<i>Rogue Diamonds: Northern Riches on Dene Land</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rogue Diamonds: Northern Riches on Dene Land Lynn Veach Sadler, writer, editor Ellen Bielawski . Rogue Diamonds: Northern Riches on Dene Land. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. 256 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Ellen Bielawski gives us Old Ways—the Land (geologically the oldest on the planet), the Sky, the legendary Northwest Territories, Great Slave Lake, Aboriginal Peoples moving in accord with Nature's clock—and New Ways—water licenses, land-use permits. We get the difference without her cutting it out with a knife made of diamonds, and we get it often through figures who are made distinct, stand as individuals among whom we, too, could visit and walk. Some will read Rogue Diamonds: Northern Riches on Dene Land as innocence (the Dene people, Athapaskans, whose language we English know as "Chipewyan") in a fallen world that falls farther as wealth tempts all and breaks the hearts of the old chiefs. Some will read it as the continuing saga of the hunt for diamonds, for it does find parallels with the antipathy between blacks and whites in South Africa and the "blood diamonds" women and children are forced to mine to feed African military dictatorships. It gives the [End Page 527] backstory of diamonds: the great heat that formed them, the lavalike eruptions of "kimberlite" (whose own etymology and history are provided) that brought them from the mantle of the earth to the surface crust, where they could be mined, the glaciers that scattered them, and the lakes that hid them. It cites the claims-stakers who disturbed the Land long before the diamond-seekers. Tantalizingly, it hints at ties between Canada's diamonds and both Osama Bin Laden and organized crime. A few, perhaps, will read this book as the [diamond] rush to meet the sixty-day federally imposed timeline for negotiating a treaty resolution among five groups, including Canada's Crown Government, various First Nations (some, like the Dogribs, more tractable than the Dene), and the BHP (Broken Hill Proprietary, which is out to build Ekati Mine as a rival to De Beers's dominance of the global diamond market). Rogue Diamonds is all such simplifications plus the public record but is significantly, even primordially/sophisticatedly, much more. An overarching picture being limned is the successful interaction of one white woman, a "non-Dene" and thence simply one of the "white guys," with this community. And a pretty picture it is! This writer never oversimplifies. She does not say, for example, that only one being could save the Dene and the world. Instead, she makes her stand this way: As Excell comes down the stairs from BHP's offices, my tired brain sees Jesus Christ descending to save us all. But it's only Jim, not a bad man, no saviour either. He's just a skilled mining engineer who, as the leader of BHP's project, is doing what must be the job from hell right now. (128–29) Similarly, the quotations that open sections are not all pretty or charming, though many are (e.g., those of the Blue-Eyed Ojibway). We realize in retrospect that many are comments on the action or lack of it during the haggling of the ponderous and laborious meetings. Those peoples who collaborate before the Dene yield are not merely sell-outs. If this book were poetry (much of it is very like!), we would know just what to label the stinger at the end of this description of the lives of the some three hundred in the Dene community that is the book's focus: "[They] hunt caribou, fish trout, gather berries, dry meat, make moccasins and collect welfare" (my italics). The pull to break from that last as a way of life has to be strong, and even the Dene are not at one among themselves. Many of them want "money" for what is signed away, fear being "left out of the riches," know greed, and fret after the amounts to be paid and the secrecy surrounding them. Oh, but along the way to such resolution as is found we get treasure that has nothing to do with diamonds, including rich folk wisdom, for example, [End...