I wrote this piece of melancholic prose as I was beginning an eastward route across Great Bear Lake in the summer of 2003. It seemsstrange 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...

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...

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...

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...

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 situwriting – 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,...

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 Eldoradohad been aCrown 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...

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 thismore,is that it involves the entire set of investments that it brings to the site of academic work. In this way it is both personalandabstract. Let me explain. I received much of my academic training during a period of intense political and theoretical upheaval within “Cultural Studies” in...

So, after having spent some number of years writing about theotherend 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...

A route is a foil: it is a track (a mark, a line)anda 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...

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...

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 thatliterally— 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...

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 agood 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 ofWidows,which aired on the Canadian cable channel Vision TV, was exactly the history I was thinking about, only it was...

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...

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.¹⁶They called the converted “Rice Christians.” Fifty...

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,...

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 throughcontinuity,an imperceptible transition to an adjacent field; and that...

Today, theRadium Gilbertis 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 theGilbertsit 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...

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...

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....

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,...

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...

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 North. This is...

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?”⁶²Good question …...

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....

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...

The multiple modes of inquiry of theoretical work place one in a constant state of indecision with respect tohowto 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.⁷⁵It calls for something on the order of what Peirce had in mind with the termabduction.

Peirce actually had a great deal...

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. a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a...

“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...

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...

[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...

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...

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 hardlyterra nulliusbefore...

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...

It was not until the beginning of October 1930 that LaBine’s “find” of pitchblende was reported inThe Northern Minerin 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...

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 ofgoodtimes in the coloniesmemoir entitledEarly 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.”⁵⁵How would one even translate such a concept? In the Slavey language “there are no words for radiation, radioactive contamination, or risk.”⁵⁶In Inuktitut, I am told, the concept of half-life...

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...

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 ofhowone approaches the representation of such places and such stories.

The antiquarian distinctions between modes of worldly representations – that is, betweentopos,choros, andgeos– 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.”⁶⁴It would...

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.”⁸⁶It’s just not possible … Anyway, this was hardly a discovery...

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...

In a brilliant text published in 1958 concerning his “ethno-metaphysical” work with the Ojibwa in the LakeWinnipeg 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...

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.”¹²The 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...

Almost at the very conclusion ofCivilization 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,¹⁵but 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...

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,...

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...

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, aDarwinism of the words, as he put it.

I took from his...

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...

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 thesamesign 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...

So states the publisher’s notice that appeared in the first German edition ofShipwreck. 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 aninterruptionto 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,”...

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.⁵⁶There 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.⁵⁷But...

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...

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...

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.Whatwas their relationship to Eldorado?Whatwas their working relationship?Whatexposures to radioactive and contaminated materials did they have?How manyDene worked, and where? The fact finder was charged with the task of gathering “all known...

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,”¹⁰⁸as 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...

“The river,” he wrote, “is a very important determining factor in the direction of economic development.”¹²⁰The 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.”¹²¹No 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...

So, what is a margin anyway? Quips Jody Berland: “it’s where you write your notes.”¹³⁸Right.

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,...

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...

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.¹⁴²The studium that animates his practice can only ever let him experience, “in reverse” perhaps, his own culture.¹⁴³The 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...

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...

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...