Big Unfriendly Giant

The Yellowknives Dene First Nation has watched as its ancestral land and waters have been penetrated to extract gold since the Con Mine began operating in 1938, followed by the Giant Mine, which opened in 1949. With The Price of Gold, the historians John Sandlos and Arn Keeling, from Memorial University, offer thoroughly documented evidence of the damage inflicted.

As with the better-known Mackenzie Valley Pipeline proposal, the subject of the Berger Inquiry, environmental concerns were front and centre for community-minded activists in the North in the mid-1970s. Conscious of the threats from the mines, campaigners persistently pursued their goal: expose and correct the leakage of arsenic trioxide dust and poisonous seepage into Yellowknife Bay. Hardest hit by years of exposure were homes at what was known as Rainbow Valley, on Latham Island near Giant.

Local Indigenous people fell victim to the “historical experience of colonialism” when the...