Labours of land: domesticity, wilderness and dispossession in the development of Canadian uranium markets

Abstract

This article examines the role played by gendered constructions and categories in Canadian cold war appropriations of Aboriginal lands for nuclear production. Focusing primarily on the ways in which gendered tropes were mobilized by wives and companions of uranium workers recently arrived in the Serpent River watershed (home of the Serpent River Anishinabe) at the end of the first global uranium boom in which uranium production in the watershed was severely threatened, I explore how gendered constructions and categories provided important cartographies and reference points with which to order and maintain possession of the lands of the Serpent River watershed as a singular, Canadian, nuclear space. Drawing on Kaika's (2004) work on the discursive production of ‘home’, I argue that representations of the watershed as home in the wilderness and as imperilled domestic space, as well as the important ways in which they worked to secure discursive rights to space within the broader registers of white Canadian post war gender difference, relied on the near-complete erasure of Aboriginal presence and culture from the land for continuity. I conclude that while this erasure facilitated (morally and practically) the further incorporation of the watershed into Canadian geographies of nuclear production, it also worked to obscure the ways in which the industry and uranium economy were able to capitalize on Aboriginal lands, labour and their subordinate position in Canadian society.

Este artículo estudia el rol que juegan las construcciones y las categorías generizadas en las apropiaciones canadienses de las tierras aborígenes en la guerra fría para la producción nuclear. Centrándome principalmente en las formas en las que los tropos generizados fueron movilizados por las esposas y compañeras de los trabajadores de uranio recién llegados en la cuenca del Serpent River (hogar de los Serpent River Anishnaabe) hacia el final del primer auge global del uranio en el cual la producción del mismo en esta cuenca estuvo severamente amenazada, analizo cómo las construcciones y categorías generizadas proveyeron importantes cartografías y puntos de referencia con los cuales ordenar y mantener posesión de las tierras de la cuenca del Serpent River como un espacio nuclear, único y canadiense. Basándome en el trabajo de Maria Kaika (2004) sobre la producción discursiva del “hogar”, sostengo que las representaciones de la cuenca como hogar en la naturaleza (y como espacio doméstico en peligro, así como las importantes formas en que trabajaban para asegurar los derechos discursivos al espacio dentro de los registros más amplios de la diferencia de género de los canadienses blancos en la post guerra), dependían de una casi completa obliteración de la presencia y cultura aborigen de la tierra a través del tiempo. Concluyo que mientras esta obliteración facilitó (moral y prácticamente) la mayor incorporación de la cuenca en las geografías canadienses de producción nuclear, también funcionó para ocultar las formas en que la industria y la economía del uranio fueron capaces de sacar provecho de las tierras aborígenes, la mano de obra aborigen, y la posición subordinada de los aborígenes en la sociedad canadiense.

Keywords:

• domesticity
• wilderness
• dispossession
• uranium
• nuclear
• Canada

Keywords:

• domesticidad
• naturaleza
• desposesión
• uranio
• nuclear
• Canadá

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Caroline Desbiens for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions on improving the manuscript. All errors are of course my own.

Notes

1. This image is reproduced without citation in the book Jewel in the wilderness: A history of Elliot Lake (1980) produced by high school English students (English 455.02) attending the Elliot Lake Secondary School and edited by students: P. Size, M. Senra, J. Bujod, R. Stitt, L Grant, S. Martin and M. Hannigan. The book is available at the Elliot Lake Public Library (where it is also on sale) and is for sale at City Hall, the Elliot Lake Center of Commerce and at Civic Centre. The book is also on display at the Uranium Mining Museum and Uranium Mining Hall of Fame (all the same) located in the basement of the Elliot Lake Civic Centre. The image appears on page 55 of the book in a section devoted to press clippings about the 1960 uranium crash and the Elliot Lake women's mobilization. The image is clearly cut from a newspaper, and appears with its original caption: ‘rehearsal for even bigger hauntings’ referring to the women's planned travel to Ottawa March 1, 1960 to meet with federal ministers. The font and layout of the image are consistent with fonts used by local papers at the time, including the Elliot Lake Standard, the Sudbury Star, Sault Star, Blind River Leader and the North Shore Standard. Press clippings of the same image without reference were also found in the Elliot Lake Library, Elliot Lake Uranium Mining Museum, and in scrapbooks of residents of Elliot Lake (some of which have been donated to the Elliot Lake library, without record of provenance). The scrapbooks all contain clippings from the above local newspapers but no specific documentation of which newspapers the photos were cut from. None of the local newspapers could provide access to their archives, in some cases records were not kept in the early 1960s or had been destroyed or lost. Archivists at the library and the museum confirmed that the photograph circulated widely in local media in February of 1960 in the days following the announcement of mine closures and buy outs, and recall seeing the photograph in the Elliot Lake Standard in Late February of 1960. Both archives also have the original colour photograph (without any credit or provenance) in their audiovisual records and no record of who donated it. Similar photographs of these women (dressed as ghosts inside the Civic Centre and posing for the camera in preparation for their demonstration) also exist in private collections of Elliot Lake residents and some are reprinted (without reference or credit) in Dixon's 1996 local history of the area.

2. The Serpent River watershed, located on the north shore of Lake Huron, between the cities of Sudbury and Sault Saint Marie is in its entirety the ancestral homeland of the Serpent River First Nation, an Anishinaabe/Ojibway nation. The signing of the 1850 Robinson Huron Treaty left the First Nation with an exclusive reserve area at the base of the watershed on the Shore of Lake Huron, and the right to continued use of the entire watershed for their customary pursuits such as hunting, trapping, fishing, forest and garden cultivation, and ceremonial practices.

3. Despite this opposition, organized opposition to the mining did not occur until the mid-1970s when the mines, having weathered the 10-year downturn thanks to federal supports and stockpiles, expanded, buoyed by Canada's role in the uranium cartel which effectively cut other Canadian mines from production and the expansion of domestic and international nuclear power programs. As Elders constantly reminded me, the early years of mining these were difficult times when their people were confronting the effects of the colonial experience in terms of unemployment, alcoholism, overincarceration, the abuses of residential schools and disenfranchisement.

4. The Vision Quest as explained to me by Elders of the Serpent River First Nation is a spiritual practice wherein members of the First Nation travel alone to Quirke rock and fast for several days. During this time they have visions that foretell their future. This is frequently, though not exclusively described as a journey and practice undertaken by young men. The Rooster Rock site itself is significant not only for its prominence in the landscape, but for the sounds made when the wind blows through the unusual rock formation (to sound like a rooster crowing) and for the shelter and protection it is reported to have given from the water in accounts of early wars between the Anishinaabe and the Mohawks. They would purportedly hide behind parts of the rock formation in their canoes to escape their Mohawk rivals. The Rooster Rock vision quest site was used regularly until mining activity in the early 1950s made this practice unsafe and undesirable.

5. Ghosts and haunting tropes are often mobilized to make sense of and navigate contemporary settler/indigenous relations, where ghosts allude to the presence of that which has been excluded, marginalized and expelled (see Cameron 2008). These specific ghosts were not ghostly representations of the Serpent River First Nation, nor did they gesture towards Aboriginal/settler relations in any self-conscious or deliberate way. They were, however, situated at the centre of a particular Canadian Nation building project (see Northey 1976), and directly reference both the precariousness of the colonial state and pioneering narratives (complete with all their disavowals) of struggle against a deadly and imposing wilderness crucial to Canadian colonial experience. Moreover, they do so in ways that like spectral tropes of Aboriginal peoples in other contexts – re-inscribes colonial power relations and fails to account for the claims (to the watershed) of the Serpent River First Nation. In this representation women/ghosts and by extension the threatened working class families of the Elliot Lake miners inhabit and are the products of interstitial spaces of a nature/culture dialectic which by its very construction as imperilled domesticity disavows and erases Aboriginal presence in the watershed. Representing the inhabitants as domestic ghosts mobilizes the dialectical tension between domesticity and wilderness wherein Aboriginal geographies (especially Aboriginal geographies of nuclear production and the dispossessions they entailed) are flattened by a wilderness that opposes domestic, nuclear, Canadian space in the watershed.