FROZEN DIAMONDS

by Jani Roberts c95

The caribou, the untamed reindeer of North America, walked the frozen lake from pine marked shores to iced horizon, heading north to the Arctic Ocean, while, beside me a black-haired Dene woman ignored the familiar sight of antlered deer to scrutinise a photo of uncut diamonds. She asked: "Is that what diamonds look like?"

She went to a cabinet in the corner of her wooden home and brought out a glass container in which there were small stones. She sprinkled them on the table in front of me and her daughter reached out and picked up one. It was small, misty white, crystalline. "Is this a diamond?" she asked.

I did not know. It did resemble some uncut stones I had seen in the diamond cutting workshops of New York's 47th Street and 5th Avenue. She then told me; "These stones come from the stomach of a caribou." I had met some diamond prospectors at the regional airport in Yellowknife, the capital of Canada's Northwest Territories, some 200 miles south of her home. They were part of a diamond rush now transforming the central northern provinces of Canada. The prospectors were all making for the grazing grounds of the caribou by plane, snow mobile and truck.

The caribou were passing her door, treading snow and ice with haste to reach their summer calving ground above the treeline on the arctic coast, past the perils of thawing lakes, Dene hunters and wolf packs. They came every year past her door, the great deer of the arctic, part of the great Bathurst herd of 360,000, paying the Dene a toll of lives, an offering for which her people are profoundly grateful and which has sustained them for over 7,000 years.

The female deer crossing the lake were pregnant. They moved quickly to reach Bathurst Inlet, a bay by the Arctic Ocean, where they would give birth and rear their young in the unending summer day. It was spring and the Bathurst herd had left the protection of the forested lands for their treeless summer fields of olive green, red and yellow lichen. I walked on the ice, followed their footprints.

The Dene who hunt the caribou, drying and smoking the meat they need on tepee frames to sustain them between deer migrations, have evaded the fate of the southern Indian buffalo hunters, who have lost their hunting grounds and animals for the Dene land is much too cold, sometimes minus 65 Celsius, to be coveted by others - until now.

Today their Bathurst herd face a previously unthought of threat , from massive diamond mines - and the company taking the lead in planning mines on the scale of the Kimberley region of South Africa, is Australia's giant mining corporation, Broken Hill Proprietary (B.H.P.). British miner RTZ is also hopefully exploring and has found some diamonds. BHP is planning for part of the deer's migration route a chain of vast pits, attendant works and residences and long access roads and will help bring about two new hydroelectric schemes - all in virgin wildernes.

The diamonds lie under and around the lakes in what are called the "barrenlands" for lack of trees though rich in lichen. Mid summer to early autumn, the caribou, before they enter the treeline, rut in these same lands and eat to fatten themselves for winter. It is ironic that on their loving grounds is found a multitude of diamonds, the much hyped love emblem.

The Dene are the furthest north of the American Indian tribes. Their lands abut those of the Inuit, once called the Eskimeaux. Many of them fear this development may harm their caribou. At community meetings I attended I heard chiefs, elders, young men and women speak with passion about the need to protect their land. To ease their fear, De Beers, the company that contro ls most of the international trade in diamonds, toured the Indian villages last year, distributing tee-shirts saying: "Diamonds are for ever," dining and wined local environmental groups, introducing them to an environmental advisor from their diamond mines in South Africa. This delegation was led by George Burne, a member of De Beers board from London.

The Indians remain concerned. In the nearest Dene village to the diamond finds, the wife of the chief showed me photographs of her family hunting caribou, camping and catching giant trout from the pristine waters of Long Lake, the very lake the diamond miners led by BHP ,plan to fill to the brim with pulverised rock slurry they have searched for diamonds.

BHP's Project Report states; "Noise from aircraft and vehicles could temporarily drive certain wildlife species out of the area, disturb their habitat and migration routes." They say of the lakes they plan to drain; "There will likely be no practical possibility of restoring (their) productivity" and that "the waste rock piles, all weather roads, airstrip and industrial plant sites... will remain evident for a long time after closure". The local Ecology North group said it will take another ice age to eradicate them.

Dene hunters who travel by canoe and dog sleigh into these lands do not treat its hazards lightly. They greet every lake with a prayer, thank God for their safe travels and thank every caribou that yields its life to them by placing water or snow within its mouth. Each community has its lakes where they meet the caribou on their great migrations. On one of these I watched them hunt.

The hunters were carried swiftly to the herds on skidoos, scooters with skis for front wheels and tracks for back. Dog teams are rarely used today. Diamonds are brought to the surface by volcanes as crystals of carbon amid molten rock. BHP has found on Dene land a swarm of ancient volcanoes uncommonly rich in diamonds, akin to the Kimberley region of South Africa. So far at least 11 volcanic pipes contain significant numbers of diamonds. For 4 mining plans have already been announced.

Each mine will average a kilometre across and a third of a kilometre deep. At first trucks will remove the diamond bearing rock on vast spiral descending roads. Later shafts will be sunk to mine the diamonds underground. The city of London could be contained in one such pit. As all the rock extracted is waste (apart from a few kilograms of diamonds), vast waste heaps taller than a fourteen story building will soar over the flat barrenlands.

Any disturbance to vegetation in such a frigid climate will take scores of years to repair. BHP's project report acknowedges this when it states; "Exceptional care must be exercised to minimise disturbances which could persist long after the activity itself has ceased." The area is a home, BHP said, "for grizzly bears, foxes, wolverines and caribou... Wolves are regularly seen in this area."

BHP has named two lakes they intend to drain in the fashion of colonialists - and cutely - as "Koala" and "Panda". Dene hunter Fred Sangre told me this should not have happened. "There are Dene names for these lakes. The land up there contains the graves of our ancestors".

Families, he told me, would travel together and when a death occurred, they buried the dead on the trail. "All our hunting trails are marked with graves." I asked government archaeologist Tom Andrews, who has to check all mining company applications in the subarctic of the NWT, if he had checked for graves the land wanted by miners. He said; "Yes I did personally - but I can only detect recent Christian burials as these are marked with wooden crosses." Work pressure was to great to check more fully.

Dene elders later confirmed to me they had not had the opportunity to check the land BHP has used. BHP's report acknowledged; "The project site is located within the traditional Dene (and Inuit) land use area and they may have been in the region from as far back as 7,000 years ago."

The diamond miners have constructed roads and an airstrip from gravels taken from the esker ridges snaking across the land formed by the rivers that once flowed under ice sheets. The soft sandy sides of these ridges are crucial to the survival of both bears and wolves for in these granite lands they are the only places where they can dig their winter dens. The Dene also use them for their graves for the same reason. The eskers also form the only natural roads once the ice is thawed and are so used by both caribou and Dene. I found them to be coated in parkland, far easier to transverse than the surrounding granite boulders and swampy muskeg.

This is the land of the Arctic diamond rush, the first such rush in North America. In 1993 there were some 250 mining exploration camps in this region and numbers have grown since. The large " barrenground grizzly" bears will sometimes wander into these camps, never having learnt to fear an enemy. One professional white hunter told me he feared this may have caused the death of some 150 last year. Government experts more cautiously put the figure at a minimum of 50 bears killed but add that even this rate will soon endanger the species.

Another danger is that a fuel truck will go through the ice. polluting lakes rich in beaver, musk-rat and fish. All diessel fuel is transported over frozen lakes. A truck recently did go through but, fortunately, not into deep water. It was retrieved by sawing it from the ice. Ice waves created by the trucks regularly crack the surface, forcing the creation of multilane ice highways. The risk seems frighteningly great.

Why take this risk? Government geologist, Mike Beauregard explained the Canadian diamonds are of good shape - better than the South African that tend to be twisted and the Australian that tend to be fused together in couples. Jaap P Zwaon, the South African Chief Mining Engineer for BHP's diamond find, showed me a photo of diamonds typical of what they had found. If so, then about 80% were white - the colour most prized in De Beers advertisements.

The financial offer to the Dene for their mineral rights is none too great. The four Dene bands were offered last year 1.5% each, or 6% in total, of the Federal royalty income from the Northwest Territories. This would be 1.5% each of the 12% of profits likely to be paid to Ottawa after their initial tax holiday - according to George Patterson of the NWT Department of Energy and Mines.

Behind these negotiations major constitutional issues are at stake. Since 1973 there has been serious legal doubts about the treaties upon which rests the Canadian government's claim to control mineral rights in the Northwest Territories. When gold was discovered in the region, the Federal government persuaded the tribes to sign a document by which mineral and land rights were surrendered known as Treaty Eight. Then, when in the 1920s rich oil fields and more golf fields were discovered, the Federal Government signed Treaty Eleven to secure more rights. The Indians got a pittance. They claim they had been tricked, that no mention had been made of land surrender by the Federal negotiators, simply of peace and of a guaranteed non interference with hunting. In 1973 a Judge ruled that, despite these treaties, the Indians still retained their rights.

Now that diamonds have been found, the Canadian Government has again sent out negotiators to try to obtain what is effectively another treaty, to obtain further not yet ceded mineral rights.

De Beers said in Yellowknife, the provincial capital of Canada's NorthWest Territories (NWT), that their South African pits are getting expensive to run. Perhaps they are thinking Canadian diamonds could replace the deep expensive mines of South Africa where now at last under the ANC the miners have a voice? BHP is gambling that they will secure clear title. David Livingstone of the Federal Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development told me that, although BHP had spent tens of millions of dollars in developing their prospects, theyhave done this without a title to the land, without a government consent to their mining plans. They have, Livingstone advised me, not even a leasehold over the diamond pipes. Before this is given, many issues remain to be settled - not least the Dene claim to the diamond lands. The diamond mining project is now under consideration by an Environmental Assessment Panel appointed by the Federal Minister for the Environment but the more traditional Dene people fear that money from diamonds will still talk louder than their need for their caribou.

There is a magic in this land. For me it has much more to offer than carbon crystals torn from vast pits in fragile tundra.. For me the diamonds I will remember are those I saw sparkling in caribou hoofprints of compacted snow frozen onto ice.