Cancer, remorse haunt tiny village

By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff Copyright 1998 Boston Globe August 6, 1998

DELINE, Northwest Territories - When the white doves are loosed in Hiroshima today in the annual rememberance of those killed by the flash of atomic fire in 1945, a delegation of Dene Indians from Canada's cancer-haunted "village of widows" will be on hand to pay respects - and express remorse.

The Sahtugot'ine Dene of Deline, a desolate hamlet of 700 on the western shore of Great Bear Lake, are a people ridden by a terrible sense of responsibility for the atomic attacks against Japan, which ended World War II.

"The stuff they used to make the bombs, they got it here and then someone dropped bombs there, and so many people died," said Rosie Dolphus, one of Deline's widows - her husband died of bone cancer a decade ago after years of hauling radioactive ore at a government-owned mine. "We want to offer comfort" to the Japanese "and explain we had no idea that rock was so dangerous. To others, to ourselves."

That rock is uranium. And if the Deline Dene played an obscure role in creating the most fearsome weapon the world has known, they, it now appears, rank as perhaps the first victims of the atomic age.

"Our own people are dying, too, because of that rock," Dolphus said.

For decades, beginning in the late 1930s, the Dene were hired as ore carriers, lugging uranium and radium from the world's first uranimum mine - the Eldorado, a Canadian Crown industry located across the lake in Port Radium - for shipment to a secret weapons program in the United States. The mine was closed in 1960, and abandoned Port Radium has since been renamed Echo Bay.

Ottawa has confirmed that uranium from the Eldorado deposit was used to make the world's first atomic bombs, dropped by US warplanes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Saying they are troubled that their labor contributed to so much agony, the Deline Dene this week sent a delegation of six elders to Hiroshima to mark the 53d anniversary of the atomic attack and express sorrow to the Japanese. It was only in the last few years, say leaders, that the Dene learned how they played a small part in one of the tragedies of the modern era. And it disturbed them, especially the elders.

"We want to express our sadness and compassion for the suffering the uranium from Great Bear Lake caused elsewhere," said Cindy Kenny-Gilday, head of the Deline First Nation Uranium Committee.

But the Dene also want to draw international attention to what they describe as a plague of cancer that has ravaged their tiny band, most of whose members still subsist by hunting, fishing, and trapping.

Although no official health records were kept until 1989, it appears that an unusually high percentage of Dene have died of the disease, starting in the decades after the mine opened.

Other Indians in the Northwest Territories have given Deline the nickname "village of widows," because so many men have died of cancer.

"In my grandmother's time, our men regularly lived to be 80 or 90," said Gina Bayha, a 35-year-old member of the Deline band council. "Now we hardly have any men past the age of 65. Nearly all died of cancer."

Only a handful of the men who actually worked in the Eldorado mine are still alive. Among them is Paul Baton, 83, who recalls bruising 12-hour shifts loading boats with 100-pound sacks of uranium ore for shipment across the huge lake and down the Mackenzie River.

"The dust coated you like flour, it covered our clothes, our heads, our hands," he recounted. "We would sleep on the sacks. No one told us anything about it being dangerous. No one told us about cancer. But over the past 25 years our people have known nothing but cancer."

The Dene are convinced that tailings and other waste from the mining operation have contaminated the water and soil all around Great Bear Lake. They say the surge of cancers is not limited only to the men who labored at the Eldorado mine but to every family in the band.

The government does not dispute that the Indians of Deline have suffered from high cancer rates. But officials also say that there is no proven medical link between the deaths and the uranium operation.

Indian Affairs Minister Jane Stewart said Ottawa is investigating the allegations of continuing radioactive leakage from the shuttered mine. "We need to work together . . . to get clear a common set of historical facts," she told Dene leaders who appeared before Parliament last month.

About 7,000 tons of radioactive material was shipped from the Port Radium mine for refinement. But another 1.7 million tons of uranium waste was either left exposed at the mine site or simply dumped into Great Bear Lake, according to government documents uncovered by members of the Dene band who started last year to investigate the deaths.

"The Dene have been expressing concern about the mine tailings for many years," Murray Klippenstein, an Ontario lawyer who has done volunteer work for the Dene, told the Toronto Globe and Mail. "But it has been very hard to get anyone to listen."

What most troubles the Dene is that the government, even back in the 1930s, was aware of the health hazards associated with exposure to radioactive materials. White miners at the Eldorado mine wore protective clothing and were required to shower off the uranium dust after every shift - precautions not offered to the Indian carriers, who were known as "coolies" and counted as labor so lowly that the mine did not even keep Dene personnel files.

"If we bring this to the global stage, then perhaps the Canadian government will be moved to do the honorable thing for the Dene of Deline," said Kenny-Gilday. "Canada must take responsibility for the damage done to our people."

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