5
A BREACH OF TRUST

The Radioactive Colonization of Native North America

There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial.

—Susan Griffin
A Chorus of Stones

IN 1903, THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT OPINED THAT, AS A RACIAL GROUP, American Indians, like minor children and those deemed mentally deficient or deranged, should be viewed as legally incompetent to manage our own assets and affairs. Indians were therefore to be understood as perpetual “wards” of the federal government, the high court held, the government our permanent “trustee.” With a deft circularity of reasoning, the justices then proceeded to assert that, since it was Indians’ intrinsic incompetence which had led to our being placed under trust supervision, we should by the same definition be construed as having no standing from which to challenge the exercise of our trustee's authority over us.1

Thus did the U.S. formally and unilaterally assign itself “plenary”—that is, absolute and unchallengeable—power over all native lands, lives, and natural resources within the area of forty-eight contiguous states of North America, as well as Alaska, Hawai‘i and other external possessions such as Guam and “American” Samoa. The only curb upon the imagined prerogatives of the United States in this regard was/is an equally self-appointed fiduciary responsibility to act, or at least claim to act, in the “best interests” of those it has subjugated both physically and juridically.² Although the basic proposition at issue has undergone almost continuous modification and perfection over the years, it remains very much in effect at present.³

The scale and implications of the situation are in some ways staggering. In its 1978 final report, the government's own Indian Claims Commission conceded that after more than thirty years’ intensive investigation, it had been unable to find evidence that the U.S. had ever acquired anything resembling legitimate title to about 35 percent of its claimed territoriality, all of which therefore remains native property in a legal sense.⁴ The approximately 2.5 percent of U.S. territory currently reserved for Indian use and occupancy—most of it still held in federal trust status—is also extraordinarily rich in mineral resources.⁵ As much as two-thirds of the uranium ore the U.S. claims as its own is situated within reservation boundaries, as is about a quarter of the readily accessible low sulfur coal, up to twenty percent of the oil and natural gas, and substantial deposits of molybdenum, copper, bauxite, and zeolite.⁶

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a component of the U.S. Department of Interior, presently administers trust relations with several hundred indigenous peoples and communities encompassing, by official count, some two million individuals.⁷ Simple arithmetic reveals that when the fifty million-odd acres of reserved land is divided by the federal tally of Indians, we end up as the largest landholding group in North America on a per capita basis. Divide the estimated dollar value of the mineral assets within the land by the number of Indians and you end up with native people as the wealthiest population aggregate on the continent (again, on a per capita basis).

All of this is, unfortunately, on paper. The practical reality is that American Indians, far from being well off, are today the most impoverished sector of the U.S. population.⁸ We experience by far the lowest average annual and lifetime incomes of any group. The poorest locality in the United States for 23 of the past 25 years has been Shannon County, on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, where a recent study found 88 percent of the available housing to be substandard, much of it to the point of virtual uninhabitability. The annual per capita income in Shannon County was barely over $2,000 in 1995, while unemployment hovered in the 90th percentile.⁹

Bad as conditions are on Pine Ridge, they are only marginally worse than those on the adjoining Rosebud Sioux Reservation and a host of others. In many ways, health data convey the costs and consequences of such deep and chronic poverty far better than their financial counterparts. These begin with the facts that, overall, American Indians suffer far and away the highest rates of malnutrition, death from exposure, and infant mortality (14. 5 times the national average on some reservations).¹⁰

The Indian health level is the lowest and the disease rate the highest of all major population groups in the United States. The incidence of tuberculosis is over 400 percent the national average. Similar statistics show the incidence of strep infections is 1,000 percent, meningitis is 2,000 percent higher, and dysentery is 10, 000 percent higher. Death rates from disease are shocking when Indian and non- Indian populations are compared. Influenza and pneumonia are 300 percent greater killers among Indians. Diseases such as hepatitis are at epidemic proportions, with an 800 percent higher chance of death. Diabetes is almost a plague [6.8 times the general population rate].¹¹

It should come as no surprise, given the ubiquitousness of such circumstances, that alcoholism and other addictions take an inordinate toll Although fewer Indians drink than do nonindians, the rate of alcohol-related accidental deaths among native people is ten times that of the general population, while the rate of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) among the newborn is 33 times greater.¹² The suicide rate among Indians is ten times the national norm, while, among native youth, it is 10,000 percent higher than among our nonindian counterparts.¹³

All told, the current life expectancy of a reservation-based American Indian male is less than fifty years in a society where the average man lives 71.8 years. Reservation-based Indian women live approximately three years longer than males, but general population women enjoy an average life expectancy seven years longer than nonindian men.¹⁴ Hence, every time an American Indian dies on a reservation—or, conversely, every time a child is born—it can be argued that about one-third of a lifetime is lost. This thirtieth percentile attrition of the native population has prevailed throughout the twentieth century, a situation clearly smacking of genocide.¹⁵

This last is, of course, a policy-driven phenomenon, not something inadvertent or merely “unfortunate.” Here, the BIA's exercise of trust authority over native assets comes into play. While it has orchestrated the increasingly intensive “development” of reservation lands since 1945, a matter which might logically have been expected to alleviate at least the worst of the symptomologies sketched above, the Bureau's role in setting the rates at which land was/is leased and royalties for extracted minerals were/are paid by major corporations has precluded any such result.¹⁶

Instances in which the BIA has opted to rent out the more productive areas on reservations to nonindian ranchers or agribusiness interests for as little as $1 per acre per year, and for as long as 99 years, are legion and notorious.¹⁷ As to mineral royalties, the Bureau has consistently structured contracts “in behalf of” Indians which require payment of as little as ten percent of market rates while releasing participating corporations from such normal overhead expenses as the maintenance of minimum standards for worker/ community safety and environmental safeguards. In fact, most such arrangements have not even provided for a semblance of postoperational clean up of mining and processing sites.¹⁸

Such “savings” accrue to U.S. corporations in the form of superprofits indistinguishable from those gleaned through their enterprises in the Third World, a matter which has unquestionably facilitated the emergence of the United States as the worlds dominant economic power in the post-World War II context.¹⁹ Minerals such as uranium, molybdenum, and zeolite, moreover, are not only commercially valuable but strategically crucial, an important factor in understanding America's present global military ascendancy.²⁰

All of this has been obtained, as a matter of policy, at the direct expense of Native North America as well as other underdeveloped regions of the world. As Eduardo Galeano once explained to mainstream Americans, with respect to the impact of their lifestyle(s) on Latin America: “Your wealth is our poverty.”²¹ The correlation is no less true on American Indian reservations. It holds up even in such superficially more redeemable connections as U.S. efforts to curtail acid rain and other collateral effects of electrical power generation through reliance upon low sulfur bituminous rather than high sulfur anthracite coal.

The largest and most easily extracted deposit of bituminous coal in North America is located at Black Mesa, in northern Arizona, an area occupied almost exclusively by Navajos. Beginning in 1974, the federal government undertook a program of compulsory relocation to remove some 13,500 resident Navajos from the intended mining area, dispersing them into primarily urban areas and completely obliterating their sociocultural existence (until then, they had comprised the largest remaining enclave of traditionally oriented Indians in the lower forty-eight states). The land upon which their subsistence economy was based is itself to be destroyed, a circumstance barring even the possibility of their reconstitution as a viable human group at some future date.²² The coal, once mined, is slurried to the Four Corners Power Plant and other generating facilities where it is burned to produce electricity. This “product” is then transported over massive power grids to meet such socially vital needs as keeping the air conditioners humming in the Phoenix Valley and the neon lights lit 24 hours a day at Las Vegas casinos. Meanwhile, 46 percent of the homes on the Navajo Reservation have no electricity at all (54 percent have no indoor plumbing, 82 percent no phone).²³ No more fitting illustration of Galeano's equation seems conceivable.

INTERNAL COLONIALISM

Historically, the term “colonialism” has been employed to describe this sort of relationship between nations. Since ratification of the United Nations Charter in 1945, however, such structural domination/exploitation of any nation or people by another, even (or especially) when it is disguised as the exercise of a perpetual “trust,” has been deemed illegal within the canons of international jurisprudence. The principle has been clarified, and has received considerable amplification, in subsequent instruments, most unequivocally in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV), also known as the “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, 1960.”24

1. The subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights, is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations and is an impediment to the promotion of world peace and cooperation.
2. All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
3. Inadequacy of political, economic, social or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence.
4. All armed action or repressive measures directed against dependent peoples shall cease in order to enable them to exercise peacefully and freely their right to complete independence, and the integrity of their national territory shall be respected.
5. Immediate steps shall be taken in Trust or Non-Self-Governing Territories or all other territories which have not yet attained independence, to transfer all powers to the peoples of those territories, without any conditions or reservations, in accordance with their freely expressed will and desire, with- out any distinction as to race, creed or colour, in order to enable them to enjoy complete independence and freedom.
6. Any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purpose and principles of the Charter of United Nations.
7. All States shall observe faithfully and strictly the provisions in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the present Declaration on the basis of equality, non-interference in the internal affairs of all States, and respect for the sovereign rights of all peoples and their territorial integrity.²⁵

While this would seem straightforward enough, the Declaration's universality was muddied by a follow-up provision—General Assembly Resolution 1541 (XV)—which effectively constrained its applicability to peoples/territories separated from colonizing powers by at least thirty miles of open ocean.²⁶ This “overseas requirement” has seriously undermined assertions of the right to self-determination by American Indians and other indigenous peoples.²⁷

There are decolonization issues in the international system which are not so easily defined, such as the Palestine Question or that of South Africa, while the formation of Pakistan out of greater India and the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan did not relate to legalisms but to political realities. On the other hand, separation by water is no guarantee of independence, as in the case of Puerto Rico, which is officially the “colony” of the United States under United Nations Trusteeship.²⁸

This last could as easily be said of Hawai‘i, or such “protectorates” as Guam, “American” Samoa, or the “U.S.” Virgin Islands.²⁹ In any event, the “Blue Water Thesis” institutionalized in Resolution 1541 has afforded the U.S., Canada, and other U.N. member-states a useful pretext upon which to construct the pretense that their ongoing colonization of indigenous nations/peoples is not really colonialism at all. Rather, they contend, they are merely exercising the prerogative, provided in the U.N. Charter, of preserving the integrity of their own respective territories.³⁰ At present, the U.S. in particular is endeavoring to have native rights (re)defined in international law in a manner conforming to its own practice of maintaining American Indians in a condition of “domestic” subjugation.³¹

While it is true that the “internal” variety of colonialism visited upon native peoples by modern settler states differs in many respects from the “classic” models of external colonization developed by European empires over the past several centuries, it is colonialism nonetheless.³² Moreover, it is no less genocidal in its implications and effects than were the forms of overseas colonialism analyzed by Jean-Paul Sartre in his famous 1968 essay on the topic.³³ Indeed, given how seamlessly it has been imposed, how imperfectly its existence and functioning are reflected in even the most ostensibly liberatory political discourses, and how committed to attaining its formal legitimation the great majority of states have lately proven themselves, internal colonialism may well prove to be more so.³⁴

Predictably, there are a number of ways in which the Sartrian equation of colonialism to genocide can be brought to bear when examining the situation of contemporary Native North America. Several of these were suggested above. Probably the clearest representation will be found, however, in the sorry history of how the United States has wielded its self-assigned trust authority over Indian lands and lives in pursuit of global nuclear supremacy over the past half-century.

RADIOACTIVE COLONIZATION

The origins of U.S. nuclear policy obviously lie in its quest to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. The “Manhattan Project” was conducted mainly at the Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory, a huge fortified compound created in 1942 on the Pajarito Plateau, northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, on land supposedly reserved for the exclusive use and occupancy of the San Ildefonso Pueblo.35 Uranium, the key material used in the lab's experiments and eventual fabrication of prototype nuclear weapons, was mined and milled exclusively in the Monument Valley area of the nearby Navajo Reservation.³⁶ Hanford, a uranium enrichment/plutonium manufacturing facility, was added in 1944, near the town of Richland, on Yakima land in eastern Washington.³⁷ When the first bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, it was on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, now the White Sands Test Range, adjoining the Mescalero Apache Reservation.³⁸

While the official rationale for these site selections has always been that their remoteness from major urban centers was/is essential to protecting the secrecy of the research and production to which they were devoted, this in itself does not account for why they were not situated in such sparsely populated areas as western Kansas.³⁹ A better explanation would seem to reside in the fact that planners were concerned from the outset that the nuclear program embodied substantial risks to anyone living in proximity to it.⁴⁰ Such people as resided in the central plains region by the 1940s were mostly members of the settler society; those at San Ildefonso, Mescalero, and Yakima were almost entirely native. For U.S. policymakers, there appears to have been no real question as to which group was the more readily expendable.

That such an assessment is none too harsh is borne out by even the most cursory review of federal comportment in the immediate postwar period. Already possessed of a nuclear weapons monopoly which it believed would allow it to dictate terms to the planet, the U.S. was unsure exactly how much more uranium it needed to acquire.⁴¹ In such circumstances, it was impossible to entice American corporations to engage in uranium extraction. Beginning in 1947, the government's newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (AEC, now the Department of Energy, DoE) “solved” the problem by arranging for several hundred otherwise destitute Navajos to be underwritten by the Small Business Administration (SBA) in starting up tiny mining operations of their own.⁴² Although it has since been claimed that the AEC was unaware of the dangers attending this occupation, there is ample reason to believe authorities were in possession of sufficient information to realize they were consigning every Navajo they coaxed into going underground to a veritable death sentence.

It is important to realize that uranium mining is unlike most other kinds of mining in that during the course of blasting and digging for ore, radioactive radon-222 gas is released. Radon-222 is a natural decay product of uranium with a half-life of about three and one-half days. Radon gas by itself poses no real danger: as a noble gas, it is chemically inert and is simply exhaled. But its radioactive “daughter products” can settle in the lungs and injure the tissues. The primary hazard comes from polonium-218 and 214, alpha-emitting radionuclides that lodge in the lining of the lung. Uranium miners are also bombarded by gamma radiation, but the primary danger, again, stems from the ingestion and inhalation of alpha emitters…Robert J.Roscoe of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has shown that nonsmoking uranium miners followed from 1950 to 1984 were thirteen times more likely to die from lung cancer than a comparable group of nonsmoking U.S. veterans.⁴³

Dr. Roscoe's test group included a significant proportion of miners who had worked in relatively large, well-ventilated shafts and even open-air uranium stripping operations. The initial group of Navajos worked in tiny, unventilated shafts where radon concentrations were often hundreds of times higher than average. As a consequence, all the AEC/SBA miners were dead or dying of lung cancer and/or other respiratory ailments by the mid-1980s. (In a preview of what by the 1990s would become national policy—and a yuppie fad—an attempt was made to blame cigarette smoking and other personal behaviors for this systemically-induced health catastrophe.)⁴⁴

As early as 1556, Austrian physician Georgius Agricola had described the extraordinary incidence of death by “consumption of the lungs” among Carpathian silver miners digging ores laced with radium.⁴⁵ In 1879, F.H.Härting and W.Hesse correctly diagnosed what had by then become known as Bergkrankheit (mountain sickness) as lung cancer, and demonstrated that approximately three-quarters of all miners in the Schneeberg region of Saxony died of the disease within twenty years of entering the shafts.⁴⁶ By 1924, German researchers P.Ludewig and S.Lorenser had linked the Schneeberg miners’ cancers to radon inhalation,⁴⁷ a connection explored more fully by American physician Wilhelm C.Hueper, founding director of the American Cancer Institutes Environmental Cancer Section, in his seminal 1942 book, Occupational Tumors and Allied Diseases.⁴⁸

Nor was Hueper's study the only one readily available to the AEC. In 1944, Egon Lorenz published an article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute which con eluded that “the radioactivity of the ore and the radon content of the air of the mines are generally considered to be the primary cause” of lung cancer among uranium miners.⁴⁹ Occupational cancer expert Fred W.Stewart went further in a 1947 issue of the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, predicting that there would likely be epidemic “cases of cancer and leukemia in our newest group of industrialists, workers in the field of fissionable materials.”⁵⁰ Even Bernard Wolf and Merril Eisenbud, directors of the AEC's own medical division, were warning their superiors of such dangers.⁵¹

The Navajos, of course, were told none of this. On the contrary, when Wolf and Eisenbud tried to establish minimum safety standards for miners in 1948, they were “told by Washington that the health problems of the mines were not the responsibility of the AEC, and…should be left to the jurisdiction of the local authorities.”⁵²

The AEC had been assigned by Congress the responsibility for radiation safety in the nuclear program but, according to a bizarre interpretation of the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, the commission was bound only to regulate exposures after the ore had been mined. Responsibility for the health and safety of uranium miners was left up to individual states, a situation that Merril Eisenbud rightly recognized as “absurd,” given their lack of equipment and expertise to deal with the expected health problems [not to mention the fact that the states lacked jurisdiction on Indian reservations].⁵³

Be that as it may, the AEC plainly went to great lengths to ensure that the general public remained equally uninformed. This was accomplished through a regulation requiring that all scientific papers dealing with radiation prepared under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) be cleared by the commission prior to presentation/publication. Thus, when Hueper sought to present a paper at a 1952 meeting of the Colorado State Medical Society, he was instructed by Shields Warren, the AEC's Director of Biology and Medicine, to “delete all references…to the hazards of uranium mining.”⁵⁴

Hueper…refused on the grounds that he had not joined the [National Cancer Institute (NCI)] to become a “scientific liar” …When word got around that he was not silently accepting his censorship, Warren again wrote the director of the NCI, this time asking for Hueper's dismissal. Hueper stayed on but was soon barred from all epidemiological work on occupational cancer. The order came from the surgeon general. Hueper was henceforth allowed to do only experimental work on animals, and was prohibited from further investigations into the causation of cancer in man related to environmental exposure to carcinogenic chemical, physical, or parasitic agents.⁵⁵

Similarly, in 1955 the AEC managed to prevent Nobel laureate H.J.Muller, a geneticist, from speaking at the International Symposium on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva because he had concluded that radiation induced mutogenic effects in human organisms.⁵⁶ During the early 1960s, the commission was also able to marginalize the work of Ernest J.Sternglass, whose groundbreaking research demonstrated that the proliferation of radioactive contaminants would lead to increased rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, childhood leukemia, and other cancers.⁵⁷ A few years later it brought about the dismissal of John W.Gofman, the discoverer of both uranium-233 and the plutonium isolation process, from his position at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Gofmans “offense” was determining that, contrary to the AEC's official posture, there was/is really no “safe” level of exposure to radioactive substances.⁵⁸

While the commission's ability to silence such voices diminished over the years, it never really disappeared altogether. When AEC researcher Thomas F.Mancuso set out in 1977 to publish findings that radiation exposure was causing inordinate rates of cancer among workers at the Hanford Military Complex, he was terminated and his research materials impounded.⁵⁹ Much the same fate befell Dr. Rosalie Bertell, albeit indirectly, through the National Cancer Institute, when she began to publish the results of epidemiological research on the effects of nuclear contamination during the late 1970s.⁶⁰ And so it went for more than forty years.

Unsurprisingly, given the context, the official stance vis-à-vis uranium miners amounted to little more than quietly tallying up the death toll. Even the Public Health Service (PHS), which called in 1957 for “immediate application of corrective measures” to avert an “impending public health disaster” spawned by radon inhalation among miners, was shortly subordinated to the AEC's demand that the truth be hidden.⁶¹ Victor E.Archer, an epidemiologist with the PHS's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), spelled this out in 1977, during his testimony in a suit brought by a group of terminally ill Navajo miners and survivors of those already dead.

Archer testified that he and his colleagues had caved in to AEC and PHS pres sures not to publicize the [radon] hazard: “We did not want to rock the boat… [W]e had to take the position that we were neutral scientists trying to find out what the facts were, that we were not going to make any public announcements until the results of our scientific study were completed. Official pressures to “monitor” the disaster without informing those at risk or forcing [mining] companies to reduce the hazard led PHS scientists to characterize their study as a “death watch” or “dead body approach.” A federal judge [Aldon Anderson] involved in the Navajo case charged that U.S. atomic authorities had failed to warn the miners in order to guarantee a “constant, uninterrupted and reliable flow” of uranium ore “for national security purposes.”⁶²

An efficient system for delivering huge quantities of uranium had become an especially high priority for the U.S. military when the Soviet Union, years ahead of expectations, tested a nuclear device of its own on September 23, 1949. This set in motion a mad scramble to amass ever greater numbers of increasingly more powerful and sophisticated atomic weapons, as well as a burgeoning number of nuclear reactors, on both sides of the Atlantic.⁶³ Thus guaranteed the sustained profitability of such enterprises, and shortly immunized against any liabilities they might entail, America's major corporations entered with a vengeance into uranium mining, milling, and related activities, completely supplanting the first generation of Navajo miners’ “mom and pop” operations by the end of 1951.⁶⁴

This sudden and massive corporate tie-in to the expansion of U.S. uranium production did not, however, signal a shifting of the burden of supplying it from the shoulders of Native North America. Rather, such weight was increased dramatically. Although only about sixty percent of uranium deposits in the United States were/are situated on American Indian reservations—most of it in the so-called “Grants Uranium Belt” of northern New Mexico and Arizona—well over ninety percent of all the uranium ever mined in the U.S. had been taken from such sources by the time the AECs “domestic” ore-buying program was phased out in 1982.⁶⁵

Hence, while the USSR and its satellites relied on slave labor provided by hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in meeting their production quotas, the U.S. utilized its internal, indigenous colonies for the same purpose.⁶⁶ Not only did the workforce harnessed to the tasks of uranium mining and milling remain disproportionately native, but the vast majority of extraction and processing facilities were situated in Indian Country as well, conveniently out of sight and mind of the general public, their collateral health impacts concentrated among indigenous populations. Much the same can be said with respect to weapons research, testing, and the disposal of radioactive waste by-products. We will examine each of these components of the nuclear process in turn.

Mining

The first largescale uranium mine in the United States was opened under AEC/BIA sanction by the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation in 1952, on the Navajo Reservation, outside the town of Shiprock, New Mexico. A hundred Navajos were hired to perform the underground labor—at about two-thirds the prevailing off-reservation pay scale for comparable work—in what was ostensibly a ventilated mine shaft.67 When a federal inspector visited the mine a few months after it opened, however, he discovered the ventilator fans were not functioning. When he returned three years later, in 1955, they were still idle.⁶⁸ By 1959, radon levels in the mine shaft were routinely testing at ninety to one hundred times the maximum “safe” levels, a circumstance which remained essentially unchanged until the ore played out and Kerr-McGee closed the mine in 1970.⁶⁹

Of the 150-odd Navajo miners who worked below ground at Shiprock over the years, eighteen had died of radiation-induced lung cancer by 1975; five years later, another twenty were dead of the same disease, while the bulk of the rest had been diagnosed with serious respiratory ailments.⁷⁰ Much the same situation pertained with regard to native employees working in the shaft at Kerr-McGee's second mining operation on Navajo, opened at Red Rock in 1953. By 1979, fifteen were dead of lung cancer and dozens of others had been diagnosed with that malady and/or respiratory fibrosis.⁷¹ The same rates prevail among the well over 700 men who worked underground for Kerr-McGee at Grants, New Mexico, the largest uranium shaft mining operation in the world.⁷² Of the original 6,000 or so miners of all races employed below ground in the Grants Belt, Victor Archer has estimated 1,000 will eventually die of lung cancer.⁷³

Nonetheless, such mines proliferated on the reservation throughout the remainder of the 1950s, as the AEC, with the active complicity of the BIA, entered into a host of additional contracts, not only with Kerr-McGee, but with corporations like Atlantic- Richfield (ARCO), AMEX, Foote Mineral, Utah International, Climax Uranium, United Nuclear, Union Carbide (a chameleon which was formerly known as the Vanadium Corporation of America, and is now called Umetco Minerals Corporation), Gulf, Conoco, Mobil, Exxon, Getty, Sun Oil, Standard Oil of Ohio (Sohio), and Rockwell International.⁷⁴ As of 1958, “the Bureau of Indian Affairs reported that more than 900,000 acres of tribal land were leased for uranium exploration and development.”⁷⁵ From 1946 to 1968, well over thirteen million tons of uranium ore were mined on Navajo—some 2. 5 million tons at Shiprock alone—and still the rate of increase increased.⁷⁶ By late 1976, the year which turned out to be the very peak of the “uranium frenzy” afflicting the Colorado Plateau, the BIA had approved a total of 303 leases encumbering a quarter-million acres of Navajo land for corporate mining and milling purposes (see Figure 5.1).⁷⁷

Aside from the effects of all this upon those working underground, the shaft mining on Navajo had an increasingly negative impact upon the physical well-being of their families and communities on the surface. One indication of this resides in the fact that, once real ventilation of the mines began to occur during the mid-60s, the vents were often situated right in the middle of residential areas, the inhabitants of which were then forced to breathe the same potent mixtures of radon, thoron, and other toxic substances which were plaguing their husbands, fathers, and neighbors below.⁷⁸ There was also the matter of pumping out the groundwater which seeped constantly into scores of the deeper shafts —a process called “dewatering”—all of it heavily contaminated. To appreciate the volume of this outpouring, it should be considered that just one site, Kerr-McGee's Church Rock No. 1 Mine, was pumping more than 80,000 gallons of irradiated effluents per day into the local supply of surface water in 1980.⁷⁹

The millions of gallons of radioactive water [released in this fashion] carry deadly selenium, cadmium, and lead that are easily absorbed into the local food chain, as well as emitting alpha and beta particles and gamma rays. Human ingestion of radioactive water can result in alpha particles recurrently bombarding human tissue and eventually tearing apart the cells comprising that tissue…causing cancer [and/ or genetic mutation in offspring].⁸⁰

FIGURE 5.1. Four corners area energy exploitation.

Small wonder that, by 1981, the Navajo Health Authority (NHA) had documented increasing rates of birth defects—notably cleft palate and Down's Syndrome—among babies born after 1965 in mine-adjacent reservation communities like Shiprock, Red Rock, and Church Rock.⁸¹ At the same time, it was determined that children living in such localities were suffering bone cancers at a rate five times the national average, ovarian cancers at an astonishing seventeen times the norm.⁸² Yet another study concluded that, overall, there was “a twofold excess of miscarriages, ínfant deaths, congenital or genetic abnormalities, and learning disabilities among uranium-area families (compared with Navajo families in nonuranium areas).”⁸³ Although funding was requested from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW) to conduct more extensive epidemiological studies throughout the Grants Belt, the request was promptly denied.

In fact, in 1983, one agency, the Indian Health Services [a subpart of DHEW, which was by then redesignated the Department of Health and Human Services] sent a report to congress…stating that there was “no evidence of adverse health effects on Indians in uranium development areas and there is no need for additional studies or funding for such studies.”⁸⁴

Meanwhile, beginning in 1952, an ARCO subsidiary, the Anaconda Copper Corporation, had been operating under AEC/BIA authority on the nearby Laguna Reservation, near Albuquerque. By the early 1970s, the approximately 2,800 acres of Anaconda's Jackpile- Paguate complex at Laguna—from which 22 million tons of ore and more than 44 million tons of other minerals were removed—was the largest open pit uranium mine in the world.⁸⁵ Ultimately, the excavation went so deep that groundwater seepage became as much an issue as in a shaft mine.

[Anaconda's] mining techniques require “dewatering,” i.e., the pumping of water contaminated by radioactive materials to facilitate ore extraction. Since 1972, the Jackpile Mine has wasted more than 119 gallons per minute through this dewatering procedure. Altogether more than 500 million gallons of radioactive water have been discharged [into] a 260-acre tailings pond [from which it] either sinks back into the aquifer, evaporates, or seeps out into the arroyos and drainage channels of the tiny Rio Mequino stream that is fed by a natural spring near the tailings dam.⁸⁶

In 1972, and again in 1977, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notified the Laguna tribal council that both the Rio Molino and the nearby Rio Paguate, both of which run through the Anaconda leasing area, and which together comprise the pueblo's only source of surface water, were badly contaminated with radium 226 and other heavy metals.⁸⁷ This was followed, in 1979, by a General Accounting Office announcement that the aquifer underlying the entire Grants Belt, from which Laguna draws its groundwater, was similarly polluted.⁸⁸ The trade-off was, of course, “jobs.” But, while most able-bodied Lagunas, and a considerable proportion of neighboring Acomas, were employed by the corporation—a matter touted by the BIA as a “miracle of modernization”—most received poverty-level incomes.⁸⁹ And, although the adverse health effects of open pit uranium mining seem somewhat less pronounced than those associated with shaft mining, disproportionately high rates of cancer among longterm miners were being noted by the early 1980s.⁹⁰

All told, about 3,200 underground and 900 open pit miners were employed in uranium operations by 1977, and Kerr-McGee was running a multimillion dollar U.S. Department of Labor-funded job training program in the Navajo community of Church Rock, Arizona, to recruit more.⁹¹ The stated governmental/corporate objective was to create a workforce of 18,400 underground and 4,000 open pit miners to extract ore from approximately 3.5 million acres along the Grants Belt by 1990.⁹² Only the collapse of the market for U.S. “domestic” uranium production after 1980—the AEC met its stockpiling quotas in that year, and it quickly became cheaper to acquire commercially-designated supplies mined abroad, first from Namibia, then from Australia, and finally from the native territories of northern Saskatchewan, in Canada—averted realization of this grand plan.⁹³

As the dust settled around the Four Corners, the real outcomes of uranium mining began to emerge. The AEC's constellation of corporations had profited mightily as a result, and not just because of their refusal to meet the expense of providing even the most rudimentary forms of worker safety or their having to pay only the artificially depressed wages prevailing within the reservations’ colonial economies. The BIA, exer cising the government's self-assigned “trust” prerogatives, had written contracts requiring the corporations to pay royalties pegged at an average of only 3.4 percent of market price in an environment where fifteen percent was the normative standard.⁹⁴ Moreover, the contracts often included no clauses requiring postmining cleanup of any sort, thus sparing Kerr-McGee and its cohorts what would have been automatic and substantial costs of doing business in off-reservation settings. When lucrative mining was completed, the corporations were thus in a position to simply close up shop and walk away.⁹⁵

The already much-impoverished indigenous nations upon which the uranium extraction enterprise had been imposed in the first place, which seldom if ever made money from the process, and whose prior economies had been demolished into the bargain, were then left holding the bag.⁹⁶ On Navajo, this involves the necessity of dealing with hundreds of abandoned mine shafts ranging from fifty to several hundred feet in depth, some subject to caving in and all of them steadily emitting radon and thoron from their gaping maws.⁹⁷ At Laguna, conditions are even worse.⁹⁸ As Dr. Joseph Wagoner, Director of Epidemiological Research for NIOSH, would later put it, with conspicuous understatement, the situation presents “serious medical and ethical questions about the responsibility [not just of the corporations, but] of the federal government, which was the sole purchaser of uranium during [much of] the period.”⁹⁹

Milling

Milling, the separation of pure uranium from its ore, is the first stage of the production process. Ore pockets across the Grants Belt range from .4 to three percent uranium content, yielding an average of about four pounds of “yellowcake” per ton.100 The remaining 1,996 pounds per ton of waste—reduced to the consistency of course sand called “tailings” during milling—invariably accumulates in huge piles alongside the mills, which, for reasons of cost efficiency, tend to be situated in close proximity to mines. Tailings retain approximately eighty-five percent of the radioactivity of the original ore, have a half-life estimated at 10,000 years, and are a source of continuous radon and thoron gas emissions. They are also subject to wind dispersal and constitute an obvious source of groundwater contamination through leaching.¹⁰¹

As with uranium mining, over ninety percent of all milling done in the U.S. occurred on or just outside the boundaries of American Indian reservations.¹⁰² Also, as was the case in the mines, “conditions in the mills were deplorable.”¹⁰³ Even the most elementary precautions to assure worker protection were ignored as an “unnecessary expense.” As Laguna poet Simon J.Ortiz, who was employed in a Kerr-McGee mill during the early 1960s, would later reflect:

Right out of high school I worked in the mining and milling region of Ambrosia Lake. I was nineteen years old… At the mill, I worked in crushing, leaching, and yellowcake, usually at various labor positions… I had a job, and for poor people with low education and no skills and high unemployment, that was the important thing: a job… In 1960, there was no information about the dangers of radiation from yellowcake with which I worked… In the milling operation at the end of the leaching and settling process, the yellow liquid was drawn into dryers that took the water out. The dryers were screen constructions which revolved slowly in hot air; yellow pellets were extruded and crushed into fine powder. The workers were to keep the machinery operating, which was never smooth, and most of the work was to keep it in free operation; i.e., frequently having to unclog it by hand. There was always a haze of yellow dust flying around, and even though filtered masks were used, the workers breathed in the fine dust. It got in the hair and cuts and scratches and in their eyes. I was nineteen then, and twenty years later I worried about it.¹⁰⁴

The situation was so acute at Kerr-McGee's first mill on the Navajo Reservation, established at Shiprock in 1953, that after it was abandoned in 1974 inspectors discovered more than $100,000 in uranium dust had settled between two layers of roofing, and former workers recalled having been routinely instructed by their supervisors to stir yellowcake by hand in open, steam-heated floorpans.¹⁰⁵ Needless to say, by 1980, those who’d been lured into the mills with the promise of a small but steady paycheck during the 1950s and ’60s were suffering rates of lung cancer and other serious respiratory illnesses rivaling those of their counterparts in the mines.¹⁰⁶

By far the greater impact of milling, however, has been upon the broader Navajo, Laguna, and Acoma communities. The environmental degradation inflicted by a single mill, the Kerr-McGee plant at Grants—once again, the largest such facility in the world— may equal that of all the shaft mines along the uranium belt combined. At its peak, the monstrosity processed 7,000 tons of ore per day, piling up twenty-three million tons of tailings in a hundred-foot-high mound which covers 265 acres.¹⁰⁷ And this is just one of more than forty mills, several of them not much smaller, operating simultaneously on and around Navajo during the late 1970s.¹⁰⁸ A similar situation prevailed at plants established by Kerr-McGee, Sohio-Reserve, Bokum Minerals, and several other corporations in the immediate vicinity of Laguna and Acoma.¹⁰⁹

At the Bluewater Mill, eighteen miles west of the Laguna Reservation [on the western boundary of Acoma, a thirty-mile trip by rail from the Jackpile-Paguate complex, with raw ore hauled in open gondolas] near the bed of the San Jose River, Anaconda has added a 107-acre pond and a 159-acre pile comprising 13,500, 000 tons of “active” tailings and 765,033 tons of “inactive” residues.¹¹⁰

In August 1978, it was discovered that Anaconda, as a means of “holding down costs,” had also made massive use of tailings as fill in its “improvement” of the reservation road network at Laguna. At the same time, it was revealed that tailings had constituted the “sand and gravel mix” of concrete with which the corporation had—with much fanfare about the “civic benefits” it was thereby bestowing upon its indigenous “partners”— poured footings for a new tribal council building, community center, and housing complex.¹¹¹ All were seriously irradiated as a result, a matter which may well be playing into increasing rates of cancer and birth defects, even among the nonminer sectors of Laguna's population.¹¹²

Probably the worst single example of mill-related contamination occurred about a year later, on July 16, 1979, at the United Nuclear plant in Church Rock, New Mexico, when a tailings dam gave way, releasing more than a hundred million gallons of highly radioactive water into the nearby Río Puerco.¹¹³ About 1,700 Navajos living downstream were immediately affected, as were their sheep and other livestock, all of whom depended on the river for drinking water.¹¹⁴ Shortly thereafter, with spill-area cattle exhibiting unacceptably high levels of lead-210, polonium-210, thorium-230, radium-236, and similar substances in their tissues, all commercial sales of meat from such animals was indefinitely prohibited.¹¹⁵

Still, even as the ban went into effect, IHS Area Director William Moehler—rather than calling for allocation of federal funds to provide emergency rations to those most directly at risk—approved consumption of the very same mutton and beef by local Navajos.¹¹⁶ At about the same time, a request by downstream Navajos for United Nuclear to provide them with trucked-in water, at least in quantities sufficient to meet the immediate needs of the afflicted human population, was met with flat refusal.¹¹⁷ The corporation stonewalled for another five years—until it was revealed by the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque-based environmental organization, that it had known about cracks in the dam at least two months before it broke and had failed to repair it—before agreeing to a minimal, state-facilitated “settlement” of $525, 000.¹¹⁸

By and large, however, it was not outright disasters such as the Church Rock spill, but the huge and rapidly proliferating accumulation of mill tailings throughout the Four Corners region—more than a half-billion tons in 200 locations by 1979, figures which were projected to double by the end of the century—that provoked a team of Los Alamos experts, utterly at a loss as to what to do with such vast quantities of radioactive waste, to recommend the “zon[ing] of uranium mining and milling districts so as to forbid human habitation.”¹¹⁹

The idea dovetailed perfectly with the conclusions drawn in a contemporaneous study undertaken by the National Institute for Science, that desert lands subjected to stripmining can never be reclaimed.¹²⁰ Since the Peabody Coal Company, among others, was/is engaged in ever more massive coal stripping operations on Navajo,¹²¹ the logical outcome of the Los Alamos and NAS studies was the formulation of a secret federal “policy option” declaring the Four Corners, and the Black Hills region of the northern plains as well,¹²² “national sacrifice areas in the interests of energy development” (see Figure 5.2).¹²³

Not coincidentally, the pair of localities selected contained the largest and second-largest concentrations of reservation-based Indians remaining in the United States: Navajo, with over 120,000 residents in 1980, is by far the biggest reservation both by acreage and by population in the U.S. Also sacrificed in the Four Corners region would be —at a minimum—the Hopi, Zuni, Laguna, Acoma, Isleta, Ramah Navajo, Cañoncito Navajo, Ute Mountain, and Southern Ute reservations. The 50,000-odd residents of the “Sioux Complex” of reservations in North and South Dakota—Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Crow Creek, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock in particular—make up the second most substantial concentration. Also sacrificed in the Black Hills region would be the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations in Montana, and possibly the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.¹²⁴

As American Indian Movement leader Russell Means observed in 1980, shortly after existence of the plan had been disclosed, to sacrifice the landbase of landbased peoples is tantamount to sacrificing the peoples themselves, a prospect he aptly described as genocide while calling for appropriate modes of resistance.¹²⁵

FIGURE 5.2. U.S. corporate interests in the Greater Sioux Nation. Source: The Black Hills “National Sacrifice Area”: A Study in U.S. Internal Colonialism.

Although a policy of deliberately creating national sacrifice areas out of American Indian reservations was never formally implemented, the more indirect effect may well be the same. With windblown tailings spread over wide tracts of Navajo, ground and surface water alike contaminated with all manner of radioactive substances, and Navajo children literally using abandoned mounds of tailings as sand piles, it is not unreasonable to suspect that both the land and the people have already been sacrificed on the altar of U.S. armaments development.¹²⁶ If so, they and their counterparts at Laguna, Acoma and elsewhere will have become victims of what may be, to date, history's subtlest form of physical extermination.¹²⁷

Weapons Research and Production

The Los Alamos lab might well have extended its zoning recommendations to include not just uranium mining and milling districts but localities in which nuclear weapons research and production have been carried out, beginning with itself. Here again, although the sites at which yellowcake is enriched and/or transformed into plutonium have been scattered across the country in localities not typically associated with indigenous people, the great weight of contamination in this connection has been off-loaded by the dominant society onto Indian Country.128

The extent of radioactive contamination at Los Alamos is astonishing. A half-century of nuclear weapons research on the 43-square mile “campus”—which adjoins not only San Ildefonso, but the Santa Clara, San Juan, Jemez, and Zia reservations—has produced some 2,400 irradiated pollution sites containing “plutonium, uranium, strontium-90, tritium, lead, mercury, nitrates, cyanides, pesticides and other lethal leftovers.”¹²⁹ A single 1950 experiment in which “simulated nuclear devices” were exploded in order to track radioactive fallout patterns was not only kept secret for decades, but left nearby Bayo Canyon heavily contaminated with strontium.¹³⁰ The facility also has a long history of secretly and illegally incinerating irradiated wastes—a practice producing significant atmospheric contamination—as was acknowledged by the EPA in 1991.¹³¹

The greatest concentration of hazardous materials in the Los Alamos compound is situated in what is called “Area G,” which “began taking radioactive waste in 1957. Since 1971, 381,000 cubic feet of [lab]-generated transuranic [plutonium-contaminated] waste has been stored there; no one knows how much went in before 1971, since records are scanty. Wastes were “interred without liners or caps, in bulldozed pits [from which] they may be presumed to be leaking.”¹³²

This, in combination with the lab's chronic release of radioactive substances into the atmosphere is thought to be correlated to dramatic increases in cancers and birth defects among local native populations over the past twenty years.¹³³ Plutonium contamination of surface water has been found downstream at least as far as the Cochiti Reservation, thirty miles away.¹³⁴ At present, Area G is slated for considerable expan sion.¹³⁵ In the new plan, strongly opposed by area Indians, it “would be able to contain 475,000 cubic yards of mixed-waste in pits 2,000 feet long and divided into 25,000 cubic yard segments.”¹³⁶

An even worse situation prevails at Hanford, which was closed in 1990. Despite frequent official denials that it presented any sort of public health hazard during the span of its operation, the complex exhibits an uparalleled record of deliberate environmental contamination, beginning with a secret experimental release of radioactive iodides in 1945, the first of seven, which equaled or surpassed the total quantity of pollutants emitted during the disastrous 1986 Soviet reactor meltdown at Chernobyl.¹³⁷ Also in 1945, Hanford officials secretly instructed staff to begin “disposing” of irradiated effluents by the simple expedient of pouring them into unlined “sumps” from which they leached into the underlying aquifer. All told, before the plant was closed something in excess of 440 billion gallons of water laced with everything from plutonium to tritium to ruthenium had been dumped in this “cost efficient” manner.¹³⁸

Another 900,000 gallons of even more highly radioactive fluids were stored in a 117- unit underground “tank farm” maintained under contract by ARCO, several components of which were found to be leaking badly.¹³⁹ Not only has regional groundwater been severely contaminated, but wastes have been found to have passed into the nearby Columbia River in quantities sufficient to irradiate shellfish at the river's mouth, more than 200 miles distant.¹⁴⁰

Not only has the Hanford plant been discharging and leaking radiation into the river for forty-five years, but serious accidents have occurred at the reactors. One could perhaps excuse the accidental release of radiation [if not its coverup] , but on several occasions huge clouds of isotopes were created knowingly and willingly. In December [1952, to provide another example,] about 7,800 curies of radioactive Iodine 131 were deliberately [and secretly] released in an experiment designed to detect military reactors in the Soviet Union (only 15 to 24 curies of Iodine 131 escaped at Three Mile Island in 1979).¹⁴¹

The true extent of the ecological holocaust perpetrated at and around Hanford is unknown, and is likely to remain so over the foreseeable future, given that most information about the facility is permanently sealed as a matter of “national security,” and DoE/Pentagon/corporate officials claim to have “lost” much of what is supposedly accessible.¹⁴² Such information as has come out, however, tends to speak for itself.

Abnormally high incidence of thyroid tumors and cancers have been observed in populations living downstream from Hanford. Strontium 90, Cesium 137, and Plutonium 239 have been released in large quantities, as was, between 1952 and 1967, Ruthenium 106. People in adjacent neighborhoods [notably, the Yakimas and nearby Spokanes] were kept uninformed about these releases—before, during and after—and none were warned that they were at risk for subsequent development of cancer. (Some experts have estimated that downwind farms and families received radiation doses ten times higher than those that reached Soviet people living near Chernobyl in 1986).¹⁴³

In sum, the probability is that Los Alamos, Hanford, and surrounding areas should be added to the extensive geographical sacrifices already discussed with respect to uranium mining and milling. To the extent that this is true—and it is almost certainly the case at Hanford—several more colonized indigenous nations must be added to the roster of those implicitly but officially identified peoples whose sacrifice is deemed necessary, useful, or at least acceptable, in the interests of U.S. nuclear development.

Weapons Testing

Nuclear weapons, once designed, must be tested. During the period immediately following World War II, the U.S. asserted its “trust” authority over the Marshall Islands, gained by its defeat of Japan, for purposes of conducting more than a hundred such tests on the natives’ mid-Pacific atolls by 1958.144 Meanwhile, the search for a more “suitable” continental locality, code-named “Nutmeg,” began as early as 1948. Two years later, the AEC/Pentagon combo finally settled on the Las Vegas/Tonopah Bombing and Gunnery Range in Nevada (now called the Nellis Range), an area which it had already decided “really wasn’t much good for anything but gunnery practice—you could bomb it into oblivion and never notice the difference.”¹⁴⁵

Of course, nobody bothered to ask the Western Shoshone people, within whose unceded territory the facility was established, whether they felt this was an acceptable use of their land, or whether they were even willing to have it designated as part of the U.S. “public domain” for any purpose.¹⁴⁶ Instead, in 1952, having designated 435,000 acres in the Yucca Flats area of Nellis as a “Nevada Test Site”—another 318,000 acres were added in 1961, bringing the total to 753,000—the AEC and its military partners undertook the first of what by now add up to nearly a thousand atmospheric and underground test detonations.¹⁴⁷ In the process, they converted the peaceful and pastoral Shoshones, who had never engaged in an armed conflict with the U.S., into what, by any estimation, is far and away “the most bombed nation on earth.”¹⁴⁸

The deadly atomic sunburst over Hiroshima, in 1945, produced 13 kilotons of murderous heat and radioactive fallout. At least 27 of the 96 above ground bombs detonated between 1951 and 1958 at the Nevada Test Site produced a total of over 620 kilotons of radioactive debris that fell on downwinders. The radioactive isotopes mixed with the scooped-up rocks and earth of the southwestern desert lands and “lay down a swath of radioactive fallout” over Utah, Arizona, and Nevada. In light of the fact that scientific research has now confirmed that any radiation exposure is dangerous, the “virtual inhabitants” (more than 100,000 people) residing in the small towns east and south of the test site were placed in… jeopardy by the AEC atomic test program (emphasis added).¹⁴⁹

Those most affected by the estimated twelve billion curies of radioactivity released into the atmosphere over the past 45 years have undoubtedly been the native communities scattered along the periphery of Nellis.¹⁵⁰ These include not only three Shoshone reservations—Duckwater, Yomba, and Timbisha—but the Las Vegas Paiute Colony and the Pahrump Paiute, Goshute, and Moapa reservations as well. Their circumstances have been greatly compounded by the approximately 900 underground test detonations which have, in a region where surface water sources are all but nonexistent, resulted in contamination of groundwater with plutonium, tritium, and other radioactive substances at levels up to 3,000 times the maximum “safe” limits.¹⁵¹

Radionuclides released to groundwater include: antimony-125, barium-140, beryllium-7, cadmium-109, cerium-141, cesium-137, cobalt-60, europium155, iodine-131, iridium-192, krypton, lanthanum-140, plutonium-238, plutonium-239, plutonium-240, rhodium-106, ruthenium-103, sodium-22, strontium-90, and tritium.¹⁵²

Although the government has been steadfast in its refusal to conduct relevant epidemiology studies in Nevada, especially with respect to indigenous peoples, it has been credibly estimated that several hundred people had already died of radiation-induced cancers by 1981.¹⁵³ Rather than admit to any aspect of what it was doing, the military simply gobbled up increasingly gigantic chunks of Shoshone land, pushing everyone off and creating ever larger “security areas” that rendered its activities less and less susceptible to any sort of genuine public scrutiny.¹⁵⁴

Today, in the state of Nevada, in addition to Nellis Air Force Base and Nevada Test Site, we can add the following military reservations: Fallon Navy Training Range Complex with its airspace; the Hawthorne Army Ammunition Depot, with its restricted airspace; the Reno Military Operations Area Airspace; the Hart Military Operations Area Airspace; the Paradise Military Operations Area Airspace; and parts of the Utah Training Range Complex with its airspace. Military ranges in Nevada alone amount to four million acres. Approximately forty percent of Nevada's airspace is designated for military use.¹⁵⁵

Across the state line in California—it is separated from the gargantuan sprawl of military facilities in Nevada only by the width of the interposed Death Valley National Monument —lies the million-acre China Lake Naval Weapons Center.¹⁵⁶ Butted up against the Army's equally-sized estate at Fort Irwin, and close to both the half-million-acre Edwards Air Force Base and the 800,000-acre Marine Corps Base at Twentynine Palms, China Lake— an oddly-named facility in that it incorporates no lake at all—uses its share of the Mojave Desert in the same manner as White Sands, only more so.¹⁵⁷ Established in November 1943 and expanded steadily thereafter, it was crediting itself by 1968 with being the location in which “over 75% of the airborne weapons of the free world [and] 40% of the world's conventional weapons” had been tested and perfected.¹⁵⁸ As in Nevada, local indigenous communities, both Shoshone and Paiute, have been pushed out while their lands, including sacred sites, have been bombed, strafed, and shelled relentlessly for more than fifty years (see Figure 5.3).¹⁵⁹

Probably the only “concession” made to native peoples in the region during this entire period has been that the three largest nuclear devices ever detonated underground, culminating in a monstrous five megaton blast in 1971, were exploded not at the Nevada Test Site, but on Amchitka Island, off Alaska. The reason for this change in procedure had nothing to do with concern for the wellbeing of human beings, however. Rather, it was brought on by fears among AEC officials that the shock waves from such large blasts might cause serious damage to casinos and other expensive buildings in downtown Las Vegas, thereby provoking a backlash from segments of the regional “business community.”¹⁶⁰ Hence, the brunt of the environmental/biological consequences wrought by the three biggest “bangs” was shifted from the Indians of Nevada to the Aleuts indigenous to the Aleutian Archipelago.¹⁶¹

Exactly how large an area has been sacrificed to nuclear testing and related activities is unknown, but most certainly includes the bulk of southern Nevada and contiguous portions of California.¹⁶² Indications are that it may encompass northern Nevada as well, given the insistence of Reagan era Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger—selected for this position, appropriately enough, on the basis of his credentials as a senior vice president of the Bechtel Corporation, the second largest U.S. nuclear engineering contractor—that the railmounted MX missile system should be sited there, a move which would have effectively precluded human habitation.¹⁶³ Given prevailing wind patterns, the sacrifice area likely encompasses northwestern Arizona as well, including three indigenous people —Hualapi, Havasupi, and Kaibab—whose reservations are located there.¹⁶⁴ Also at issue are the more westerly reaches of Utah, a region which includes the small Goshute and Skull Valley reservations in addition to another huge complex of military bases and proving grounds.¹⁶⁵

FIGURE 5.3. The Nuclear Landscape. Shaded areas here designate military airspace and military operations areas. Such areas extend the zone of military operations far beyond land holdings. Source: Valerie L.Kuletz, The Tainted Desert Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (New York, Routledge, 1998).

Waste “Disposal”

Plutonium, an inevitable byproduct of most reactors and the essential ingredient in nearly all nuclear weapons, has been aptly described as being “the most toxic substance in the universe.”166 Only ten micrograms, a microscopic quantity, is an amount “almost certain to induce cancer, and several grams…dispersed in a ventilation system, are enough to cause the death of thousands.”¹⁶⁷ Indeed, it has been estimated that a single pound of plutonium, if evenly distributed throughout the earth's atmosphere, would be sufficient to kill every human being on the planet.¹⁶⁸ Viewed from this perspective, the quantity of this material created by the United States during the course of its arms race with the Soviet Union—as of 1989, the U.S. alone had amassed some 21,000 nuclear weapons—is virtually incomprehensible.¹⁶⁹

By 1995, military weapons-grade plutonium, in the form of active and dismantled bombs, amounted to 270 metric tons. The commercial stockpile of plutonium in nuclear-reactor wastes and isolates from spent fuel amounts to 930 metric tons and will double to 2,130 tons by 2005, …“Every four or five years we’re [now] making about as much plutonium in the civil sector as we did during the whole Cold War.” And this is only plutonium. Fission reactors create eighty radionuclides that are releasing “ionizing radiation,” which causes harm to human beings in the form of genetic mutations, cancer, and birth defects.¹⁷⁰

Leaving aside the proliferation of commercial reactors and other such facilities, as well as the mining and milling zones, there are 132 sites in thirty states where one or another facet of nuclear weapons production has left radioactive contamination of varying orders of magnitude, all of them unacceptable.¹⁷¹ The DoE currently esti mates that it will cost about $500 billion to return these to habitable condition, an absurdly low figure in view of the department's admission that neither concepts nor technologies presently exist with which to even begin the clean-up of “large contaminated river systems like the Columbia, Clinch, and Savannah [as well as] most groundwater [and] nuclear test areas on the Nevada Test Site.”¹⁷²

It is also conceded that there is no known method of actually “disposing” of—i.e., decontaminating—plutonium and other radioactive wastes after they’ve been cleaned from the broader environment.¹⁷³ Instead, such materials, once collected, can only be sealed under the dubious premise that they can be somehow safely stored for the next 250, 000 years.¹⁷⁴ The sheer volume is staggering: “Hanford [alone] stores 8,200,000 cubic feet of high-level waste and 500,000 cubic feet of transuranic waste. Hanford buried 18, 000,000 cubic feet of ‘low-level’ waste and 3,900,000 cubic feet of transuranic waste.”¹⁷⁵ And, daunting as they are, these numbers—associated exclusively with weapons, weapons production, and commercial reactors—don’t begin to include the millions of tons of accumulated mill tailings and similar byproducts of “front end” nuclear processing.¹⁷⁶

Such facilities as now exist to accommodate warhead and reactor wastes are all temporary installations designed to last a century or less, even under ideal conditions which seem never to prevail.¹⁷⁷ The steadily escalating rate of waste proliferation has led to the burning of plutonium and other substances—a practice which certainly reduces the bulk of the offending materials, but also risks sending clouds of radioactivity into the atmosphere¹⁷⁸—and an increasingly urgent quest for safer interim facilities, called “monitored retrievable storage” (MRS) sites, and permanent “repositories” into which their contents could eventually be moved.¹⁷⁹ Here, as always, emphasis has been on offloading the problem onto captive indigenous nations.¹⁸⁰

The reason, predictably enough, is that despite a chorus of official assurances that neither an MRS nor a repository would present a health hazard, the precise opposite is true. John Gofman has calculated that if only 0.01 percent of the plutonium now in storage were to escape into the environment—a record of efficiency never remotely approximated by the nuclear establishment—some 25 million people could be expected to die of resulting cancers over the following half-century.¹⁸¹ Those most proximate to any dump site can of course expect to suffer the worst impact. Consequently, only one county in the United States has proven amenable to accepting an MRS within its boundaries, and its willingness to do so was quickly overridden by the state.¹⁸²

Federal authorities have therefore concentrated all but exclusively on siting the dumps in Indian Country. As longtime indigenous rights activist Grace Thorpe has observed:

The U.S. government targeted Native Americans for several reasons: their lands are some of the most isolated in North America, they are some of the most impoverished and, consequently, most politically vulnerable and, perhaps most important, tribal sovereignty can be used to bypass state environmental laws… How ironic that, after centuries of attempting to destroy it, the U.S. government is suddenly interested in promoting Native American sovereignty—just to dump its lethal garbage.¹⁸³

There can be little doubt that during the early 1990s DoE negotiators played heavily upon the colonially-imposed destitution of indigenous peoples in peddling their wares.

[Sixteen] tribes initially applied for $100,000 grants from DOE to study the MRS option on Native lands. The lucrative DOE offer included up to $3 million to actually identify a site for an MRS and as much as $5 million per year for any tribe to accept the deal. The government also offered to build roads, hospitals, schools, railroads, airports, and recreation facilities [most of which the Indians should have been receiving anyway].¹⁸⁴

Another $100,000 was passed along in 1992 to the federally-oriented National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) to garner its assistance in selling the proposition to its constituents, while a whopping $ 1.2 million—eighty percent of the DoE's budget for such purposes—was lavished on the Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT), a federally/corporately-funded entity created for the sole purpose of systematizing the wholesale brokering of native mineral rights.¹⁸⁵ Despite the best efforts of both organizations—CERT in particular went beyond the MRS concept to promote acceptance of a repository at Hanford by the Yakimas, Nez Percé, and Umatillas—the campaign was largely a failure.¹⁸⁶ By 1995, only three reservations—Mescalero, Skull Valley, and Ft. McDermitt in northern Nevada—indicated any degree of willingness to accept a dump, regardless of the material incentives offered.

The reasoning which led to this result is instructive. At Skull Valley, the feeling expressed by many residents was that they and their land may already have been sacrificed, in part to radiation blown in over the years from the not far distant Nevada Test Site, in part to a host of nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological contaminants emanating from military bases closer to home. Even the specific area committed as an MRS site has long been leased to several corporations as a rocket testing range.¹⁸⁷ As tribal member Leon Bear observes:

People need to understand that this whole area has already been deemed a waste zone by the federal government, the state of Utah, and the country… Tooele Depot, a military site, stores 40% of the nation's nerve gas and other hazardous gas only 40 miles away from us. Dugway Proving Grounds, an experimental life sciences center, is only 14 miles away, and it experiments with viruses like plague and tuberculosis. Within a 40 mile radius there are three hazardous waste dumps and a “low-level” radioactive waste dump. From all directions, north, south, east, and west we’re surrounded by the waste of Tooele County, the state of Utah, and U.S. society.¹⁸⁸

The sentiment at Skull Valley, that it is better to at least charge for one's demise than endure the suffering free of charge, is shared by an appreciable segment of the Mescalero population. As one reservation resident noted, the feeling of many people is that “since they are getting impacted by nuclear waste [anyway] they should have a chance to benefit economically.”¹⁸⁹ Or, as another put it, “The federal government has forced us to choose between being environmentally conscious [and] starving.”¹⁹⁰ Such perspectives notwithstanding, local activists like Rufina Laws were able to engineer a “no-acceptance” vote on an MRS proposal at Mescalero during the winter of 1995. It seems that only a policy of outright bribery by pro-nuclear Tribal Chairman Wendell Chino—reputedly the payment of $2,000 per “yes” vote—was sufficient to reverse the outcome by a narrow margin in a second referendum conducted a few months later.¹⁹¹

More important than such subsidies, however, may be the fact that many Mescaleros are now experiencing an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, based in the knowledge that not only are they just downwind from White Sands, but that—over their strong objections—the first U.S. nuclear repository has been sited in the Carlsbad Caverns area, immediately to their east.¹⁹² This is the so-called “Waste Isolation Pilot Plant” (WIPP), a facility intended to house virtually all military transuranics produced after 1970–57,359 cubic meters of it—in a subsurface salt bed already fissured by underground nuclear detonations.¹⁹³

The disposal area will exceed 100 acres, although the site's surface area covers more than 10,000 acres… The repository's design calls for “creeping” salt to seal the wastes [2,150 feet below ground]—a process that is supposed to isolate the substances for tens of thousands of years. Controversy over the WIPP focuses on potential ground water contamination, gases which would be generated by the decomposing wastes, and the hazards posed by transporting approximately 30,000 truckloads of waste to the site, among other things.¹⁹⁴

It now appears that the deep salt beds below Carlsbad are not so dry as was once believed by the National Institute for Sciences, a matter which could lead to relatively rapid corrosion of the storage canisters in which the repository's plutonium is to be contained, and correspondingly massive contamination of the underlying Rustler Aquifer.¹⁹⁵ Serious questions have also arisen as to whether the mass of materials stored in such close quarters —after accommodating its present allocation of transuranics, the WIPP will still retain some seventy percent of its space availability to meet “future requirements,” official shorthand for continuing nuclear weapons production—might not “go critical” and thereby set off an incalculably large atomic explosion.¹⁹⁶

Even worse problems are evident at Yucca Mountain, located on the southwestern boundary of the Nevada Test Site, where a $ 15 billion repository to accommodate 70, 000 tons of mostly civilian high-level waste is being imposed on the long-suffering Western Shoshones and Paiutes.¹⁹⁷ Not only is “spontaneous detonation” just as much a threat as at the WIPP, but Yucca Mountain, located in a volcanically active region, is undercut by no less than 32 geological fault lines.¹⁹⁸ Needless to say, no amount of engineering brilliance can ensure the repository's contents will remain undisturbed through a quarter-million years of earthquakes interspersed with volcanic eruptions. Once again, however, the project is being moved forward as rapidly as possible.

As if this were not enough, it was announced in 1993 by the Southwestern Compact, a consortium of state governments, that it had “decided to keep the option” of siting a huge low-level waste dump in the Mojave Desert's Ward Valley, near the small town of Needles on the California/Arizona boundary.¹⁹⁹ Envisioned as being large enough to accept the contents of all six existing—and failed—low-level facilities in the U.S. with room to spare for the next thirty years, the proposed site is less than eighteen miles from the Colorado River and directly above an aquifer.²⁰⁰ It is also very close to the Fort Mojave, Chemehuavi Valley, and Colorado River Indian Tribes reservations, and upstream from those of the Cocopahs and Quechanis around Yuma, Arizona.

Taken as a whole, the pattern of using “deserts as dumps” which has emerged in nuclear waste disposal practices over the past decade serves to confirm suspicions, already well founded, that creation of sacrificial geographies within the U.S. has been an integral aspect of Cold War policies and planning for nearly fifty years.²⁰¹ In many ways, the siting of repositories in particular, since they are explicitly intended to remain in place “forever,” may be seen as a sort of capstone gesture in this regard. The collateral genocide of those indigenous peoples whose lands lie within the boundaries of the sacrifice zones, nations whose ultimate negation has always been implicitly bound up in the very nature and depth of their colonization, is thus, finally and irrevocably, to be consummated.²⁰²

FREEING THE MINER's CANARY

The radioactive colonization of Native North America has involved fundamental miscalculations at a number of levels. In retrospect, the very idea that environmental contamination and consequent epidemiologies could be contained within U.S. internal colonies, hidden from polite society and afflicting only those deemed most expendable by federal policymakers, seems ludicrous. Windblown uranium tailings have never known that they were supposed to end their ongoing dispersal at reservation boundaries, no more than irradiated surface water has realized it was meant to stop flowing before it reached the domain of settler society, or polluted groundwater that it was intended to concentrate itself exclusively beneath Indian wellheads. Still less have clouds of radioactive iodides and strontium-impregnated fallout been aware that they were scripted to remain exclusively within Yakima or Shoshone or Puebloan territories.

As Felix S.Cohen once observed, American Indians serve as the proverbial “miners canary” of U.S. social, political, and economic policies. Whatever is done to Indians, he said, invariably serves as a prototype for things intended by America's élites for application to others, often to society as a whole. The effects of policy implementation upon Indians can thus be viewed as an “early warning” device for the costs and consequences of policy formation upon the broader society. In paying attention to what is happening to Indians, Cohen concluded, nonindians equip themselves to act in their own self-interest; in the alternative, they will inevitably find themselves sharing the Indians’ fate.203

Cohen's premise plainly holds in the present connection, and not simply in the more obvious ways. If the citizens of Troy, New York, which became an unanticipated “hot spot” for fallout from atmospheric testing during the early 1950s, can now advance the same claims concerning health impacts as can the residents of Nevada (see Figure 5.4),²⁰⁴ so too can everyone within a fifty mile radius of any of the more than one hundred nuclear reactors in the United States, all of them made possible by the uranium mined and milled on native land.²⁰⁵ As well, there are scores of nuclear weapons manufacturing centers, storage facilities, and the more than four tons of plutonium and comparable materials missing from U.S. inventories by 1977.²⁰⁶

If the disposal of mountainous accumulations of transuranic and other wastes has become a problem admitting to no easy solution, its existence essentially accrues from the fact that even the most progressive and enlightened sectors of the settler society have busied themselves for forty years with the protesting of nuclear proliferation at its tail end rather than at its point(s) of origin. For all the mass actions they have organized at reactors and missile bases over the years, not one has ever been conducted at a mining/milling site like Church Rock, Shiprock, or Laguna.²⁰⁷ Had things been otherwise, it might have been possible to choke off the flow of fissionable materials at their source rather than attempting to combat them in their most proliferate and dispersed state(s).

The opposition, however, has for the most part proven itself as willing to relegate native people to stations of marginality, even irrelevancy, as has the order it ostensibly opposes. And here, to borrow from Malcolm X, it can be said that the chickens have truly come home to roost.²⁰⁸ This takes the form of the increasingly ubiquitous cancers that have made their appearance across the spectrum of American society since World War II, and the spiraling rates of congenital birth defects and suppressed immune systems evident among those whose lives began during the 1940s or later.²⁰⁹

Plastering “no smoking” signs on every flat surface in North America will have absolutely no effect in preventing or curing these and myriad other radiation-induced maladies.²¹⁰ Wherein lies the cure? In a technical sense, it must be admitted that no one knows. We are very far down the road. The wages of radioactive colonialism are by and large being visited upon the colonizing society itself, and will likely continue to be in what is, in human terms, a permanent fashion. Such effects as have already obtained may well prove irreversible.²¹¹

Whether or not this is true, one thing is clear: any effort to counter the effects of nuclear contamination must begin by halting its continuing proliferation. Unavoidably, then, success devolves first and foremost upon devising means of stopping still more uranium from coming out of the ground. Until that is accomplished, struggles to shut down individual reactors, to clean up specific mill-sites and production facilities, to reduce the number of nuclear warheads in military inventories or even to figure out how to dispose of the existing accumulation of wastes will prove futile.²¹²

FIGURE 5.4. Areas of continental United States crossed by more than one nuclear cloud from above-ground detonations. Source: Jay M.Gould, The Enemy Within: The High Cost of Living Near Nuclear Reactors (New York: Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1996).

The principle of course is as time-honored as it is true: to correct a problem it is necessary to confront its source rather than its symptoms. In and of itself, however, uranium mining is not the source of the affliction at hand. Underlying the mining process is the nature of the relationship imposed by the United States upon indigenous peoples within its borders, that of internal colonization, without which such things could never have happened in the first place. And underlying that is a mentality shared by the North American settler population as a veritable whole: a core belief that it is somehow inherently, singularly, even mystically, entitled to dominate all it encounters, possessing or at least benefiting from that which belongs to others, regardless of the costs and consequences visited upon those thereby subjugated and dispossessed.²¹³

It can thus be said with certainty that if the dominant society is to have the least prospect of addressing the steadily mounting crisis of nuclear pollution it has no real option but to end the radioactive colonization of Native North America. This can happen only if U.S. élites are forced to abandon their ongoing pretense of holding legitimate and perpetual “trust authority” over native peoples, thus facilitating the genuine exercise of indigenous self-determination and our more general decolonization.²¹⁴ In turn, this can happen only to the extent that there is a wholesale alteration in the “genocidal mentality” which marks the settler population.²¹⁵

The key in this regard is a breaking down of the codes of denial, both individual and institutional, by which the settler society has always shielded itself from the implications of its own values and resulting actions.²¹⁶ The process is in part simply a matter of insisting that things be called by their right names rather than the noble-sounding euphemisms behind which reality has been so carefully hidden: terms like “discovery” and “settlement” do not reflect the actualities of invasion and conquest they are used to disguise; colonialism is not a matter of “trust,” it is colonialism, a crime under international law; genocide isn’t an “inadvertent” outcome of “progress,” it is genocide, an always avoidable crime against humanity; ecocide is not “development,” it is ecocide, the most blatant and irremediable form of environmental destruction; mere possession constitutes “nine-tenths of the law” only among thugs devoted to enjoying the fruits of an organized system of theft.²¹⁷

Thus accurately described, many of the measures heretofore accepted by the American public in the name of forging and defending its “way of life” become viscerally repulsive, to average Americans no less than to anyone else. Unlike a society based on discovery and settlement, progress and trust, there are few who would queue up to argue the defensibility of a way of life predicated in/sustained by invasion, conquest, genocide, ecocide, colonization, and other modes of systemic theft. This is all the more true when it can be demonstrated, as it can in the present connection, that the process of intergroup victimization is bound to subject victims and victimizers alike to an identically ugly destiny. In sum, it is not unreasonable to expect an increasing proportion of the settler population to move towards the position sketched above, if not from a sense of altruism (i.e., “doing the right thing”), then on the basis of newly perceived self-interest.²¹⁸

It is worth observing that the ensuing decolonization of Native North America would offer benefits to humanity extending far beyond itself. Every inch of territory and attendant resources withdrawn from U.S. “domestic” hegemony diminishes the relative capacity of America's corporate managers to project themselves outward via multilateral trade agreements and the like, consummating a “New World Order” in which most of the globe is to be subordinated and exploited in accordance with models already developed, tested, and refined through their applications to Indian Country.²¹⁹ Overall, elimination of this threat yields the promise of an across-the-board recasting of relations between human beings, and of humans with the rest of nature, which is infinitely more equitable and balanced than anything witnessed since the beginnings of European expansionism more than 500 years ago.²²⁰

In the alternative, if the current psychopolitical/socioeconomic status quo prevails, things are bound to run their deadly course. Felix Cohen's figurative miners will inevitably share the fate of their canary, the genocide they so smugly allow as an “acceptable cost of doing business” blending perfectly into their own autogenocide until the grim prospect of species extinction has at last been realized. There is, to be sure, a certain unmistakable justice attending the symmetry of this scenario (“What goes around, comes around,” as Charlie Manson liked to say).²²¹ But, surely, we—all of us, settlers as well as natives—owe more to our future generations than to bequeath them a planet so thoroughly irradiated as to deny the possibility of life itself.