In January 1978, a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite plunged from orbit. Radioactive fragments of the spacecraft landed in a region of the Canadian Arctic known as “the Barrens.” Canadian state officials and journalists alike expressed relief that the accident had occurred in a place seemingly devoid of life, human or otherwise. However, Dene and Inuit communities that depended on local subsistence faced very real danger of exposure. The Cosmos 954 incident marked only one of several nuclear accidents to take place in the North American Arctic, threatening Northern Indigenous communities whose experiences were in turn largely erased from contemporary and historical accounts.
Conflict between settler experts and Indigenous knowledge were complicated by problems of linguistic and cultural translation. As the joint Canadian-American cleanup team descended upon the Barrens, the threat of radioactive contamination forced Indigenous communities in which the very vocabulary of the Space Age did not exist to participate in novel debates over space governance—and to contribute to liability negotiations between the Canadian and Soviet governments. Meanwhile, claims of “natural” radiation in the region allowed nuclear experts attempting to identify and quantify traces of the satellite within a broadening vertical and circumpolar nuclear continuum to dismiss Indigenous concerns about exposure to the satellite’s remains. Outsider expertise subsumed the embodied experiences of individuals living in proximity to the radionuclides in question—whether in the form of natural uranium ore, in the cells of lichens and tissues of caribou, or falling from the sky.
