Ayah’s Prophecy: Uranium, Colonial Violence, and Dene Grounded Solidarity

This entire issue’s idea came to Léopold in June 2024 after listening to Glen Sean Coulthard describe the 1998 visit of a group of Dene people to Hiroshima, during which the Indigenous delegation formally apologized to the city’s residents for the role their land and labor played in the US nuclear bombing of the city. Glen’s words surely took an additional layer of meaning through the fact that they were uttered “on the land,” in Denendeh (Dene country) during the second “Grounded Solidarity” gathering at Dechinta that he describes in the first part of this text. The latter can be seen as a formidable introduction to a land-as-relationship cosmology (and its subsequent ethical obligations) in opposition with the colonial land-as-property paradigm.

In winter 2023, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Uahikea Maile, Kelsey Wrightson, Robyn Maynard, and myself began organizing to hold the second “Grounded Solidarity” gathering on Chief Drygreese Territory, Treaty 8, the unextinguished homelands of my people, the Yellowknives Dene First Nation. Between June 24–29, 2024, a group of academics, activists, artists, and students were hosted by Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a land-based political education project I helped found in Denendeh back in 2010. Drawing on the example of previous generations of Dene organizers, Dechinta seeks (among other things) to break the historical relationship forged between colonial genocide, dispossession, and economic dependency, on the one hand, and the institutions of western education, on the other.

Organizing for the gathering began in the wake of the genocidal campaign waged by Israel against the Palestinians of Gaza following the Hamas military operation of October 7, 2023. The purpose of the meeting was twofold. Practically speaking, we aimed to situate the land as a generative site of solidarity-organizing by calling on my community to host a diversity of activists from around the globe to engage in land-based practices (in this case, duck hunting, fishing, hide tanning, medicine harvesting, etc.), discuss issues of mutual concern, establish meaningful and affective bonds of mutual aid, and to cultivate a much-needed place of refuge and recuperation for a group of worn comrades passionately committed to the intersecting communities they serve and to the collective project of liberation. In a more conceptual vein, the get-together aimed to displace the all-too-common misunderstanding that politics rooted in land or place foreclose the possibility of cultivating wider affective and material relations. In other words, the solidarity gathering sought to demonstrate that immersion in the diversity of relationships and ethical practices that constitute “the land” from a Dene perspective (as opposed to treating the land as a commodity or property) can, and, indeed does, facilitate an expansive sense of belonging that both traverses but also ties together a multiplicity of forms of life and community struggles.