 | |
| Author | Traci Brynne Voyles |
|---|---|
| Subject | Uranium mining and the Navajo people |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | University of Minnesota Press |
Publication date | May 15 2015 |
| Pages | 304 |
| ISBN | 978-0816692675 |
Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country is a 2015 non-fiction book by Traci Brynne Voyles.
The book documents the history of uranium mining in the Navajo Nation.
Wastelanding is a 2015 non-fiction book by Traci Brynne Voyles. [1]
The book contains perspectives of historians, environmental activists, gender experts. The book uses the Navajo (Diné) names for places, as part of the author's wider attempts document things from a decolonised perspective. The author is critical of non-Indigenous leaderships attempts to portray Navajo lands as empty, as wastelands, to make the extraction of uranium easier, avoiding the need to consider the needs of the land's Indigenous inhabitants. [1]
The book starts with the U.S. military attacking the Navajo and destroying their crops in 1864. [1] It notes the 1930s permission given to companies to develop resources, [2] as government scientists declared the land as "barren" and started efforts to reduce Navajo Nation's cattle numbers. 1940s accounts of history note the rise in global demand for uranium for nuclear power, 1950s discovery of uranium by Navajo shepherd Paddy Martinez, falsely attributed to luck and not knowledge. [1]
The book concludes with the author's push for society to adopt truthful, non-colonial versions of history, and illustrates how uranium mines are located on places sacred to the Navajo people, examples include Tsoodzil. [1] The book notes over 2,000 abandoned uranium mines remain on Navajo land, with contamination affecting land, water and people. [3]
The American Historical Review praised Voyles for her careful use of language, avoiding common colonial mistakes. The review, by Samuel R Cook, praises the author for her rigorous analysis, but describes the presentation as "in some ways cynical". Cook describes the book as impressive, but notes that the author avoided the topic of tribal government's role in resource extraction, although calls this an "excusable oversight". [1]
Kathleen Chamberlain writing in Ethnohistory described the book as "outstanding", "well-written" and "thoroughly documented." [2] Michael A. Amundson of Northern Arizona University described the book as "thought-provoking". [4]
Mining is the extraction of valuable geological materials from the Earth and other astronomical objects. Mining is required to obtain most materials that cannot be grown through agricultural processes, or feasibly created artificially in a laboratory or factory. Ores recovered by mining include metals, coal, oil shale, gemstones, limestone, chalk, dimension stone, rock salt, potash, gravel, and clay. The ore must be a rock or mineral that contains valuable constituent, can be extracted or mined and sold for profit. Mining in a wider sense includes extraction of any non-renewable resource such as petroleum, natural gas, or even water.
An Indian reservation is an area of land held and governed by a U.S. federal government-recognized Native American tribal nation, whose government is semi-sovereign, subject to regulations passed by the United States Congress and administered by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, and not to the U.S. state government in which it is located. Some of the country's 574 federally recognized tribes govern more than one of the 326 Indian reservations in the United States, while some share reservations, and others have no reservation at all. Historical piecemeal land allocations under the Dawes Act facilitated sales to non–Native Americans, resulting in some reservations becoming severely fragmented, with pieces of tribal and privately held land being treated as separate enclaves. This jumble of private and public real estate creates significant administrative, political, and legal difficulties.
Wasteland or waste land may refer to:
Environmental justice or eco-justice, is a social movement to address environmental injustice, which occurs when poor and marginalized communities are harmed by hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses from which they do not benefit. The movement has generated hundreds of studies showing that exposure to environmental harm is inequitably distributed.
The Navajo are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States.
Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colonization is a book by Ward Churchill. It is a collection of essays on the efforts of Native Americans in the United States and in Canada to maintain their land tenure claims against government and corporate infringement. Equating colonization with genocide and ecocide, the author provides examples of resistance.
Uranium mining is the process of extraction of uranium ore from the ground. Over 50 thousand tons of uranium were produced in 2019. Kazakhstan, Canada, and Australia were the top three uranium producers, respectively, and together account for 68% of world production. Other countries producing more than 1,000 tons per year included Namibia, Niger, Russia, Uzbekistan, the United States, and China. Nearly all of the world's mined uranium is used to power nuclear power plants. Historically uranium was also used in applications such as uranium glass or ferrouranium but those applications have declined due to the radioactivity of uranium and are nowadays mostly supplied with a plentiful cheap supply of depleted uranium which is also used in uranium ammunition. In addition to being cheaper, depleted uranium is also less radioactive due to a lower content of short-lived 234
U and 235
U than natural uranium.
Uranium in the environment is a global health concern, and comes from both natural and man-made sources. Mining, phosphates in agriculture, weapons manufacturing, and nuclear power are sources of uranium in the environment.
Patricio "Paddy" Martinez was an American prospector and shepherd who discovered uranium at Haystack Mesa in the San Juan Basin near Grants, New Mexico, in 1950. This was the first discovery in the Grants Uranium District, and led to a uranium boom that lasted almost 30 years. The San Juan Basin yielded 60% of the uranium in the United States, valued at over $25 billion.
Uranium mining in the United States produced 173,875 pounds (78.9 tonnes) of U3O8 in 2019, 88% lower than the 2018 production of 1,447,945 pounds (656.8 tonnes) of U3O8 and the lowest US annual production since 1948. The 2019 production represents 0.3% of the anticipated uranium fuel requirements of the US's nuclear power reactors for the year.
The Return of Navajo Boy is a documentary film produced by Jeff Spitz and Bennie Klain about the Cly family, Navajo who live on their reservation. Through them, the film explores several longstanding issues among the Navajo and their relations with the United States government and corporations: environmental racism, media and political representation, off-reservation adoption, and denial of reparations for environmental illnesses due to uranium mining in Monument Valley, Utah, which was unregulated for decades. Bill Kennedy served as the film's executive producer; his late father had produced and directed the earlier silent film The Navajo Boy (1950s), which featured the Cly family.
The Church Rock uranium mill spill occurred in the U.S. state of New Mexico on July 16, 1979, when United Nuclear Corporation's tailings disposal pond at its uranium mill in Church Rock breached its dam. The accident remains the largest release of radioactive material in U.S. history, having released more radioactivity than the Three Mile Island accident four months earlier.
The Navajo People and Uranium Mining (2006) is a non-fiction book edited by Doug Brugge, Timothy Benally, and Esther Yazzie-Lewis; it uses oral histories to tell the stories of Navajo Nation families and miners in the uranium mining industry. The foreword is written by Stewart L. Udall, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
In the 1950s, the Navajo Nation was situated directly in the uranium mining belt that experienced a boom in production, and many residents found work in the mines. Prior to 1962, the risks of lung cancer due to uranium mining were unknown to the workers, and the lack of a word for radiation in the Navajo language left the miners unaware of the associated health hazards. The cultural significance of water for the Navajo people and the environmental damage to both the land and livestock inhibits the ability of the Navajo people to practice their culture.
The uranium mining debate covers the political and environmental controversies of uranium mining for use in either nuclear power or nuclear weapons.
Nuclear ethics is a cross-disciplinary field of academic and policy-relevant study in which the problems associated with nuclear warfare, nuclear deterrence, nuclear arms control, nuclear disarmament, or nuclear energy are examined through one or more ethical or moral theories or frameworks. In contemporary security studies, the problems of nuclear warfare, deterrence, proliferation, and so forth are often understood strictly in political, strategic, or military terms. In the study of international organizations and law, however, these problems are also understood in legal terms. Nuclear ethics assumes that the very real possibilities of human extinction, mass human destruction, or mass environmental damage which could result from nuclear warfare are deep ethical or moral problems. Specifically, it assumes that the outcomes of human extinction, mass human destruction, or environmental damage count as moral evils. Another area of inquiry concerns future generations and the burden that nuclear waste and pollution imposes on them. Some scholars have concluded that it is therefore morally wrong to act in ways that produce these outcomes, which means it is morally wrong to engage in nuclear warfare.
The World Uranium Hearing was held in Salzburg, Austria in September 1992.Anti-nuclear speakers from all continents, including indigenous speakers and scientists, testified to the health and environmental problems of uranium mining and processing, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, nuclear tests, and radioactive waste disposal.
The International Uranium Film Festival was founded in 2010 in Rio de Janeiro, and has traveled to Germany, Portugal, India and the United States. This educational event merges art, ecology, environmentalism and environmental justice, to inform the public about uranium mining and milling, nuclear power issues, nuclear weapons and the nuclear fuel cycle from "cradle to grave" life-cycle assessment - and the effects of radioactivity on humans and other species. The festival founders and principal organizers are Norbert Suchanek and Marcia Gomes de Oliveira. The legal organizer of the International Uranium Film Festival is the arts and education non-profit "Yellow Archives". The organizers and the festival participants seek to educate and activate the international public on these issues through the dynamic media of film and video.
Extractivism is the removal of natural resources particularly for export with minimal processing. This economic model is common throughout the Global South and the Arctic region, but also happens in some sacrifice zones in the Global North The concept was coined in Portuguese as "extractivismo" in 1996 to describe the for-profit exploitation of forest resources in Brazil.
Ecofeminism generally is based on the understanding that gender as a concept is the basis of the human-environment relationships. Studies suggest that there's a difference between men and women when it comes to how they treat nature, for instance, women are known to be more involved with environmentally friendly behaviors. Socially there's an important claim in the ecofeminism theoretical framework that the patriarchy is linked to discrimination against women and the degradation of the environment. In Canada the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Toxics in 2020 shows that ineffective environmental management and mismanagement of hazardous waste is affecting different age groups, genders, and socioeconomic status in different ways, while three years before that, Canadian Human Rights Commission in 2017 submitted another report, warning the government about how the exposure to environmental hazards is a different experience for minorities in Canada. There have been ecofeminist movements for decades all over Canada such as Mother's Milk Project, protests against Uranium mining in Nova Scotia, and the Clayoquot Sound Peace Camp. Ecofeminism has also appeared as a concept in the media, such as books, publications, movies, and documentaries such as the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood and Fury for the Sound: the women at Clayoquot by Shelley Wine. Ecofeminism in the Canadian context has been subject to criticism, especially by the Indigenous communities as they call it cultural appropriation, non-inclusive, and inherent in colonial worldviews and structures.
