Decolonial Justice and Denuclearization: Hibakusha in Korea, Canada’s Northwest Territories, and Beyond

When talking about colonized people who found themselves involved against their will in the US military infrastructure that culminated in the 1945 nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is crucial not to elude colonized Korean laborers who were displaced under duress from Korea to Japan, where dozens of thousands of them were killed by the Bomb. Lisa Yoneyama draws a line between this history back to Dene Country where we started the issue.

When my partner and I moved to Canada from California in 2011, friends in American studies who knew of my previous work on the memory politics concerning Hiroshima gave me a piece of homework. They recommended that I watch Village of Widows (1999), a documentary film directed and produced by Canadian filmmaker Peter Blow. Village of Widows has attracted the attention of many Anglophone critics and cultural producers for its rare depiction of an encounter between Hiroshima’s atom bomb survivors and a group of Sahtu (Sahtúgot’ine/Great Bear Lake) Dene people in the Northwest Territories.

As I have no doubt Glen Sean Coulthard describes in his text for this issue, the Sahtu Dene’s involvement in Canada’s nuclear complex began as early as the 1930s, when mining activities began in the area not only to extract resources from the land, but also to mobilize Dene labor to transport uranium ore from the mine to ships bound for refineries. In 1942, the mining operation was transferred to the Canadian government as a wartime mandate. The area was then renamed Port Radium and uranium from the site was exported to the United States for the Manhattan Project. The Port Radium mine was decommissioned in the early 1980s, but the Dene community of Déline continued to experience a high rate of cancer-related deaths. In the 1990s, the Sahtu Dene organized to voice their concerns about the radioactive waste left in the vicinity of the lake. In 1998 the Déline Dene Band Uranium Committee released a report, They Never Told Us These Things: A Record and Analysis of the Deadly and Continuing Impacts of Radium and Uranium Mining on the Sahtu Dene of Great Bear Lake. The report led the Canadian state to acknowledge that the Dene workers were not properly informed of the radiation hazard, but the government denied the risk of radiation-induced cancer and stopped short of recommending a full investigation. Village of Widows not only exposed the settler state’s decimation of Dene life and community over generations; it also shed light on their ongoing struggle for survival and redress nearly five decades after the end of World War II. The film also followed the delegates of the Uranium Committee who visited Hiroshima that same year. In 2024, Village of Widows was screened for the first time in Hiroshima with Japanese subtitles.