What was your goal while writing this book?
Arn Keeling: The book was really intended to summarize our decade-plus historical research on the history and legacy of Giant Mine. While the story is well-known to many people in Yellowknife, it’s an important one for all Canadians to know about, since it is all of Canada that will be paying for the remediation and perpetual care of the site. Although the story of arsenic pollution at Giant Mine is a very local one, we thought it deserved book-length treatment as a powerful warning about the long term environmental costs of resource development, an illustration of the connections between pollution and colonialism, and a testament to Indigenous resistance to extractive development and pollution on their lands.
Was there a book or piece of writing that made you want to pursue writing as a career? What was it?
Arn Keeling: Reading and writing was always exciting to me—I initially aimed to become a journalist and environmental writer, but ended up on the academic track. I love fiction, but have a particular attraction to great non-fiction writers like John McPhee or, more recently, Robert Macfarlane.
John Sandlos: I was exposed to a huge variety of environmental writing in graduate school, but became especially attracted to environmental history because of the clarity and conviction of so many writers in the field. I was inspired first by Willliam Cronon’s seminal work, Changes in the Land, a masterful account of the environmental history of colonialism in New England. Robert Gottlieb’s, Forcing the Spring, opened me up to the importance of local, grassroots enviormental struggles, a huge influence on the way we approached The Price of Gold.
Why is writing about Canada/Canadians important to you?
Arn Keeling: As a historical geographer of Canada, I think it’s crucial to tell truthful stories about this country if we want to continue living together—both the good and the bad. In fact, I find there is much as much heroism and insight into Canada from our difficult stories, which the Giant Mine story exemplifies in showing how the Yellowknives Dene and local mine workers collaborated to tackle the poisoning of their community.
John Sandlos: For most of its history, Canada has staked its economic future on primary resource development of one sort or another. For a citizenry whose population is huddled in the southern latitudes, too often the environmental impacts of resource extraction are hidden from view. Without denying that resource extraction is a critical provider of jobs and economic activity, my goal as a writer is to reveal the vast environmental costs that have accompanied resource development, along with the very direct impacts of extractivism on northern Indigenous communities. Ultimately, I hope my work inspires readers to grapple with the difficult questions that accompany almost any large-scale form of resource extraction.