Pitchblende

Elise Marcella Godfrey

• Publisher: University of Regina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780889778429
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

“We began to dig ourselves
 
deeper than we dreamed
when we began to see
 
metal as other than medicine,
our bodies, more than mineral.” From an emerging environmental voice comes an evocative, multilayered poetry collection about extraction, destruction, and the erasure of Indigenous people.
 
At Rabbit Lake in Northern Saskatchewan lies the second largest uranium mine in the western world. For decades, uranium ore and its poisonous by-product—pitchblende, a highly radioactive rock—were removed, transported, and scattered across the land, forever altering the lives of plants, animals, and people who live there.
 
Elise Marcella Godfrey’s Pitchblende is a powerful, political collection that challenges us to urgently rethink our responsibilities to the land, water, and air that sustains all species, and our responsibilities to one another. Inspired by and adapted from testimonies given at the public hearings about the Rabbit Lake mine, which prioritized the voices of industrial interests, Godfrey gathers voices from the found texts, and adds others, in defence of the natural world. Interconnected, Godfrey's poems are a choral and visual, literal representation of how industry, capitalism, and colonialism seek to erase affected peoples and their voices.

35

Hatchet Lake Band’s Testimony

(Erasure, Part One)

You’ve heard Elders speak of damage to the land, disruption to wild life, changes in the fishery. Your reaction may be, “So what? There’s a good store in town, people can buy all the food they need. There’s no money in trapping, anyway.”

To understand our concerns, you must understand our lifestyle. Our way of living on the land has evolved over thousands of years...