Voisey's Bay (part 1)

Vale Inco announced last week that they were reopening the Voisey’s Bay nickel mine near here, so I thought I should provide a bit of background and a timeline, as I will likely be referring to this in future postings.

The mine and ore concentrator at VB was completed in November 2005 by Inco, a Canadian company with nickel mines and operations already in Sudbury, Ontario, and New Caledonia. The VB facility cost a company estimated $950 million, which is quite a sum by Labrador standards, but which, given the proximity to existing processing facilities in Sudbury made it an easy decision—and the mine can produce gross nickel and copper proceeds at two or three times that amount every year. To give one example, the year before the strike (2008), VB produced 77,500 tons of “contained” nickel, and 55,400 tons of “contained” copper, which (in refined form) would be worth $1.43 billion and $562 million, respectively at today’s prices. At the height of the market in 2006-07, the value of this amount of nickel alone (once refined) would be $4.5 billion—produced in a single year. The mine is located about 20 miles south of Nain, along the coast. At capacity it employs roughly 450 people, though only a handful from Nain.

In 2007, Inco was purchased by Vale Inc, a Brazilian mining conglomerate (and now the world’s 2nd largest mining company), becoming a subsidiary called Vale Inco. Vale’s short term planning was poor, though, as less than a year after the purchase, the price of zinc fell sharply, largely as a result of the decline in world manufacturing—zinc is a key ingredient in the manufacturing of stainless steel, but not much good outside of that. As a result, last summer (2009) Vale Inco suspended work in its Sudbury processing plant which serves all of its North American operations, starting on June 1 and lasting for 8 weeks. This happened directly after several weeks of scheduled operation shut down for maintenance, and, perhaps more importantly (though never mentioned by the company) amid discussions with main processor union in Sudbury over contract alterations and desire by the company to remain profitable “in all of the price cycle”. The union (a local of the United Steel Workers) contract expired July 12, in the middle of the shutdown, and without an agreement on a new contract.

Actually the union contract had been set to expire May 31 but had been extended for negotiations by both sides, and negotiations had been going on since May. Again, while never state as such, the shutdown was likely aimed at imposing strike-like hardship on the furloughed workers even before a strike could begin. The USW contract covers 3300 of 4700 workers at the Sudbury site, and is one of the largest employers in the Sudbury area. Price declines were likely the backdrop of the contract negotiations as well. Nickel had fallen from $24/lb in 2007 (when Vale bought Inco) to $4/lb in early 2009. As a result, Vale Inco had wanted to cut 428 jobs and reduce pension, bonuses (previously tied to the price of nickel), and other benefits. USW Local 6500 rejected these cuts, and voted to strike, starting July 13. Voisey’s Bay USW workers followed, and went on strike August 1st. In total, 135 workers at VB mine walked off the job, and as of today have not returned.

Sudbury is actually sort of a mess in general these days. The slowdown at Vale Inco affected FNX mining, another large employer, because their nickel, copper, and other precious metal ore are processed at the Vale Sudbury facility. FNX shut down nickel mining (in 2008) but was still mining copper and precious metals. In the past, it might have been possible for them to shift processing to X-Strata, also in Sudbury, but X-Strata was also planning to shut down (“care-and-maintenance” phase) and cut 638 jobs as well. Sudbury produces 30% of the world’s nickel (with other concentrations in Russia and New Caledonia), and is located about 225 miles north of Toronto, 250 northwest of Ottawa, just above Georgian Bay. The smelter brags of being the tallest smokestack in North America, but seldom mentions the fact that it is world’s largest producer of sulfuric acid laced pollution.

In mid 2009, nickel prices began to recover a bit, and in August Vale-Inco announced it will reopen Sudbury concentrator operation without striking workers, and started “retraining” management and non-striking staff in late August to run the mill. Vale Inco also runs a precious metal refinery in Port Colburn Ontario, not far from Sudbury, that was out on strike too, with 125 workers having walked off in support of the Sudbury strike. Because that plant dealt mainly in copper and platinum (whose prices had remained high), that plant remained running, though at reduced capacity. In September, Vale Inco informed FNX to begin shipments to Sudbury once again, concentrating on copper and platinum there as well. The mill started operations in mid-September. The rationale was clear: in 2009, copper prices were up 140%. Earlier this month (January 2010), Vale announced its intention to reopen Voisey’s Bay nickel mine, and shortly afterward sent a new proposal to striking workers there. Negotiations were short, however, and three days after presenting their proposal, Vale officials called off talks and announced plans to use non-union staff and management to replace strikers at the VB mine. In the same week, they announce plans to reopen the smelter plant (where “concentrate” is refined into commodity level nickel, zinc, cobalt, or copper) in Sudbury.

That is where things stand now, though there are other elements not quite directly related that I don’t have room to go into here. I will try to get some of that up in the next week. As I mentioned in an earlier post…there aren’t many workers here affected directly by the strike. Perhaps two dozen total, though many are not in the union. As is widely recognized throughout the north, Aboriginal hiring quotas are almost always met in the “service” side operations—cafeteria workers, dormitory cleaners, security guards, and so on. These aren’t the high salary mining jobs normally advertised. Many of these positions, while not strike positions, are obviously dependent on operations at the mine, and have been out of work since the strike began in August. In a community where jobs are so scarce, that actually means a lot. In addition, as I wrote about in an earlier entry, a portion of the Provincial royalties from the mine go to support the Nunatsiavut Government here—the new Inuit government that followed the land claims, which in turn had followed the discovery of large nickel deposits at Voisey’s Bay.

First Interviews

Today was our first day of formal interviewing....five interviews, which took up most of the day. A picture of our office at the OK society is below. Today's folks were primarily those from the elder's focus group we did last Tuesday. They all went well, with one very kind compliment from a long time Nain resident saying that he had done many of research interviews over the years, and this was the best he'd done. I'm not sure, but my sense was that he appreciated that we were taking time to talk to people about what was happening in Nain, and what they thought about it. Usually, he said, the interviews were very rushed and only looking for one or two things--without getting very far into things. So it looks like we are off to good start. We also had one respondent ask if we had any time to talk more, and listen to some old stories. That would be great, of course, and I asked if we could call her in a couple of weeks, once things were running and Josh was here, to make a time come and talk....she said yes, so we have a good lead for stories.


The story part of the project is actually very simple: we are hoping to be able to collect as many stories as we can here, record them, and produce a series of texts that we can analyze. Of course the texts are very valuable in their own right, and have all of the obvious connections to what anthropologists usually do. And they can show us alot about what has happened here...in the ethnohistorical (rather than conventional historical) sense. But we are also hoping to be able do some new text analysis on them, and do some cognitive mapping of the ideas they contain and deploy. This sounds more complex than it really is...the real point is to use the stories to see the relationships between the ideas contain, and to produce a map of the clustering and interdependency of those ideas. The idea that underlies this (from C.S. Peirce originally) is that it takes at least three independent items to make what people usually call "meaning"...a sign, the thing that it stands for (the object, often another idea), and the thing that connects them (still another idea that connects them (the relation or, as Peirce referred to it, the "interpretant"...which is still yet another idea). Put another way, any sort of thing that might qualify as "meaningful" is usually, minimally a triangle of ideas.

We do alot of interpreting with tone and gesture and lots and syntax and lots of other things that are difficult to capture in a text, of course. But alot of the time we do it with words...using a word that can point to alot of things, and using other words to do the pointing, picking out which of the many things it might refer to. In the maps we make, we try to find the clusters and interdependencies of clusters of ideas, where a group of ideas partly points to one another, and partly also supplies the pointing. In effect it is a mapping exercise, but of ideas.

In effect the maps look alot like the social network maps we make, except they show dependencies between ideas instead of people. So we are going to try to collect as many stories as we can...of any sort: stories about the old time, funny stories, short stories, long stories. I really have no idea how this part of the project will turn out (hope our funder isn't reading this section), but I am excited to see how it turns out.

News on the weather front: we are supposed to get up into the single (negative) digits, and perhaps even up to +2C this week. More weird weather, people are nervous.

Consutation Wrap-up

We finished a week of community consultations yesterday, and I met with the Nunatsaivut Government Research Committee to talk to them about the recommendations we received from the focus groups, to review the final survey, and go over again the recruitment and interview methods we are using. The process was very useful, altogether.

The last focus group was a mix of ages, and like the two before them, they recommended a number of additions. They like the suggestion of asking about responsibility (who do you think should be responsible for dealing with...?) that the young people had made in the youth section, and recommended it be added to each section. They also suggested that we expand our question on Inuit traditional knowledge to include customs and values....the concern was that the former was too narrow. This was a very interesting insight. The notion of traditional Inuit knowledge has of course become very political during the land claims process and since, and one of our participants thought that alot of what was unique and interesting about the past here was not included: Moravian traditions that had become largely caught up with local identity, and was now looked at as foreign, and local values as much as particular knowledges.

This was very smart, and might be phrased differently by a social scientist like me looking at how legal processes serve to narrow the range and specificity of particular discourses, but not much is gained by turning it into academic talk. The point is particular interesting because that is precisely what happened in Alaska.

Another suggestion was to end with a more positive note (surveys about social problems tend to be very gloomy), and ask what the interviewee thought was the most positive thing Nain had going for it right now. This is very smart as well, and might point to a variety of different images of the community. I will be very interested to see how people answer that question.

The meeting with the Research Committee went very well, I think (haven't heard back yet). They have been friendly and supportive throughout, and considerably more competent than some of the ethics review panels I have dealt with back in New York (who shall remain nameless, but whose initials are CUNY GC!). With their final go ahead, we will start interviews soon...Monday I hope.

Just catching up, I also went to a Vale Inco meeting with the community Wednesday night. I thought I was going to the Aurora Uranium Mining meeting (missed it, it was at the Community Hall at 6:00). Instead I went to the NG building at 7:00 to find Vale Inco talking about shipping at Voisey's Bay. Ordinarily, shipping is a large concern because winter shipping breaks up the ice that people regularly cross to go to their cabins (where they hunt and fish, get firewood, and other resources). Two factors make this an usual year. The first is that the Voisey's Bay strike means that there aren't at present any ships planned. The second is that this year the ice has come in so late, because of both weather and warming, that it is still in very poor condition, and people are unable to travel. Were it a usual shipping year, it would be a fiasco.

They discussed the pontoon bridge that a local company, Sikumiut, puts across the broken ice, which seems to have worked well. But most of the talk was concern for the late spring. When the ice forms, if it does not form properly, due to uneven heating and cooling, and stormy weather, it will melt in uneven fashion when the Spring comes. This makes it very dangerous to travel over, and people were expecting a rough Spring. This is critical because it is an important time for gathering country foods...the weather is milder, but the travel routes are still covered in ice and snow, and are accessible. In other words, Spring is a peak harvest time, and poor ice conditions in Spring put a lot of people at risk.


I'll end with a photo of our the building where our office is located, and where most of the interviewing will take place. On the first posting you can see a picture of it in August. Here it is in January (the tallest building on the left. Again, double click to blow it up to full screen size.

A Few Pictures

We have finished the second of the two focus groups, and both have provided alot of really useful information. Fran invited a group of younger people on the first day, and elders on the second. Both groups made a number of suggestions to the survey questions, which were important and informative. So I will be revising the questions a bit.

The reaction, though, was very positive, with most of the focus group attendees wanting to sign up for interviews right away. As a result, we are pretty booked up early next week. It will be good to get started with the interviews, but I have scheduled them a bit spread out...just in case there are any kinks in the system that have to be worked out. Josh arrives on Sunday, and my hope is that by the time he gets here we have a regular flow of interviews.

We will likely schedule the elders for interviews at their houses, if they prefer. Fran and I will go "on call" as they say, and allot more time to those sessions, while Josh minds the shop. It will make it easier to explain things in more detail, and give them the flexibility they need and deserve. (The elders, rightly, expect to be given the time to say what they have to say, and the house visits sound very interesting to me). One of the attendees yesterday said it was important for us to get out on the land with folks, and I may try to set something like that up if it is possible for later in the spring (April?). I'd like to get out, like I did in Alaska, so if the chance comes up I will take it.

I've posted a few pictures here to lighten up the somber tone of the last post, just for fun. If you click on the pictures, they blow up to full screen, with much better detail and color. They were all taken at about 9:30 this morning, but it is still pretty dark.

The first picture is looking down the street where I am staying toward the harbor. If you look closely, you will see the tops of the trash cans coming up out of the snow beside the street! They are 55 gallon drums, but all that is visible is the top 8 inches or so. The snow on the street is compacted by the snowmobile traffic, but is still more than two feet deep. As a result, any work on the street has to go down through two feet of ice and frozen ground. So here is a second photo of a work crew using a jack hammer to get down to the street level to work on the water (I hope I'm not going to get back to the house to find that we have no water...).
And finally, the last shot is of Nain Bay as the sun is coming up over Mount Sophie to my right. The mountains in the distance are sunny, but we are still in shade here.

More tonight, about the Voiseys Bay / Vale Inco transportation meeting last night.

Woodsy

A quiet Sunday. The brief blow (100 kph) of last night drifted a lot of snow, but had died down to a quiet 20 or 30 by this morning. I had a restless night, but it was bright and sunny, and Brian (my host) suggested a walk. The temperature was pretty cold, -20C or so with a wind chill in the -40s, so it seemed like a good test of my new clothes. I bundled up pretty good, about as pretty good as I can, and we went out. Once we were in the trees and the wind was gone, I was actually overdressed a bit and sweating. Who knew you could sweat at -20C. Funny.

As we were walking I was thinking about karma, actually. It was quiet and I was thinking at first about how the trees manage to live with all the snow and cold, and the dogs who live their lives outside here. Fate and struggle. In part the focus on karma was a response to the death of the girl here, though not directly, and in part thinking about how my being here affects the people close to me. I’ll stick to the former. The story goes like this. We are putting together a focus group of young people. Fran is working on who to invite, and her initial list included some people directly touched by the tragedy, and so had to be revised. It would be unfair to invite them, obviously. They have enough on their plates, I said to myself. And it’s this idea, of having enough on their plates, that also made me think of karma.

I’m not particularly religious (actually not at all) and by no means an expert in eastern religions….but I’ve always thought of karma as that delicate intersection between conscience and the contingency of the events around us. We bear the marks of our acts (conscience), but so do those around us. And our awareness of how our own decisions and their accompanying fates affect those around rebounds back on that same consciousness. This isn’t quite the “super-ego” that Freud talked about--it isn’t about control or self control or internalization, all terms I think are particularly useless when applied to people. Rather, it is about the simultaneity of living with the effects of our acts and decisions as we simultaneously live with the waves that lift and move us, the accumulated effects of the events and decisions of people both close and far as they crash down on us, all that with the power to reflect on them and to redirect that karma to others, and the decision whether to do that or not.

In a sense, this is the kind of anthropology that I learned from Gerald Sider. And when I do anthropology well, it is because I am paying attention to this. “People everywhere think about the future…” Sider wrote at the beginning of the Newfoundland book, and he is right. At times I wonder if it is folly to think that there can be an objective science of karma in this sense, but actually I think that there can be--though I doubt very much it would look like science to most folks. Lately I am trying to think of it as a dialectical science, or a science that springs from a dialectical method, but that only muddies the water at this point (though I do think sociology, which I do about half the time…I’m only a part-time anthropologist...could be an objective approach to karma, to those waves, though it would have to take much more seriously the fact that people are aware of karma, and their ability to move it around). Althusser thought there could be an objective approach to this whole karma mess (I am putting words in his mouth), and I think I agree, though I’m still working out how to do that. Ordinary sociology has landed a bit far from the mark, I’m afraid to say.

But all of this is very far from the issue. The issue for people here and in places like this is how to live amid that sea of karma, how to know and get some handle on when and where they spread it around. Perhaps psychology is the attempt to see that, though it isn’t often phrased in that way, at least not since William James. And I’m not a psychologist, I suppose. Still I’ve always thought of myself as something of a good sink hole for other peoples’ bad karma, able to pull it out and down and let it gradually go away…which makes me particularly aware at times of how we depend on one another to cope with the accumulated crap of our lives.

There are people like that everywhere, and everyone does it a bit for everyone else. But what happens when the karmic load is too big, too much? In Alaska, it was always shocking to me to learn who committed suicide, at least among the young people. It wasn’t the down and outs or the trouble makers, not at all. It was usually those on the cusp of making it. They too came from troubled homes or lives, but quite often they were the ones who seemed to have the wherewithal to get out, to make the break, to float above the enormous sea of bad karma around them. And when they didn’t, the downward spiral was intense and sudden. I wondered today, as I was walking in the woods, whether those same abilities that made it possible for them to nearly break away—those abilities to sense the movements and currents of the karma around them, whether it was these same abilities that finally broke them. Perhaps it broke them because they couldn’t stop seeing iall that bad karma and taking it and using something like courage and patience to let it melt away, until it finally filled them up and they couldn't do it any more. I don’t know; I’m out of my depth here. I’ve never been in a situation like that, never got full, as it were. And I did get out of a bit of crummy place, rather than getting pulled back in. So I may be the least capable of understanding this sort of thing. But alas, this is what comes of cold walks in the woods…getting in over one’s head, so to speak.

Late in the day today my skis arrived and I hoofed it down to the airstrip to pick them up. I’m excited by the prospect of more time sloshing through the paths behind the town. It was amazing beautiful. Next time I’ll bring my camera, and lighten up this discussion with pictures of me in funny clothes.

Week 1

It's the weekend, and I'm catching up on a few things. The cold is here, apparently (-40C wind chill last night), so I'm waiting for it to warm up a bit before I go into the office. In the mean time I am finishing reading Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams. It isn't very recent, and would probably be written alot differently now (first published in 1984), but it is interesting...lots of polar bear ecology and romantic reflections on life in hard places. Josh put me on to it, and I have liked it.

Josh arrives on January 31, by which time the interview process will be in full swing. The focus groups and community meetings will be done by Thursday, and if all goes well, we can begin interviewing right after that...maybe as early as Friday or Saturday. I am going to give out referral coupons at the focus groups, and some of those folks might like to get in on the process early to earn a couple of dollars. I will have to take it a bit slow, because the bank account, while open, will not have any money in it to pay anyone until two weeks from Monday...the time it takes for a check from the US to clear. Once it is in, then it should be smooth sailing, financially, but until then I will have to dip into personal funds. It can be costly: with referrals and interview fees, it can add up to $300 or more per day. A week of that will just about do me in.

Nain is in a bit of stir. I wasn't sure whether to write about this or not, but have decided it bears on the project and people might have some useful advice. But for reasons that will be immediately clear, I have mixed feelings about it (from reading Lopez's book, I am beginning to think of anthropologists as the human equivalent of arctic foxes...small, somewhat maladapted creatures who make their winter living by heading out onto the ice to scavenge polar bear kills...parasites living off of someone else's struggle to get by, despite their beautiful coats). In any case the story is all over the CBC North news, so it is clearly not a secret.

The day before I got here there was a woman found dead here in Nain. The cause of death is unclear, and there is RCMP investigative team here. The have called it a "suspicious death". She was in her early 20s, and apparently in a tumultuous relationship with a young man of about her age who had previous run-ins with the law. The town is of course very suspicious and upset, and the RCMP aren't saying anything. No arrests have been made, which makes people here nervous to think that there might be someone dangerous in town while the police seem to do very little. Of course they are not doing very little--they are waiting for the autopsy, which is being done in Goose Bay. But they are a bit high minded and hide behind procedure. As one person here put it, they are very hands off when dealing with violence against native women.

All that being said, Nain is like any town...these things happen more often than people are prepared to admit, especially in places where alcohol affects families and turbulent describes the political economy as much peoples' personal relationships. OIne result is that I have started looking at some of the crime and economic data for Labrador as a whole, and the north coast, which is predominantly indigenous towns--Nain (Inuit), Natuashish (Innu), Hopedale (Inuit), Makkovic (Inuit/white) and Rigolet (Inuit/Metis/white)--compare well with the non-indigenous towns on the south coast--Cartwright (white/metis), Mary's Harbour (white), Charlottetown (white), Paradise River (white). All have similar levels of employment, similar dependency on the government employment, and similar levels of outmigration. And similar levels of violence.

In any case, I don't intend this to be a news blog. I raised the event here because it bears on one of our prime research topics--what we are calling "household wellness"...a catchall for questions about violence and insecurity within households. It is an issue in any small town, and not specific to Nain or Labrador. But our approach is somewhat different in this project. We are asking people a number of questions about where/to whom they would direct people for help, whether they have been approached for help, and a number of other questions that try to avoid asking directly about what is happening (which is none of our business, in a certain sense) to the social structure which surrounds these events. By constructing the composit network of people as they are affected by this issue, we can look at how that structure is tied into the structures put in place to reproduce the town as a whole, on a daily basis. The point of this approach is to take the question of violence out of the realm of the personal or psychological and instead look at it as something that happens within a context of a group of people acting socially to produce individual and collective livelihoods, public structures and the resources to run them, and systems of inequality that place social divisions within the day-to-day events of small and large places. A complicated task.

With that said, I'm off to the office to try to get some work done, and perhaps shoot a few more pictures of a cold, beautiful place. K

Made it to Nain

A first post from Nain! I made it into town yesterday, and the phone service is back today. My hosts have a DSL connection, so we have internet access, though the village wide data connection is still down…meaning I don’t have access at work. But things are shaping up. I’ve gotten all but one of the boxes I sent up, and the office is set up. Today I did an interview on the local radiostation, which I will upload when I get the file. It was brief but fun…they interview most visitors who are going to be here for a while, and then translate the interview into inuktitut. It functions as a community introduction and local news, and probably some entertainment as people get to see all the strange folks who wander their way here.

The weather is cold and clear. The wind died down a bit yesterday, and the temperature has been dropping a bit. Folks here are happy…it means that the ocean will freeze enough to support snow mobiles and they can go to their camps. Many people have cabins up and down the coast, and the only way they can get to them easily is to go over the ice. Others have them inland, and go by way of interior trails. But most are along the coast. My impression is that most people use them on the weekends, rather than going out for months at a time. It makes sense…many have jobs, and kids in school. But they still use them to hunt and fish and relax, and to cut wood to bring back to their houses.

Fran (our community liaison) and I went around letting people know that I am here, and what are plans are. We are planning a community forum for next Thursday night, and found space to hold that. And we are planning three focus groups as well—one with young people, one with elders, and one more general. We hope that the focus groups will give us some feedback on the questions we are planning to ask, and help get the word out about what we are doing. I went over the survey with Fran today, and she made some important changes and additions. I am anxious to get started with the interviews, but I know that things will be busy soon (too busy), and that the preparation is going to help.

Beyond planning the project, Fran asked if I would be interested in getting out on the land while I am here. People do a lot of partridge hunting this time of year, which sounds fun, and is good to eat. The caribou are pretty far inland right now, but come closer to the coast later in the winter. It would be a cold adventure…out on skidoo for a few days…but I would love to do it if it works out. I remember going seal hunting in Alaska as one of the more amazing things I did there. My warm clothes were here waiting for me here, and are warm enough for a trip like that. I don’t have a picture of me bundled up yet, but will post one when I do.