By Arn Keeling and John Sandlos Decades of gold mining at Giant Mine in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, has left a toxic legacy: 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust stored in underground chambers. As a multi-billion government remediation effort to clean up the mine site and secure the underground arsenic ramps up, the Canadian government is promising to deal with the mine’s disastrous consequences for local Indigenous communities. In March, the minister for Crown-Indigenous relations appointed a ministerial special representative, Murray Rankin, to investigate how historic mining affected the treaty rights of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation. We document this history in our forthcoming book, The Price of Gold: Mining, Pollution, and Resistance in Yellowknife, exposing how colonialism, corporate greed and lax regulation led to widespread air and water pollution, particularly…
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