We began our careers as pastors with a call to serve two congregations in southwestern North Dakota. That corner of North Dakota wasn’t settled until after the turn of the 20th century. Located south of the Northern Pacific Railroad, the land was originally part of the Great Sioux Reservation and the site of the last large-scale buffalo hunts aimed at forcing the Lakota people onto reservations. When subsequent actions by the federal government reduced the reservations, the land became property of the United States, which offered part of it to the Milwaukee Railroad and opened part of it to homesteading in the first decade of the century.

The churches we served were part of a process in which church founders followed the railroad and planted churches in the communities. A town site was located every 20 miles to provide water for steam locomotives, but more than half of those towns never became home to more than a few families. Once the buffalo were gone, it was tough country from which to make a living from the land. Cattle ranching depended on growing hay for feed. Grain farming was dependent on unpredictable weather. The original 160 allotments were too small to support a family. In each generation, farms and ranches were consolidated as people moved away from the area.

By the time we arrived, the towns were nearing their 75th anniversaries, and the population was steadily declining. We spoke of serving churches in rural and remote locations. The local hospital received funding from a program founded to support wilderness health providers. We thought nothing of driving 150 miles one way for shopping and specialized medical care.

The reality, however, was that those communities weren’t really remote, and we weren’t really isolated. We felt the support of the communities we served. We got together regularly with other clergy serving congregations in the area. We had access to reasonably priced groceries and high-quality health care. We were able to visit our families who lived elsewhere.

Decades later, we spent some time at the Sandy-Saulteaux Spiritual Centre in Manitoba, where we met pastors serving really remote communities. In northern Canada, some communities are not accessible by road. We used to think of the United States as large, but Canada's landmass is larger. Canada is the second-largest country in the world after Russia. The provinces that border the US are large from north to south, and their population centers are mainly in the south. Nunavut and the Northwest Territories are dotted with villages that are hundreds of miles from the nearest town and more than a thousand miles from urban centers.

In those remote areas, indigenous people have lived in traditional ways, hunting and fishing, and practicing subsistence living. Some of those communities have been impacted by resource extraction, often through mining and petroleum drilling.

Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories is the largest lake in Canada entirely within its borders. It straddles the Arctic Circle. It is the world’s tenth-largest lake by volume. Fort Confidence, on the north shore, is now uninhabited. A mining area called Port Radium is on the eastern shore. The indigenous community of Deline is on the southwest corner of the lake. It is where the Sahtu Dene people have lived for thousands of years. Originally a nomadic tribe, they started to settle more firmly in Deline in the 1940s.

Tribal members had been employed at the Eldorado Mine on the eastern shore of the lake. The mine opened in 1932 and was an early source of radium, a substance considered a miracle cure for cancer. It could also be used to make instrument dials glow in the dark and was a sought-after substance during World War II. Sahtu Dene men worked at the mine, transporting valuable bags of radioactive ore. During the war, mining switched from radium to uranium. Uranium made its way from Canada’s north to the Manhattan Project in the U.S. and ultimately to Japan in atomic bombs dropped at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

In addition to the legacy of destruction of atomic weapons, the war left behind a legacy of nuclear waste and environmental damage. The Eldorado mine’s ore processing facility, located in Port Hope, Ontario, is the center of a billion-dollar cleanup campaign. Less attention, however, has been paid to cleaning up the mine site on the shore of Great Bear Lake.

The Sahtu Dene miners went back to their families in the Deline area. Many developed cancer as they aged. The town gained the grim title of the “Village of Widows.” A national report examining the mine's health legacy, conducted in 2005, acknowledged the legacy of fear and anxiety surrounding environmental contamination and health.

When someone in Deline needs advanced health care services, they must be transported to Stanton Territorial Hospital, located in Yellowknife. That is a 350-mile flight. The drive from Deline to Yellowknife is 1,752 miles when the ice road is open in winter. There is no year-round road connecting Deline to the outside world.

The population of Deline isn’t significant. Five hundred seventy-three people lived there in 2021, according to a count. The population has been slowly growing in recent years, up from 533 in the 2016 count. They are served by a primary care clinic located in Deline.

Deline is just one of the remote communities in northern Canada. There are several communities north of the Arctic Circle in the Northwest Territories that are even farther from advanced medical care than Deline. Nearly a thousand people live in Tuktoyaktuk, located on the Beaufort Sea near the Mackenzie River Delta. It is the most northern village accessible by road in Canada.

When we lived in North Dakota, we didn’t really live in a remote location compared to some communities in northern Canada. We didn’t even know what remote was at the time.