Listen here:
You can’t tell the story of Yellowknife without telling the story of the Indigenous groups who lived here before settlers arrived.
And you can’t tell the story of the Yellowknives Dene and Yellowknife’s founding without telling the story of Giant Mine.
Starting its operations in 1935, the impacts of the mine are still being felt more than 15 years after the mine ended operations.
Arsenic trioxide, a byproduct of the gold mining process, has polluted the land, where the mine once was.
The Giant Mine Remediation project is still in its planning stages.
And the Yellowknives Dene have had enough.
“They took the gold out of the ground and gave us nothing.”
Johanne Black, Director of Treaty, Rights, & Governance, Yellowknives Dene First Nation
Chiefs, members of the band and the public gathered to call on the federal government to compensate and apologize to YKDFN for the damage done by the Giant Mine…
… a project the Yellowknives Dene have taken to calling Giant Monster.
The impacts are wide ranging, according to Dettah Chief Edward Sangris.
“Every family had a dog team, dog teams were a big part of the community. When we would travel across the mind site, our dogs would get sick and some of them even died. They would lose all their hair on the arms and legs and paws. They looked like they were getting burnt, simply from walking on the ground at the Giant Mine site.”
Chief Edward Sangris, Dettah Chief of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation
Fixing the wrongs of the past starts with an apology, compensation and opportunities for economic development..
One of the ways this can happen, Ndilo Chief Ernest Betsina said, is by training Yellowknives Dene to be land monitors.
Part of the core, the core of their traditional knowledge is land management, which is embedded in Dene culture and should be integrated into long term environmental consulting and monitoring of the Giant Mine Remediation project
Chief Ernest Betsina, Ndilo Chief of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation
The cleanup for the arsenic is yet to begin.
Until that happens, the Yellowknives Dene continue to wait until it’s safe to return to the land they have lived on for millennia.
