norman Wells museum, 15, 56 North, the idea of: about, 58; Grace on, 61–3, 65–6, 231n122; and imperial metonymy, 58, 66– 7, 71, 193; and Innis, 190, 191, 193, 200; other sources on, 63– 4; Wiebe on, 69; and writing, 59–60

INDEX / 267

Northern Canada: author as stranger in, 20, 144, 189; development of, 90, 195–6 (see also Innis); exceptionality of, 70; and geography (Moss), 134; interest in, 61, 191, 230n117; as liminal region, 69; and metaphor, 71–2; and modernity, 13–14; and “national self-realization,” 16, 64, 191, 200; and radium/uranium, 13–14, 90, 194, 195; and southerners, 71–2, 74; trees of, 132–4 Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (Hulan), 63, 64, 231n122 Northern Miner, The, 15, 97, 104, 110 Northern Transportation Company Limited (ntcl): corporate film, 28, 211n46; corporate history, 28–9, 31; employment records, 230n106 North Korea, 196 Northward Course of Empire, The (Stefansson), 59 nostalgia de la boue (Walter), 224n75 nuclear energy, 196–7, 232n135 nuclear materials. See pitchblende; radium; uranium nuclear radiation. See radiation nuclear reactors, 197, 218n74, 232n136 nuclear research laboratories, 30, 55, 86, 92, 118 nuclear waste storage, 12–13, 162, 205 nwt Archives, 15, 119, 120, 224n86

observation, active, 75, 136–7, 224n75 O’Donoghue, Diane, 225n5 oikos (“home”): and contamination, 49; and disaster, 175–6; and ecology, 174–5; Freud on the, 228n67; “haunted by its history,” 138; and the humanities, 22; Lyotard on the, 228n69 Ojibwa, 149 Ontario, 197 opsis (“optic perception”), 137 oral history: Dene projects, 40, 113–14; Eldorado project, 16; and government report, 185; understanding, 202 orality, 125, 126, 151, 152 other, the, 23, 47 Pascal, Blaise, 169 past. See history Paz, Octavio (quoted), 54 Peach, Ian, 209n22 pedagogy, 71, 177, 179 Peet, Fred “Tiny,” 16, 121 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 4, 33, 78–9, 141 Peters, John Durham, 178 phantoms (Abraham and Torok), 153. See also ghosts photographic film, 83 photographs, 15, 45, 56–7, 164 pipelines, 29, 39–40 pitchblende: etymology of, 88; Northern discovery, 104–10, 113–15; properties of, 89, 108, 114; prospecting for, 83; and radium, 87, 93; theft of, 41, 113. See also radium; uranium place: encounter with, 138–40;

268 / INDEX

engagement with, 7, 137; and memory, 158–9; and sensory experience, 135, 136; and site, 68. See also chorography; land(scape) place names, 67, 72, 97, 127 Plato, 80, 135, 136 Playing Dead (Wiebe), 46–7 plutonium, 92 Pochon, Marcel, 29–30, 31 poets and poetry, 74, 131–3, 171 politics, 156, 200, 202, 228n67 pollution. See contamination; mine tailings; radiation Port Hope, Ontario (processing facility): early radium production, 85, 213n64; as former pea factory, 219n101; health and safety standards, 30; processing of Congolese ore (1940s), 76, 117– 18; and radioactive waste, 36 Port Radium, Northwest Territories: field note, 138–9; history of, 15, 119–21; location of, 26; monument, 139, 224n85; names for, 83, 120, 139; radium recovery rates, 93; as site of modern North, 13; tennis court, 6 (image), 138, 139; threats from Lord Haw-Haw, 19, 87, 219n103. See also Eldorado companies Port Radium Story, The (Jenkins), 16, 224n86 postage stamps, 192 (image), 231n127 privacy legislation, 9–11, 18 “prophesy in reverse” (Barthes), 56, 215n28 “proximity of the remote” (Gordon), 86, 138

psychoanalytic theory, 155–6 psychology, 228n70 Ptolemy, 136. See also chorography punctum (Barthes), 33, 45–6, 47, 57 Purdy, Al, 131–3, 134 Quintilian, 152, 167, 168 radiation: and Dene fear, 183, 184; and Dene knowledge, 39, 40–1, 49, 51; and invisibility, 19, 36–7; at Port Hope facility, 30; at Port Radium tennis court, 138; translation of concept, 129–30 radio, 19, 31, 110, 120 radioactive decay sequence, 82, 218n94 radium: as an economic staple, 21, 39, 194–5; discovery of, 87–8, 89; economics of, 31, 93; and Innis, 21, 29, 232n128; and Northern development, 13–14, 90; production of, 29, 85, 89–90, 93, 212n51; properties of, 14, 87; and uranium, 82, 218n94; uses of, 88, 90–1, 91–2 Radium Dial Company, 92 Radium Franklin (ship), 31, 211n46 Radium Gilbert (ship), 27, 54 (image), 55 “Radium Girls,” 91–2 Radium King (ship), 31, 36, 131 (image) Radium Trail, map of (1934), 25. See also “Highway of the Atom”; shipping (boats) radon “health mines,” 91 reading, 17, 60, 67, 201

INDEX / 269

reasoning: abductive, 4, 78–80, 81, 135, 160, 165. See also logic Rendall, Steven, 167 responsibility: as aspect of research, 3, 19; and the Dene, 42, 45, 46, 47, 160, 185 Rich, Adrienne, 171 Richardson, Sir John, 46, 97 Ryan, Joan, 127, 223n54 St. Paul, E. Charles, 100, 106–7, 108, 109 Saskatchewan, 10, 186, 196, 197 Saxa loquuntur (Freud), 150, 225n5 Seaburg, Leo, 106, 109 seeing-as, 24 semiotics, 17, 20, 59. See also signification; sign(s) Sengier, Edgar, 117, 118 Sexty, Robert W., 231n127 Shakespeare, William, 165 Sharp, R.R., 111–12 shipping (boats): on Great Bear Lake, 27, 85, 211n46; on the Great Bear River, 28, 31–2; images, 18, 54, 131, 200; Innis statistics (1924), 189; and leakage, 36; and shipwrecks, 32, 213n64. See also transportation shipwreck as metaphor, 165–6, 170, 171–2 Shipwreck with Spectator (Blumenberg), 161–2, 167 signification: and concepts (Worster), 173–4; and the “elsewhere” (Barthes), 156; and indices, 140–1 sign(s): atomic bomb as a (Howe), 129–30; Barthes on, 17; in the North, 59; and nuclear materials,

37; for nuclear waste storage, 12–13 Signs of Danger (van Wyck), 12, 13, 224n86, 229n97 silver, 88, 99, 109 Slavey (language), 126, 127, 129, 202 Sloan, Charles, 98, 99, 105 Smith, David M., 179 social sciences. See humanities Somba Ke: The Money Place (film), 184, 195–6 spectatorship, 168–72; aesthetic, 170–1; and theory, 172 Spence, Hugh, 110, 114 Spry, Irene (née Biss), 119–20, 139 stamp as metaphor, 158 staple theory (Innis): about, 193–4, 195, 231n123; and radium/uranium, 13, 21, 39, 194–5; and “stamps,” 194, 231n127 statistics: cancer deaths in Déline, 184–5; Dene labourers, 187–8; early mineral exploration, 110; government fact-finder’s, 186–7; Manhattan Project uranium, 117; mine tailings, 36, 183; radium production, Port Hope, 85; radium recovery rates, 93; shipping, 29, 189 Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, 59, 98 stones, Hallowell’s vs Freud’s, 149–50 stories: ethnography of, 223n54; field notes as, 4; function of (Benjamin), 177–9; and interpretation, 204; Northern, 16, 134; orphan boy and medicine man (Masuzumi), 144; and revisionist history, 100; of “turtles all the way down” (Hawking), 81. See

270 / INDEX

also Dene stories; mythology; oral history studium (Barthes), 45 sympathetic magic, 3, 51, 52–3 taxonomy. See naming Taylor, Diana, 35 technology, 29, 31, 93, 212n51 tekmerion (“irrefutable claim”), 141–2 testimony, 4, 142, 149, 185 theodicy, 76 theoria (“active observation”), 75, 136–7, 224n75 theros (“looking at …”), 168–9 theory: communication, 151–2, 178; of ecological threat, 13; economic (see Innis); Enlightenment, 151, 169; “heterotopoanalysis” (Casey), 207n7; and the Highway, 6–7, 22–3, 27; of history, 3, 33–4, 35–7; of knowledge, 71, 153, 194, 199; and methodology, 75, 78, 136; “paratheoretics” (Blumenberg), 161; and spectatorship, 168–72; of trauma, 48, 52, 55; and truth (Blumenberg), 161–2; the “weak” argument (Corax), 162, 226n31. See also Greek philosophy therapeia of place (“close attendance” or “caring”), 137 “They Never Told Us These Things” (Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee), 181 threat, ecological, 13, 141, 182, 184, 229n97 threat, theory of, 13 tigullapaa (“active observation”), 75, 206

Timm, W.B. (quoted), 50 topistics, 135, 136, 224n75 toponymy, 72. See also naming; place names topos (“theme”), 34, 65, 67, 135, 135–7, 137 Torgovnick, Marianna, 58 tourism, 74, 189, 190 trade, 102, 194. See also fur trade traditional ecological knowledge (tek), 127, 150, 177 traditional knowledge, 19, 69–70, 127, 150 tragedy, 175 “Trail of Tears,” 129 Trail of the Spirit (Blondin), 180 “Trail of ’32,” 110 translation, 126, 129–30 transportation: air, 28, 29, 31, 99, 105; and the Dene, 28, 102; and Innis, 28, 152, 189, 192, 199; of radium (1930s), 28–9, 31–2; of uranium (1940s), 118. See also shipping (boats) trauma: and causality, 49; and Dene apology, 45, 47, 53; Derrida on, 48, 55; and the idea of North, 58; and the oikos, 175, 176; theories of, 52 traumatic memory, 35 “Trees at the Arctic Circle” (Purdy), 131–3, 134 trinitite, 55, 56, 164 Trinity Site, New Mexico, 86, 163–4, 176 tropes. See metaphor(s) Tsiigehtchic (Arctic Red River), 202 Tulita (Fort Norman), 200–1 Tweedsmuir, Lord (John Buchan), 85

INDEX / 271

Ulmer, Gregory L., 136, 137, 203 uncertainty, 5, 17, 114 unconscious, the, 136, 140, 157, 161, 176 Union Minière de Haut Katanga mine (Belgian Congo), 86, 89– 90, 111, 117 United States: nuclear test site, 14, 56, 86, 163–4, 176; nuclear waste storage, 12–13, 162, 205; radiation deaths, 213n72. See also Manhattan Project Université de Montréal (laboratory), 86, 118 uranium: current mineral exploration, 195–6; discovery and early uses of, 88–9, 111–12; discovery in the North, 97, 104–10; as an economic staple, 13, 21, 39, 194–5; and the Eldorado mine, 14, 117–18; global market for, 195–6, 232n131; and Innis, 21, 29, 54, 232n128; mining in the Belgian Congo, 86, 89–90, 111, 117; Niger as producer of, 211n47; and radium, 82, 93, 218n94; sales to United States, 209n22 “Uranium Highway,” 28 Uranium (Zoellner), 76, 88, 112, 211n46 US Atomic Energy Commission (usaec), 209n22 vanadium, 89 van Herk, Aritha, 61, 66, 67 Village of Widows (film), 9, 38–9, 42, 47, 48–9; review by Keyes, 187; and Somba Ke: The Money Place, 195

visuality. See avisuality; invisibility; observation, active Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 169 Walter, E.V.: on chora, 80, 135–6; on place, 67; on theoria, 75, 137; and topistics, 136, 224n75 Waterways, Alberta, 26, 27 Watkins, Mel, 194 Watt, Frederick B., 106 Weil, Simone (quoted), 24, 211n44 Wernick, Andrew, 198 Westinghouse Electric Company, 232n136 When the World Was New (Blondin), 180–1 White Sands Missile Range, 163–4. See also Trinity Site, New Mexico Wiebe, Rudy, 12, 46–7, 69 wilderness, 5, 73, 74, 174, 193 witnessing, 4, 22, 153–4, 161, 168–9, 204 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 24, 161 Worster, Donald, 173–4, 176 writing: and methodology, 5, 17, 19, 20, 23; and the North, 59– 60; and the paradigm (Ulmer), 137, 203. See also chorography; language Yamaguchi, Tsutomu, 24 Yates, Frances, 158, 226n23 Zoellner, Tom, 76, 88, 112, 211n47 Zwicky, Jan, 74, 79, 211n44