Randy
Lee
Cutler

Conflict Minerals: The term “Blood diamonds” highlights the violent diamond trade in war zones (Angola, Congo and Sierra Leone), which finance militias. Conflict minerals refer to the products derived from similar activities involving other natural resources. The four most commonly mined conflict minerals most of which are extracted from the Congo are cassiterite (for tin), wolframite (for tungsten), coltan (for tantalum), and gold ore. In addition to feeding global jewellery companies, conflict minerals are also used in the manufacture of a variety of electronic devices such as mobile phones, laptops, etc. Miners are usually “hired” at gunpoint and working conditions are extreme, frequently leading to death. Insurgents use tactics such as rape and other forms of violence to control the local population and destroy the social fabric. It is often difficult to trace these conflict minerals as they pass through the hands of numerous middlemen by way of neighbouring countries such as Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. Governments are attempting to legislate due diligence with regard to tracing the supply chain. On a smaller scale, many businesses and institutions are demanding that conflict free minerals are used in their electronic devices heralding perhaps a new direction in industrial mining.

Burning Vision: In 1789 uranium, a silvery-white metal named after the newly discovered planet Uranus was identified in the mineral pitchblende. For 150 years, it was used as a colouring agent in pottery and glass. Fast forward to WWII when the Canadian Eldorado Gold Mining Company, located near the eastern shore of Great Bear Lake, extracted uranium-bearing ore in order to supply the U.S. military with the uranium needed to produce the nuclear bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Great Bear Lake is located on Sahtu Dene territory in the northern boreal and Arctic region. In the late nineteenth century, a Dene seer had a vision of men going into the ground and walking out with something that would rain fire down on other people. In the 1940s Dene miners were told that they were digging for a substance to cure cancer. By the 1960s, the miners who had hauled bags of the stone out of the ground began to die of lung cancer and other lung diseases. Pre-WWI, female factory workers in the United States also contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint containing radium (the radium compound is found in uranium) when they wetted their paint brushes with their mouths to keep them sharp. Marie Clements writes about this little-known history in her play Burning Vision, 2003.