 | |
| 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 the perspectives of historians, environmental activists, and gender experts. The book uses the Navajo (Diné) names for places, as part of the author's wider attempts to document things from a decolonised perspective. The author is critical of non-Indigenous leadership's 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]
A non-renewable resource is a natural resource that cannot be readily replaced by natural means at a pace quick enough to keep up with consumption. An example is carbon-based fossil fuels. The original organic matter, with the aid of heat and pressure, becomes a fuel such as oil or gas. Earth minerals and metal ores, fossil fuels and groundwater in certain aquifers are all considered non-renewable resources, though individual elements are always conserved.
The exploitation of natural resources describes using natural resources, often non-renewable or limited, for economic growth or development. Environmental degradation, human insecurity, and social conflict frequently accompany natural resource exploitation. The impacts of the depletion of natural resources include the decline of economic growth in local areas; however, the abundance of natural resources does not always correlate with a country's material prosperity. Many resource-rich countries, especially in the Global South, face distributional conflicts, where local bureaucracies mismanage or disagree on how resources should be used. Foreign industries also contribute to resource exploitation, where raw materials are outsourced from developing countries, with the local communities receiving little profit from the exchange. This is often accompanied by negative effects of economic growth around the affected areas such as inequality and pollution
An American Indian reservation is an area of land held and governed by a U.S. federal government-recognized Native American tribal nation, whose government is autonomous, 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 intersection of private and public real estate creates significant administrative, political, and legal difficulties.
Environmental justice or eco-justice, is a social movement to address environmental injustice, which occurs when poor or 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 50,000 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 and toxicity 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. Beyond naturally occurring uranium, mining, phosphates in agriculture, weapons manufacturing, and nuclear power are anthropogenic 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 224,331 pounds (101.8 tonnes) of U3O8 in 2023, 15% of the 2018 production of 1,447,945 pounds (656.8 tonnes) of U3O8. The 2023 production represents 0.4% of the uranium fuel requirements of the US's nuclear power reactors for the year. Production came from five in-situ leaching plants, four in Wyoming (Nichols Ranch ISR Project, Lance Project, Lost Creek Project, and Smith Ranch-Highland Operation) and one in Nebraska (Crowe Butte Operation); and from the White Mesa conventional mill in Utah.
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.
The relationship between Uranium mining and the Navajo people began in 1944 in northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah.
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.
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 event merged art, ecology, environmentalism and environmental justice, to inform the public about uranium mining and milling, nuclear power, 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 in European extractivism. The concept was coined in Portuguese as "extractivismo" in 1996 to describe the for-profit exploitation of forest resources in Brazil.
The Four Sacred Mountains of the Navajo are the four mountains along the boundaries of the Navajo Nation. According to Navajo belief, each mountain is assigned a color and direction and is seen as a deity that provides essential resources for Navajo livelihood. However, the environmental integrity of these sacred mountains has been compromised for decades, by uranium mining and other resource extraction procedures leading to unfavorable consequences for the Navajo community. According to the Navajo, the destruction of sacred places of power can release dangerous power, which the Navajo attribute to the seen social disintegration in today's society.
