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

[Cindy Bloom]

What a beautiful way to argue!

Cindy

At 02:53 PM 1/9/2006 -0500, Franta, Jaroslav wrote:
>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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