Q&A: The authors of Price of Gold on learning from Giant Mine

“They used to call it the city paved with gold and we as kids would say oh geez, it’s paved with arsenic.”

Darrell Beaulieu says there’s a lot about Giant Mine and its impact on the Yellowknife area that is not written in books and reports.

Growing up in Ndılǫ across Great Slave Lake from the gold mine, he said people in the community would swim in Back Bay, drink the water and set nets on islands.

In the 1970s, Beaulieu said he remembers the Yellowknives Dene discussing concerns about the safety of the water.

During a meeting with the First Nation, he said the federal government brought jars of water claiming it had come from Back Bay, had been tested and was safe to drink. When federal officials were asked to drink the water themselves, however, he said none of them did.

“That’s a powerful message,” Beaulieu said, questioning if the water had really come from Back Bay.

“They’re telling the Indigenous people it’s good to drink and they wouldn’t drink it.”

Beaulieu shared his experiences at the northern launch of The Price of Gold: Mining, Pollution and Resistance in Yellowknife at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre last week.

The new book by John Sandlos and Arn Keeling explores not only Giant Mine’s toxic legacy and how the federal government and mining companies long hid the impacts of pollution, but how the Yellowknives Dene fought back alongside labour and environmental activists.

“It was just a really interesting and inspiring story to unpack about how these folks really came together,” Keeling told Cabin Radio, “and pursued that common goal of ensuring they could hold the company’s feet to the fire, and hold the government’s feet to the fire, and sort-of investigate and challenge the assumptions about the safety of their local environment.”

The authors, who are both professors at Memorial University of Newfoundland, have been examining the history and legacy of arsenic contamination at Giant Mine for more than a decade.

Sandlos said one of the key themes in The Price of Gold is the “remarkable response” of the community and its resilience in the face of major challenges.

“I really want to emphasize this is not necessarily a negative book or a book that’s without hope,” he said at the book launch.

“In fact, by the time I finished writing it, I was very much thinking hopefully about the future of Giant Mine and indeed about people’s capacity to respond to environmental problems.”

Sandlos pointed to an independent study conducted by the National Indian Brotherhood, United Steelworkers and the University of Toronto that found high arsenic levels in mill workers and Indigenous children in the 1970s. He also highlighted public efforts that led to an environmental assessment of the Giant Mine Remediation Project.

‘We need to not forget what happened’

Kevin O’Reilly, a longtime environmental advocate and former Yellowknife city councillor and MLA, described the book as “the story of government decision-making around Giant Mine.”

“It’s a really important part of our history and story here,” he told those gathered at the book launch.

“It’s very important that story get preserved and get told again and again and again, because we need to not forget what happened.”

O’Reilly called Giant Mine “a warning not to let these sorts of things happen again” and cautioned against shortcuts to environmental laws and regulations.

Sandlos said he also hopes the book will serve as a cautionary tale in light of “calls to reduce red tape, to gut environmental laws and truncate environmental assessment processes.”

“I think the Giant story is a tale that calls us and compels us to rethink those shortcuts and really take the time to assess the impacts of these developments on people and the environment,” he told Cabin Radio.

Keeling said much of his current work is focused on how to improve mine closure and ensure communities can “better ride that resource rollercoaster.”

Sandlos noted while legislation and regulations have improved since Giant Mine, mines are still closing and leaving taxpayers on the hook for the cleanup. He pointed to Wolverine mine in the Yukon and Jericho mine in Nunavut as examples.

There is hope, however, Sandlos said, as some companies and governments are trying to do better.

“Many jurisdictions, Quebec is one of them, have woken up to the fact that they have billions of dollars in liabilities that the government has to deal with and clean up,” he said.

“With history, we’ve learned many, many cautionary tales and we can use that to hold people’s feet to the fire. But we can also, hopefully, do some positive things to look at ways we can plan better, and I think it starts in the community.”

Toxic legacy

Giant Mine operated on the edge of Yellowknife from 1948 to 2004. During that time it produced more than seven million ounces of gold and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust, a toxic byproduct of roasting gold ore.

The mine’s dark history includes widespread arsenic contamination leading to sickness and the death of a two-year-old Dene boy, the loss of traditional land, and a vicious labour dispute in which nine underground workers were murdered.

Today, 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust remains stored underground at the former mine site.

The federally-led cleanup of Giant Mine, which officially began in 2021, is expected to cost $4.38 billion and take until at least 2038 to complete. Management of the arsenic dust underground will require perpetual care, while the Giant Mine Oversight Board continues to push for a permanent solution.

The Yellowknives Dene First Nation is still negotiating an apology and compensation from the federal government for the long-term social, cultural, environmental and economic impacts from the mine.

Canada has signed economic benefits agreements related to the remediation of Giant Mine with the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, Tłı̨chǫ Government and North Slave Métis Alliance.

This interview was recorded on October 17, 2025. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Emily Blake: This book is something you’ve been working on for 15 years. What initially sparked your interest in it?

Arn Keeling: We’ve been looking at the history of abandoned mines across northern Canada as a project that John and I started in the late 2000s.

Giant really stood out to us as really one of the most important mines in northern Canada, both in terms of it being a catalyst for northern development, for the founding of the City of Yellowknife and for the development of the settler and industrial economy in the region, but also for some of the really unique environmental challenges and environmental legacies that were left behind. While we’ve been working on mines from Yukon all the way to Quebec and Labrador, Giant kept bringing us back to Yellowknife.

And then the response that we got from community members in terms of identifying like, “hey, we need some support, we’d be really interested in historical research you can do,” and the partnership opportunities for supporting the community and some of their knowledge gaps that they wanted addressed, gave us the opportunity to and the motivation to keep coming up.

Who would you say this book is for? Who should read the book?

John Sandlos: As we saw tonight with this wonderful book launch where a lot of people came up, I think the book is primarily of interest to people in Yellowknife, many of whom have been grappling with the legacies of Giant Mine for decades. So it’s a local story in a lot of ways, but I would also say it’s part of a national story of mining in Canada.

Giant isn’t the only mine that’s ever had pollution problems. We had a whole period of mining, really up until the 1970s, where mining was done in a largely unregulated way. There were no consultations with Indigenous communities, there were no environmental assessments and regulations. I think Giant is one of the prime examples of everything that can go wrong without those kinds of regulatory controls and oversight in place. Just the level of pollution, the complexity of the pollution problems.

I would say the other level to that is that you can find these stories throughout the globe of where resource developments may have run amok. That’s not to say there aren’t some that have been run well, but I think Giant Mine is really a cautionary tale. Especially in today’s world where there’s all this talk in Canada – I guess understandably in some ways – but on the other hand, we hope to provide a cautionary tale for people to reflect on in light of all of these calls to reduce red tape, to gut environmental laws and truncate environmental assessment processes. I think the Giant story is a tale that calls us and compels us to rethink those shortcuts and really take the time to assess the impacts of these developments on people and the environment.

Touching on that, we have this push for nation building projects and a major projects office in Canada. Can you say more about what we should learn from Giant Mine when it comes to new mining and resource projects?

Keeling: Well, obviously, regulation is important, oversight is important, and community involvement is important. On a broader level, I would say mining is a temporary land use – and even mining companies like to say that – but what that also means is that we need to plan for the future of the community and the environment after mining. That planning needs to start even before the shovels hit the ground.

We need robust closure planning regulations. We need to mine with closure in mind. And that’s kind of becoming a buzzword in the industry now, but it’s still a principle that’s not evenly applied, shall we say. And we need to have companies acting responsibly, but also backed with robust regulations that ensure that they meet their obligations to leave the land behind in as good a condition as they can.

Of course, mining breaks things. Mining digs things. Mining processes things. But there’s ways to do it, and we have great new kinds of technology to do it, in the proper way. But it has to be done with those guardrails in place.

There’s a lot of darkness in the Giant Mine story but the book also talks about the element of hope. Can you comment on that?

Sandlos: What we found when we came here was an amazing story of community activism and community resilience at different periods in Giant Mine’s history.

In the 1970s, when the story of Giant Mine’s arsenic problem became a national story through an As It Happens episode on the CBC – so that’s the power of radio coming through – the United Steelworkers (the union at Giant Mine) started to collaborate with Indigenous groups: the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknives Dene, the National Indian Brotherhood. And they worked with professors at the University of Toronto and did their own, what we call today citizen science. They were measuring arsenic levels in the hair of Indigenous children, but also in workers and basically saying to the government, “We don’t believe you when you tell us that the arsenic situation is safe here in Yellowknife. We think there’s a problem, and we have some research data to back that up.”

The other incident would be when the problem of the underground arsenic came to the fore. The original plan of the federal government was to freeze it and leave it underground. I think the community had really kind of a flowering of activism and discussion and said, “Hey, we don’t want that.” And the city government triggered an environmental assessment. I think that was a really valuable process, because the community got some independent oversight over the remediation project, they got an environmental agreement that set certain standards for the project, and they also got the timeframe for the project shortened from forever – which everybody was uncomfortable with – to 100 years, in the hope that within that timeframe a more permanent solution to the arsenic problem at Giant can be found.

For Yellowknifers or other folks that may know a bit or a lot of the history and story of Giant Mine, are there any sort of surprises or details in the book that they might not be aware of?

Keeling: Really the story of how the community came together around that activism that John talked about in the 1970s and the alliances that were created between environmentalists, Indigenous activist organizations, and the steel workers. You know, there’s sometimes this image of mining versus the environment, or the industry versus Indigenous peoples, or even Indigenous people versus environmentalists. And it was just a really interesting and inspiring story to unpack about how these folks really came together and pursued that common goal of ensuring that they could hold the company’s feet to the fire, and hold the government’s feet to the fire, and sort of investigate and challenge the assumptions about the safety of their local environment.

I think that’s a story that hasn’t been told. I mean the story of the early pollution and the tragedy that befell Yellowknives Dene is something that Yellownives Dene have begun to talk a lot about. The more recent history of the environmental assessment, certainly folks are a little bit more familiar with. But it’s that period in the 60s and 70s, I think, that was really fascinating for us to learn about and that we hope that people will find a really interesting part of the book.

Of course the book is published now but the story of Giant Mine is not over. What’s next for you guys when it comes to Giant Mine?

Sandlos: We have, over the years, maintained our relationship with people up here. So we’ve actually done some consulting work on the perpetual care plan and we’ve tried to contribute to that, and we’ve reminded the company that’s doing that of the importance of working with the community locally. So hopefully that process will get up and running and we can make a contribution with our knowledge base there.

Also we’ve taken the lessons we’ve learned at Giant Mine and Arn and I are involved in a project right now that looks at the history of health and safety in the mining industry and really examining workers. [We’ve taken] what we found out at Giant and we’re like, “Well, what was going on in other mines?”

We found that, at other mines, mine workers were, in fact, very strident environmentalists at the same time. I think that’s something that a lot of Canadians don’t understand, that workers are not opposed to environmentalism, and they are often at the forefront of protecting their families and their communities from pollution. Pollution that’s being caused by their employer, but they’re always demanding that their employer do better.

So that’s the direction we’ve tried to broaden this a little bit. We’re looking at places places like Sudbury and Rouyn-Noranda and communities like that that have big smelters and large mining operations.

Keeling: In terms of thinking about where stories like Giant have led us, it goes back to an earlier theme, I think, of our work on abandoned mines: What happens after the gold rush, right? What happens after mining? How do communities adjust? Why do some communities end up as ghost towns? Why do others have a kind of greater resiliency, and what are the environmental challenges left behind?

I think we’ve parlayed that a little bit into, at least I have, in a lot of my work to thinking about, well, what about operational mines today? How can we do closure planning better? How can we think about the long-term to better forestall those environmental problems, to ensure that maybe some of the infrastructure or some of the benefits of development have a more permanent and positive impact on communities rather than getting abandoned and left behind? And how can communities and their knowledge of the land be folded into what is usually a pretty dry, technical and expert-driven engineering closure planning exercise?

So, again, something that is really a direct lesson from Giant because we saw the ways in which citizens kind of forced their voices onto the agenda and said, “Yeah, we have knowledge. We have priorities and we demand that those be heard.”