Money Rock

Sunset White Earth Minnesota, originally uploaded by artist_charleentouchette.

from REAL & FAKE INDIANS
a novel by Charleen Touchette and S. Barry Paisner
Shell Lake - White Earth

Summer is finally here and Nadema has been training hard. She is getting stronger and faster everyday. Swimming across the lake has toned her body, and the summer sun has bronzed her skin and streaked her hair. In just a few more weeks, she will board a plane to Athens to compete in the four hundred meter. It will be her first time on a plane, and first time out of Minnesota, let alone out of the country.
Nadema is ready to tackle the four hundred meter race. Leaving home is a different matter. Her mother has arranged a ceremony with the Midèwewin medicine women up at Red Lake. Nadema is glad. She has questions for the grandmothers about the new dreams she has been having.
She dresses in her great-great grandmother's trade cloth dress. As she combs and plaits her thick poker straight blond hair before wrapping it in otter skins, she looks at the pictures of her parents on the windowsill, her gentle capable mom Louise, her dependable husband Jack MacLeod, and Nadema’s own father, long deceased.
Her eyes catch sight of two tiny photos in an antique brass double frame of her mother with her father when they met, nine months before she was born. Nadema's mother is a classic Ojibwe beauty dressed in the same elaborately beaded trade cloth dress her daughter wears today for the ceremony. Louise's coal black hair is parted down the center and her thick braids are wrapped in beaver pelts lashed with beaded moose leather thongs. Nadema's dad has the broad flat face of his mother's Dene people from Great Bear Lake, but his hair is blonde, nearly tow head, and his eyes are the same intense sapphire blue as Nadema's. Despite the Scandinavian hair and eyes inherited from his half Norwegian father, Lars Anfindsen's brown face and high cheek bones made him look Dene. There are lots of blonde Indian's across Canada. Sometimes they are just part of the family, but often they are not accepted by either Natives or whites. Nadema’s mom told her that her Dene dad was chased by other kids on the Rez who threw rocks at him and called him a Breed. He died before she was old enough to talk and share her own stories of being teased for being mixed blood.
“Your father Lars didn't know he was sick when we met,” Nadema's mother Louise Nanabozo told her when she was old enough to understand. “We met at a Midèwewin ceremony in the summer of 1983 at Red Lake. The healing was for his mother who had kidney cancer that would not respond to the treatments the white doctors recommended.”
Louise's serious look made Nadema stop what she was doing, and listen carefully to her mother.
“His dad Anfind Olson, your grandfather, had died in 1966. It was one of the first cancer deaths in their tiny village of Deline. He was just forty-nine years old. Elders had always lived to their nineties among the Dene. But one day, Anfind lifted his leg to brace himself as he reached down to start the outboard motor on his fishing boat and his foot fell right off and plopped into the now yellow and fouled water of Great Bear Lake. The doctors diagnosed a virulent rare bone cancer, and Anfind died a wretched death. As a young man he had carried burlap sacks of uranium ore weighing forty-five kilograms on his back to barges for the Canadian Crown's Eldorado Mine, twelve hours a day, six days a week for three dollars a day. Anfind was thirteen when Beyonnie found the black rock, gave it to the white trapper and got the flour, baking powder, and lard. The Eldorado Mine dredged for uranium ore and dumped radioactive waste rock and tailings right into Great Bear Lake where the Dene had hunted caribou and fished for tens of thousands of years,” Nadema's mother said, and took a deep breath.
“They extracted seven thousand tons of ore, but left nearly 2 million tons of radioactive waste exposed or dumped in the lake,” her stepdad, added.
“At first, the people called the ore Money Rock,” her mother continued, “but then the grandfathers started to die of cancers of the bone, lung, stomach, and kidney. Now they call it, Death Rock. Only five grandfathers are left in Deline.”
“Your father Lars said there was a prophet in the village who told the people, ‘Under this rock is a matter so powerful no man can survive it.’ He had a vision of this material ‘put into a big stick on to what looked like a metal bird. It was dropped on people that looked like us and burned them all.’ When the people in Deline learned what had been done with the Money Rock, the Elders went to Japan and visited with those people fifty-three years after they dropped the bomb that killed all those people's relatives and told them how sorry they were,” Louise said. She used her shawl to dry her eyes.
“They built the atomic bomb on Pueblo Indian land down in New Mexico, and tested it sixty miles from the Mescalero Apache reservation. Now they want to store it on Western Shoshone land in Nevada,” Jack explained.
“Both governments knew. My mother-in-law said they gave the white miners protective clothes and made them shower off the uranium dust after every single shift,” Nadema’s mother said. “They called the Dene ‘coolies’, and never told them the dangers.”
Nadema still remembers every word her parents said the first time they told her about what happened to her Dene relatives. She is inspired by the Dene women who told the people about the dangers of uranium mining.
“That girl Cindy, up on the Deline Uranium Team, is helping the widows,” Nadema's mom said.
“Her grandfather was one of the ones who carried the uranium,” said Jack McLeod. Nadema's stepdad always knew the historic facts and details behind every newstory. “Cindy Kinney-Gilday said ‘the government knew the dust of the ore would kill the Dene, and now we have a village of widows.’”
“And it's not over. The Dene think their fish, caribou, and moose at Great Bear Lake are contaminated. Who knows how many more will die?” Louise added. “Not the young women, that's for sure. I never thought I'd be a widow so young. You were just a toddler learning to talk when your dad died from lung cancer. He was only twenty-eight years old.”
“He slept in tents made with the sacks and played in the tailings,” Jack said.
“Lars told me the dust was everywhere when he was a boy,” Louise said. “Back then, ndns meant nothing.”
“Still don't,” Nadema said.
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Watch how uranium mining claims have increased at Great Bear Lake today.