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The Price of Gold
The Price of Gold: Mining, Pollution, and Resistance in Yellowknife
by John Sandlos and Arn Keeling
McGill-Queen’s University Press
250 pages, $34.95
In Yellowknife, the promise of gold shone brightly — but it also left behind 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust held in underground chambers. And in The Price of Gold, authors John Sandlos and Arn Keeling unearth the story of the main gold rush player: Giant Mine. In doing so, they offer a case study in how the pursuit of resource wealth saddled a community with a toxic inheritance.
Sandlos and Keeling — back together after publishing their last and best-known book, Mining Country — bring their knowledge of Canada’s extractive past to this Northwest Territories mine, tracing how dreams of prosperity became entwined with environmental disaster, Indigenous land dispossession and a bitter labour struggle.
The book spans from 1930s prospectors, staking claims on Great Slave Lake, to the mine’s 2004 closure and today’s billion-dollar cleanup. Along the way, it revisits tragedies including the 1951 arsenic poisoning of a Tatsót'iné child, the deadly 1992 strike bombing and the ongoing reality of a community living with contaminated land and water.
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Perhaps the most unexpected detail shared is the alliance between the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories and the United Steelworkers. Suspicious of government studies and angered by the dismissal of local health concerns, they launched their own investigations into arsenic exposure — a remarkable act of solidarity across communities.
This isn’t a breezy read; dense with archival material and grounded in years of fieldwork, its narrative is enlivened by oral histories, and the authors give space to Yellowknives Dene voices without appropriating them. While scholarly in its depth, the writing remains approachable, and for those willing to linger, the reward is a layered, sobering account that situates industrial development within the longer history of colonialism in Canada.
The Price of Gold is ultimately a cautionary tale about short-term gains, long-term consequences and the moral questions we must ask about the future of mining.
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