Lianne C. Leddy, Serpent River Resurgence: Confronting Uranium Mining at Elliot Lake, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 248 pgs. ISBN 9781442646346.
Reviewed by James Jenkins
Uranium mining brought profound change to the community of Serpent River First Nation and the broader north Lake Huron region in northern Ontario during following World War II. This period of development created opportunities for wage employment and community-owned industry, but these relatively short-term benefits were outweighed by environmental impacts that led to long-term health concerns and that compromised land-based subsistence. Yet, in Serpent River Resurgence, Lianne Leddy demonstrates that Serpent River members actively adapted and resisted this change on their own terms. Despite enormous public and private resources backing the uranium industry, Serpent River members raised their voices to hold government and private companies accountable. As the widespread environmental impacts of mining became more apparent, community members’ tactics came to include activism and participation in environmental review processes.
Serpent River Resurgence traces the history of Serpent River from the period of asserted British Sovereignty in 1763 following the Seven Years War to environmental activism and policy reform in the 1980s. Leddy shows that government and business interests threatened the community’s way of life well before the uranium boom. Despite the draconian powers of the Department of Indian Affairs following Canadian confederation, departmental records reveal that community leaders advocated for their members’ interests and questioned external economic development initiatives. Community members responded to timber leases and a private sawmill by frustrating the Indian Affairs surrender process and later boycotting the company store.
Leddy uses a more detailed case study from the postwar period to show how development projects often had far-reaching consequences that brought the benefits of Serpent River economic participation into question. The Cutler Acid Plant was an industrial facility located within the community. Although it employed some community members for almost a decade, it also impacted the community through air and water contamination. Community leaders spent years trying to hold the company and government responsible for decommissioning the site. Community members resorted to direct action and public appeals as the broader environmental movement took shape in the late 1970s. The case study highlights economic participation as an unfulfilled promise and links Serpent River’s pre-World War II history of resource extraction to postwar development in the region.
The book also discusses the period leading up to the 1970s in which environmental concerns were minimized by companies, government officials, and city planners to entice greater tourism and residential growth. Yet the legacy of uranium mining, especially tailings ponds and water contamination, had a profound impact on the ability of Serpent River members to practice traditional activities such as harvesting wild game meat, fish, and plants. Community members experienced disconnection from land-based subsistence activities, while wage-based incomes were subject to the industry’s boom-and-bust cycle. The long-term viability of the uranium industry remained shaky despite efforts by the federal government to stockpile the mineral and delay an inevitable market collapse. Throughout this period, Serpent River members took action to protect their interests.
Although uranium near Serpent River relied on government supply-side management, Leddy goes too far in calling the establishment of Elliot Lake in the 1950s a “public-private partnership.” An early chapter on the history of Elliot Lake provides fascinating context to the rapid growth of this uranium-based town, in which mining interests successfully advocated for the provincial government to support rapid infrastructure development. For its part, the federal government stockpiled uranium when necessary and provided federally-backed mortgages despite the looming possibility of a demand-side bust in the market. However, Leddy never fully connects her analysis to what we commonly know as a public-private partnership, which is a more modern phenomenon rooted in the New Public Management (NPM) approach that began in the 1980s. In that context, public-private partnerships usually refer to large infrastructure projects that have a private partner to encourage innovation without placing risk on the public partner. The Rogers Commission report on the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy is one of the early works identifying dynamics and risks of these partnerships, including the obfuscation of accountability. Interestingly, one of Canada’s more insightful examples comes from Elliot Lake: the Elliot Lake Commission report on the 2012 fatal collapse of a shopping mall is a detailed study on how these NPM approaches can impact accountability. However, the planning of Elliot Lake has greater resemblance to pre-war mining towns—albeit on a large scale—and one wonders how the roles of public and private actors changed as Serpent River members became more visibly resistant in the 1980s.
Historians of the rise of environmentalism and of Indigenous peoples of North America will find much of interest in Serpent River Resurgence. Given the similar approach that the Department of Indian Affairs took when it came to development in locations across Canada, Serpent River has similarities to many other communities that organized to drive change in the context of greater environmental awareness in the 1970s. Environmental historians have studied communities like Grassy Narrows and my own community of Walpole Island, and this work on Serpent River may call for a more comparative look at how First Nations communities in Canada responded to industry and environmental impacts during the Cold War era.
As we move into a period of rapid growth in electricity demand, nuclear generation and uranium extraction have again taken centre stage in debates about our energy future. In Canada, governments and utilities are pushing for equitable Indigenous participation in new energy projects. However, Serpent River Resurgence shows us that promises of Indigenous participation in economic development are by no means new: Serpent River members were promised economic benefits that proved short-lived and that obscured environmental, social, and health impacts in the community. It is essential that Indigenous leadership continues to grow in the energy sector so that communities can experience economic participation while mitigating impacts to their way of life.
Feature image: Highway 17 where it crosses the Serpent River as seen by satellite, 2025.
