[ RadSafe ] A Review of the Video "Village of Widows"

[Franta, Jaroslav]

Here's how we do antinuke propaganda in Canada (and export it to the US
too...) 

(article reproduced here with the permission of the author)

 Jaro  
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 


A Review of the Video "Village of Widows" 
A lesson of how much more powerful emotions can be than facts 
by Walter Keyes 
CNS Bulletin, Vol. 26, No. 4 p.45
http://www.cns-snc.ca/Bulletin/bulletin.html
 
Several years ago a Canadian filmmaker, Peter Blow, produced a sensational
video called A Village of Widows. The project started when members of the
Deline Uranium Committee from Deline, NWT, invited him to make a film about
the Sahtu Dene's "tragic involvement with the world's first atomic bombs."
Blow notes it was not intended to be an investigative or journalistic
effort, but rather, "I wanted to make an intimate film from the perspective
of the community". 

The film purports to show the disastrous consequences to native people from
the community of Deline, NWT. People who worked for the Eldorado uranium
mine at Port Radium on Great Bear Lake between the 1930s to1960 when the
project ended. It tells the tale of how unwitting native workers and their
families were exposed to high levels of radioactivity and how the product of
the mine was used to make the bombs that were used in Japan. It even shows a
delegation traveling to Japan to apologize and seek forgiveness for their
involvement in the event.
 
Blow's film is powerful. Interviews with elders provide sad litanies and
frightening anecdotes, tents made from used gunnysacks dusty with uranium,
children playing in "sandboxes" filled with tailings, the decimation of
entire families by cancer. The visual imagery, camerawork and editing are
all put to the service of the Deline Uranium Committee's desire to tell a
story. Archival footage locates the story in history and lends a factual
context to the film while the clever juxtapositioning of fact with fiction
weaves a seamless story in a documentary style format. 

It's a powerful formula for such a film and it is difficult not to be
affected by its emotional impact. It's a good film, even if it isn't true.
But this is not an objective report on what was once known as Port Radium.
Rather, it is a brilliant piece of propaganda art and a lesson of how much
more powerful emotions can be than facts. 

The first factual flaw in Village of Widows is its title. According to
StatsCan, there are more men in Deline than women, but somehow the name
Village of Widowers wouldn't work quite as well. The next factual flaw is in
its opening scene, a mournful image of lovely old women at a funeral,
burying 'another' of the former mine workers who died of cancer. In fact the
funeral was for a young man who died in a truck accident. But again, safe
driving in a village with six kilometers of all weather road is not as good
story material, so why not invent? 

About the same time the film was being shot, the Deline Uranium Committee
got the attention of the federal government. They met with three federal
Cabinet Ministers, Alan Rock, Ralph Goodale and Jane Stewart, and they had
their camera along to record the meeting. They wanted both compensation and
recognition of past wrongdoing by the federal government. 
The ministers took the matter seriously. Both Stewart and Goodale wanted to
see some facts. "We need to work together... to get clear a common set of
historical facts," Stewart told the Deline delegation. 

To make it happen, Ottawa put up six million dollars and created a working
group called the Canada Deline Uranium Team (CDUT). The Team consisted of
Deline members appointed by the Deline Band Council and federal government
officials. The CDUT investigation lasted five years and cost close to seven
million dollars. Its report was released in mid September 2005. In a way, it
too was a bombshell. But it got almost no media coverage. 

The report concluded that perhaps the largest health threat to the community
was the fear that had been created by scary news reports and fictional
events like those contained in Blow's video Village of Widows. 

The report concluded that no Dene people ever worked at the mine site, not
one, ever, in the 28 years the project was in operation. A few Dene worked
as part-time seasonal stevedores for about two months each summer, loading
and unloading barges at three of eight sites on the river system. It found
that the Dene were treated no differently from any of the other
transportation workers. 

With regard to radiological effects, the report found that at an absolute
maximum, the most additional cancer deaths that could even theoretically be
attributed to all such exposures was 1.6 but that the likely additional
deaths was below any statistical detectable levels. 

The finding from five years of research and six million dollars of taxpayers
money was that the community of Deline, which is about 200 miles away from
the mine, had hardly been affected by the mine, in any way, environmentally
or individually.
 
Vision TV helped spread the message 

The belief patterns illustrated in Village of Widows are likely to be much
more widespread and persistent than the findings of the CDUT study. The film
illustrates how people and organizations that set themselves up as ethical
and rational authorities can be so easily drawn in, and be so wrong. 

In Canada, Vision TV has aired this video a number of times without ever
warning the audience that events have been dramatized in a documentary
format. The film won a joint Vision TV /CAW sponsored HUMANITARIAN AWARD at
the Hot Docs Festival in Toronto. The award was for the Canadian documentary
that best explores humanitarian issues. That's right, documentary! Despite
the producer, Peter Blow's acknowledgement that it was not a documentary, it
won in the documentary film category. An award sponsored by Vision TV and
the Canadian Auto Workers Union, two credible Canadian organizations! 
 
Effect spreads 

The culture of self-deception and herd instinct goes far beyond the film
award and Vision TV. Village of Widows has been incorporated into
educational materials in our school systems. One example is from south of
the border. The University of Washington and Western Washington University
produce a series called K-12 Study Canada. This educational series is
designed to teach American students about Canada by making links between the
histories of the two countries. According to the program outline, "Village
of Widows" is designed to point out an important historical event that links
our two countries". 

That project is funded by the U.S. Department of Education with the mandate
to provide education to students, educators and the community about Canada.
Additional funding for outreach is from an annual Program Enhancement Grant
from the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC. 

It's not just in the US school system that this stuff is being promoted. The
same thing is taking place in Canada as well. For the past two years a high
school teacher in Saskatoon Saskatchewan has been propagandizing her
students with study sessions on the tragedy at Deline. She maintained she
was teaching the students to be discerning, to judge for themselves, what
the merits of the case were. How enlightened, except for the fact that all
the time she was feeding them fiction dressed up to promote a cause. She
failed to distinguish that it was not different, opinions or interpretations
of the facts that were involved but in this case but a difference between
facts and fantasy. 

Breathtaking isn't it? A work of fiction is awarded a prize for best
documentary film. The Action is next turned into an historical event and
taught in our schools. And, the Canadian Embassy in Washington helps finance
the event at the same time the Canadian Government in Ottawa and the Dene of
Deline are working hard to establish a common set of historical facts -
facts for which few people seem to have an appetite. 
 - - - - - -
Walter Keyes is a member of the Saskatchewan Branch of the CNS. Over his
career he has worked as a Depuly Minister in the Saskatchewan Government
regulating many aspects of the uranium industry in Saskatchewan and has also
been involved in many national and international consulting projects on
energy and resources issues. 
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