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Aboriginal opposition to development of silver-zinc deposit in Nahanni National Park Reserve is supported by writer’s great-granddaughter
Celebrated writer Jack London’s great-granddaughter is supporting northern first nations and environmental groups challenging efforts by a Vancouver mining company to redevelop a rich silver-zinc deposit within the Nahanni National Park Reserve.
The park, surrounding the South Nahanni River where it carves through the Mackenzie Mountains about 1,300 kilometres north of Vancouver, has been called Canada’s Grand Canyon.
Last December, the Dehcho First Nations wrote to the federal government saying that a decision by the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board dismissing the need for an environmental impact review for the Canadian Zinc Corp.’s Prairie Creek mine was “troubling and disappointing” in its failure to adequately address their concerns about downstream water quality.
“Ensuring responsible development that minimizes environmental impact should be the highest priority for the review board, and they have failed,” wrote Grand Chief Sam Gar-gan in the letter to Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Minister John Duncan.
“We believe that the project should only proceed with standards in place to ensure that the environmental integrity of the Nahanni National Park Reserve is maintained,” the letter said.
Tarnel Abbott of Richmond, Calif., whose grandmother was London’s daughter Joan, said she was drawn to the issue because the famous author of The Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Sea Wolf had written about the disputed area, featuring both it and the indigenous people in his novels.
London, born in San Francisco in 1876, joined the Klondike gold rush in 1897. Like many prospectors he left the gold fields broke and suffering from scurvy that would mark him for life. Yet the short stories and novels he based upon his experiences roaming Canada’s northern wilderness made him wealthy, internationally famous and a still-controversial literary icon.
He became the most widely published and best-selling author of his era, publishing 50 books and more than a thousand short stories, essays and articles in less than two decades.
London has been accused of racism, social Darwinism and a white supremacist view of the world on the one hand; and of being a social progressive, defender of the underclass, enemy of economic imperialism and advocate for oppressed aboriginal peoples on the other.
Richard Marshall Bond of Boston, grandson of Marshall Latham Bond, one of London’s pals in the Klondike and owner of the dog “Jack” that Lon-don recast as “Buck,” the canine hero who escapes from bondage in The Call of the Wild, is also supporting the Dehcho First Nations’ challenge to the project.
In a eulogy to London, Bond’s grandfather later described his first encounter with the writer in the grimy Dominion saloon in Dawson City. London was an “unkempt and for-bidding” man who asked permission to put up a tent next to Bond’s cabin and to share his cache to protect pro-visions from marauding dogs.
London, the elder Bond wrote, was of medium height with broad shoulders, a thick, stubbly beard and wore a cap pulled low on his forehead. Then just 21, “he looked as tough and as uninviting to us as we doubtless looked to him … a confusing blur of cap, mackinaw and moccasins.”
Hard as London appeared – for he’d grown up rough in San Francisco, worked under the cruel conditions of the sealing fleet in the Bering Sea and kicked around as a hobo, riding the rails across the U.S. – Bond wrote that the writer-to-be had an unusual affinity for dogs, in particular for his dog Jack.
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