THE DENE SEER (pronounced “see-er”) – A Dene medicine man who sang four seer songs over a long night, in the late 1880s. (voiceover)
LITTLE BOY – A beautiful Native boy. Eight to ten years old. The personification of the darkest uranium found at the centre of the earth.
FAT MAN – An American bomb-test dummy manning his house in the late 1940s and ’50s. He gets more and more human as the bombs draw closer. Unlikeable in a likeable way. In his forties.
ROUND ROSE – An aged Iva Toguri who works in her father’s Japanese souvenir store in Chicago, still waiting for an apology by the U.S. government for her prosecution as “Tokyo Rose” – a propaganda radio personality who aired “zero hour” broadcasts during the Second World War. Her “on air” personality was seen as the exotic Japanese geisha girl by American G.I.s. In reality, she is an almost homely Japanese-American student who went to UCLA and believed herself to be American before and after anything else.
THE WIDOW – An older Dene women who keeps a fire of love for her dead Dene ore-carrier husband.
ROSE – A Métis woman in her twenties who walks between Native and non-Native lines as she works in the North at her father’s Hudson’s Bay Store. A bread-maker and a dreamer looking for her place.
KOJI – A Japanese fisherman just before the blast of the atomic bomb. His spirit holds on to a cherry branch of hope until he transforms himself to the other side of the world.
THE RADIUM PAINTER – A beautiful American woman who paints radium on watch dials in the 1930s. She is looking for the answers to the glow and death of her life.
CAPTAIN MIKE – For more than thirty years, captain of the Radium Prince, a barge that transported uranium used in the atom bomb. Icelandic. Late forties to fifty years old. (voiceover)
THE JAPANESE GRANDMOTHER – The slow march of a grandmother’s hope for her grandson’s survival after the dropping of the bomb. (*double cast)
THE MINER – A white Port Radium miner in the depths of the earth. Late twenties/early thirties. (*double cast)
THE BROTHERS LABINE – The two brother prospectors who discovered uranium at the base of Great Bear Lake in the 1930s. Thirty-ish. (*double cast)
THE TWO STEVEDORES – Native boat pilots who navigated the boats of ore downriver. (*double cast)
DENE ORE CARRIER – The widow’s husband who emerges from the fire in her dreams and ultimately joins the long line of Dene ore carriers when she is able to let him go into the next world. (*double cast)
RADIO ANNOUNCERS:
LORNE GREENE/VOICE OF DOOM
RADIO ANNOUNCER FOR CBC’S NATIONAL NEWS BULLETIN – A voice that so characterized the bad news of the Second World War in Canada that it became known as the “voice of doom.”
SLAVEY ANNOUNCERS – Community members who broadcast in the North trying to find and reach out over the air to loved ones who are missing from them. In this case, a call and response from this world to the spirit world.
TOKYO ROSE – A 1940s radio siren that embodied the erotic fantasies of U.S. Army men in the Pacific War of the Second World War. In this case, the radio announcer is Round Rose, an older somewhat bitter version of the myth that broadcasts her view from the back storeroom of her father’s store.