Copyright and Creative Commons
Copyright applies to all the images and text on the Uranium City History’s website and are covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License. You are free to share and adapt the material for non-commercial purposes, as long as you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may not use the material for commercial purposes without permission from the copyright holder. The full definition of the license is given on this webpage. If you want to use any images or text, then you should first visit that link and read carefully.
Two important aspects of the license: first, you must attribute any images belonging to me to the Uranium City History website. Images or text contributed by anyone else must be attributed to them by name and to the page on on the Uranium City History website from which they were taken from.
Second, the non-commercial part of the license means you cannot use the recordings for any purpose where you’re seeking to make a profit or expecting to be paid. Please don’t disregard that rule!
About This Site
This is in some ways a personal site reflecting my long off and on association with Uranium City. Like a documentary film, I use this site to explore the town, the history and culture of the North, the nuclear industry and its effects, the mystery of abandonment, but most of all the history of this small town where I was lucky enough to grow up and visit many times since. I lived in UC for two parts of my young life: from the mid-’60s to the very early ’70s when I was very young (my memories of this period are vague and mostly second-hand), then later in the late ’70s when I was in my teens, and the town was growing fast and seemed set to continue for decades, perhaps indefinitely, as a model northern town.
I went back as an adult fourteen years after the mine very abruptly closed, with just six months notice, in June, 1982. I stayed one week, and went back another four times, the last, in August, 2022. In February, 2003, I went back with a producer and co-director Ole Gjerstad, and Dave Segerts, long-time resident and cinematographer, in an attempt to make a documentary film. We had exploration funding from the NFB, CBC, APTN, spent 10 days shooting in -40 degree weather. Alas, conditions in the Canadian film and TV industry changed that year, and we had difficulty securing more funding and all that remains from that shoot is 30+ hours of raw footage, most in a format not easily digitized. Over time that some of that footage will appear on this site, along with all and any other material I can secure from across the web: publications, company records, broadcast footage, archives personal and official, as well as stories and other content from individual contributors.
Along with my own recollections, I hope to collect the memories of anyone who cares to write in, send photos, images, video, or whatever else they might want to contribute. Much of the writing on this site is necessarily subjective, formed out of my own experiences and memories, or the experiences and memories of individual contributors. I hope that by collecting these stories artifacts in one place I can eventually provide a history of Uranium City, the industry behind it, the inter-twining of white and native Canadians that gave, and continues to give, Uranium City, and the area round it, such a distinctive character.
This site is under development, with new features and content being rolled out regularly.