ABSTRACT
Several years ago Peter van Wyck, a writer and scholar at Concordia University in Montreal, telephoned me with an extraordinary invitation. Would I accompany him on a trip to explore the geography, archive and stories along ‘The Highway of the Atom?’ This adventure would eventually lead us to the top of Canada in minus forty-degree winter, to a nuclear-waste disposal site one mile below the New Mexico Desert, and to the Trinity Site where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated. ‘Highway of the Atom’ was the name given the Canadian trade route over which uranium ore was transported from northern Canada. The uranium was carried on men’s backs and river barges over a two-thousand-mile water and portage route.
It was then loaded onto trains and sent south to be refined in Port Hope (a port town just outside Toronto with access to Great Lakes shipping) and ultimately used by the American government to build atomic bombs. Many of the Dene First Nation of the community around Deline, Great Bear Lake (the Sahtúgot’ine), were employed to transport this uranium. Over the years a number have died of cancer (Peter Blow’s 1999 documentary about Deline is called ‘Village of Widows’). In the late 1990s, the Dene discovered that ‘their’ uranium had been used in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they undertook a most extraordinary expedition. A small group from the community flew to Japan to apologize to the survivors, the hibakusha. This conveyance of apology, this act of witness and responsibility in the face of events over which the Dene had no control, startled and challenged us. Peter and I saw ourselves as bewildered strangers stumbling down the highway of the atom in search of an ethics of memory. We asked what it means to be implicated and to take ownership in the face of a catastrophic event. An excerpt from our project description states how we viewed our task:
