It’s an odd feeling being surrounded by arsenic.

Especially when the world around you is so breathtaking.

Beautiful seems a word not strong enough to describe Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. It’s a city full of ice, snow, and dark most of the time (around seven hours of sunlight this time of year) but full of the most incredible landscape, northern lights, and people […]. Here, rock faces peek around every street corner, spread between swaths of trees interrupted by homes, trailers, and arts and craft stores. […] Everywhere you look are postcard images of rivers, islands, ice roads, and art. Culture and history too. The city is located on Chief Drygeese Territory, traditional home of the Yellowknives Dene alongside the North Slave Metis. Indigenous languages like Dene, Inuktitut and Cree are spoken everywhere, alongside the territory’s eight other official languages.

Everywhere is beauty here.

It’s a world, however, infected with poison. Yellowknife has always been known for its minerals. […]  Yellowknife is most known for gold, however. “Discovered” in the 1930s by prospectors, southerners flocked here for decades looking for future and fortune, bringing Canada and colonialism with them. In 1944, a massive gold deposit was uncovered in the Baker Creek Valley, five kilometres north of Yellowknife. The gold wasn’t easy to obtain, though. It was contained in specks in bedrock, requiring crushing and high-temperature heating to be obtained.

This is how the Giant Mine began in 1948.

For 56 years, the Giant Mine was owned by three private companies and produced over 220,000 kilograms of gold. In addition, it also produced hundreds of thousands of tonnes of arsenic trioxide – a crystalline by-product that is dust-like and easily becomes airborne

For the first ten years of the Giant Mine, the Falconbridge company released nearly 7,400 kilograms of arsenic into the atmosphere, covering the landscape in and around Yellowknife.

Residents – and in particular Yellowknives Dene elders – immediately began to notice the death of fish, animal mutations, and the loss of medicines like berries and Labrador tea. Their nation had already had their traditional lands occupied (and later stolen) for gold.

No one believed them about the atmosphere until the sickness began to grow. Arsenic is a poison. When exposed, effects first appear on the skin – gangrene, pigmentation, or keratosis (skin hardening on soles of feet or palms). Eyes may turn red and suffer permanent damage, while breathing it in causes lung cancer.

In 1951, a child died from eating snow. Hundreds more reported other health issues. In 1958, government officials imposed restrictions and policies on the Giant Mine to control the spread of arsenic. In response, the company began to store most of it, leading to nearly 237,000 tonnes in existing stopes and custom-built containers still sitting on the Giant Mine site. Royal Oak Mines (the third owners of the mine) went bankrupt in 1999, the entire Giant Mine site was contaminated, hundred of miles surrounding the area was infected […].  The clean-up costs for the site alone are nearly a billion dollars, never mind the costs for the surrounding areas (which is, as yet, incalculable).

Part of the clean-up involves what to do with the quarter of a million tonnes of arsenic in metal containers on the site. After thirteen years of planning, government officials have settled on a solution: to freeze and bury the containers, keeping them cool with technology for an additional $2 million a year.

Meanwhile, rivers and lakes remain unusable, medicines and animals remain unsafe to regularly consume, and residents wait and hope the technology that keeps the poison frozen nearby doesn’t break down one day.

All last week [January 2020], public hearings were held to discuss the billion-dollar clean-up plan and fulfill requirements to attain permits. As the people most impacted by the legacies of the Giant Mine, Yellowknives Dene leaders have demanded a role in the clean-up project and compensation for the loss of use of their land.

So far, their appeals have fallen on deaf ears.

“Every time we raise our concerns, you guys always change the subject and say, ‘No, that’s not what we’re talking about today,’” Yellowknives Dene elder [AB] stated at the hearings.

Meanwhile, the entire city of Yellowknife remains surrounded by arsenic, and its people consume a little bit in their food, water, and air every day.

This is the cost of choosing gold over life.
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Niigaan Sinclair. “Mine leaves Yellowknife legacy of poison.” Winnipeg Free Press. 27 January 2020.