The shrine to Louis Ayah in Deline, Northwest Territories.
The photographs of uranium mining in Port Radium at Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories are accompanied with text by the Dene spiritual leader and prophet Ehtseo (Grandfather) Louis Ayah (1857-1940). Gilbert LaBine’s Eldorado Mining and Refining company had hired Dene hunters and trappers from Deline to carry the 100-pound sacks of radioactive uranium concentrate from Eldorado’s mine at Port Radium on their backs and to load them onto barges for shipment to Eldorado’s refinery in Port Hope, Ontario. Louis Ayah had foreseen white men coming to the shore of Great Bear Lake and mining and shipping rocks out of the ground. He warned the Dene that they would suffer from a “new kind of sickness you have never heard of” because of carrying and living in proximity to the radioactive uranium concentrate. Many of these Dene workers later died of cancers leaving Deline a village of widows.