A light breeze from Great Slave Lake adds a last bite of winter to the warm spring air as Chief Ernest Betsina walks through Ndilo, a Yellowknives Dene community down the road from Yellowknife.
After a few minutes, he stops at a high spot. The entire community stretches before him. He can see the abandoned Giant gold mine site across the bay. It’s a festering wound, the worst-case scenario when a mine company goes under.
Today, another mining company, Dominion Diamond, is fighting off its own financial ruin. Its cash reserves collapsed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving it with $1.2 billion US worth of debt it has no way to pay off unless it restructures itself through the courts.
The case has prompted serious fears about the future of one of the North’s key employers, while pulling back the curtain on the international diamond trade.
“The Yellowknives Dene, we are the original miners of the North,” Betsina said. “Our people are called Tetsǫ́t’ıné, which means metal, or copper people. Our people are very resilient.”
The entire territory could use that resilience now.
The Yellowknives Dene have a mining tradition that stretches back across their history. They mined copper and other minerals, crafted tools and traded with other Indigenous groups.
In the 20th century, the gold mining industry exploited, even poisoned them.
During more than half a century of mining, an estimated 19,000 tonnes of toxic arsenic trioxide dust spewed from Giant’s smelter stacks and those at the nearby Con Mine, settling on the once-pristine lands around Yellowknife and Ndilo.
In 1951, a Dene child died after eating snow contaminated by arsenic from Giant.
When the company that owned the mine went bankrupt, it became the responsibility of the federal government, which is still cleaning up the site 20 years after it closed. Betsina continues fighting for compensation from Ottawa for the damage inflicted by the mine.
Today, the First Nation is a key player in the territory’s major industry. Its economic arm, the Det’on Cho Corporation, earned $56 million last year.
The Yellowknives Dene supply workers at all three of the territory’s diamond mines, enrol workers into apprenticeship programs, and generally have a positive relationship with the sector, Betsina said.
“It’s amazing,” he said. “My people have survived all these years. Survived, and thrived.”
Det’on Cho is also Dominion’s largest northern creditor, owed about $5 million.
In the Northwest Territories, it’s generally accepted that if someone doesn’t work for the government, they likely work for a mining company or a company whose business relies on one.
According to the territory’s latest industry report, diamond mining and related spinoff industries account for $2.25 billion of the territory’s $4.9 billion GDP. About 1,600 people in the Northwest Territories work for three mines directly, including 253 at Dominion, while “countless other N.W.T. residents work for companies or organizations that exist because of mining activity,” the report says.
They are high-paying, union jobs. The kind that are disappearing.
In Ndilo alone, 30 of the 400 people who live there work for Dominion Diamond. They’re out of work while the Ekati mine is shut down.
“In effect, that’s 30 families affected with the sudden stoppage of work,” Betsina said. “I know these people. In fact, I know the majority of the people. I know them by name.”
People in Ndilo are banding together, making food hampers, sharing geese hunts and catches of fish.
“We’re helping out with groceries. Every little bit goes a long way,” Betsina said.
Dominion Diamond is far from being the only company in this situation as the economic fallout from COVID-19 sinks in. But it may have the most riding on its success or failure — the economic future of the Northwest Territories.