Land and Sovereignty

The United States nuclear complex depends on land, raw materials, and labor. During the Cold War, the federal government sought these on the "Colorado Plateau," an arid region encompassing the "four corners" area of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona where there was already intensive resource extraction. This region is home to several Indigenous Nations with large present-day land bases and treaty rights that extend over a wide area, often across state lines, including the Diné (Navajo), Pueblo, Ute, Apache, and Western Shoshone peoples. With the onset of the Cold War in the 1940s, the region became valued for its deposits of another energy resource: uranium, a heavy metal used to fuel nuclear reactors. In 1946, the Atomic Energy Act established the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and allowed for the withdrawal of public lands for uranium mining. The AEC also persuaded the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) National Park Service to allow prospecting on federally protected lands. In conjunction with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the AEC performed ground and aerial surveys of uranium deposits, some of which breached Native American tribal borders. In 1948, the AEC announced that it would purchase uranium at a guaranteed price from private prospectors, thereby causing a uranium boom that lasted through the 1950s.

The Navajo (Diné) Nation participated in this nuclear economy, with the tribal government signing lease agreements with private mining companies and many members Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 57.working as miners or wage laborers at nuclear plants and forming so-called “uranium communities. At the time, many leaders in the Navajo tribal government believed that uranium carried the promise of economic prosperity, although records show that Navajo miners were paid as little as $0.81 per hour in 1949—just a few cents over minimum wage. By the early 1960s, a striking increase in lung cancer deaths among Navajo miners prompted their widows to organize for improved safety, health care, and compensation and laid the groundwork for the eventual passage of the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act of 1990. Over time, uranium mining’s threats to land rights, cultural practices, health, and economic independence became clear, and in 2005, Dana Powell, Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), iv-xv.Navajo officials issued a moratorium on the creation of new uranium mines in their territory and called the U.S.’s actions during the Cold War a genocide.

Meanwhile, the federal government had already demonstrated its willingness to seize private land for nuclear production and testing. The U.S. seized more than 18,000 acres of farmland in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for the Manhattan Project. Much of this land belonged to the San Ildefonso Pueblo, whose officials believed the land would be returned after World War II. In 1951, farmland in Colorado’s front range was seized to build the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility, while the Nevada Test Site was established on the unceded territory of Western Shoshone. To date, none of these tracts have been returned, and the Shoshone continue to organize against the Nevada Test Site and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage project.

The federal government’s pursuit of land and resources has threatened the integrity of tribal lands. The four corners region is home to the Pueblo, Diné, and Nuevomexicano peoples; the San Carlos Apaches reside in southeastern Arizona; and in southwestern Colorado and northeastern Utah live the Southern Utes and Ute Mountain Utes. Each of these groups has been petitioned by the AEC for land leases and uranium prospectors’ permits. While the Southern Utes and Ute Mountain Utes forbade prospecting in 1955, the AEC appealed to the Ute Mountain Tribal Council and managed to obtain a lease to investigate uranium deposits on their land anyway. Mining, engineering and nuclear testing have threatened the land both ecologically and culturally, as demonstrated by the Manhattan Project’s encroachment upon Pueblo spiritual sites in Los Alamos. The Manhattan Project imposed 43 square miles of nuclear infrastructure in the area and cut off the Pueblos from their own religious sites.

Wayne Hsieh, Ute Mountain Tribal Park, 2017, Flickr

Nuclear activity has also caused health and economic problems for Native Americans living nearby, infringing upon tribal ability to control their own affairs. For example, hazardous fallout from nuclear tests like Test shot "Harry" became known as “Dirty Harry" by those adversely impacted downwind.“Test Shot Harry,” launched on May 18, 1953, likely reached Navajo and Ute communities in northern Arizona and southwestern Utah. Similarly, oral histories collected by the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Committee testify that radioactive ash rained down on their rural community of Native, Indigenous Mexican, and Spanish-descended ranchers after the secret 1945 Trinity nuclear test that initiated the atomic age. Yet the effects of experiments like these on Native American populations were not acknowledged or investigated by the federal government. In 1992, the Los Alamos National Laboratory claimed that its facilities posed no health risk to the San Ildefonso Pueblo living in the area, but this claim was directly contradicted by the Eight Northern Pueblos Office of Environmental Protection. In fact, exposure to radiation from uranium mining and weapons activities tracks with an increase in cancer among Indigenous communities in New Mexico from virtually nonexistence to the highest of almost any other group.

Native activists have pushed tribal governments to take measures to combat these offenses against their land, health, and sovereignty. In 1987, during the first Indigenous Uranium Forum in the four corners region, the tribes in attendance lobbied for legislation that would protect their rights to their lands and environment. Numerous regional and pan-Indian activist groups have protested against nuclear encroachment on Native American land, including Diné Citizens Against Ruining our Environment (CARE), the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM), the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment (MASE), Women of All Red Nations (WARN), and the American Indian Movement (AIM). Without the work of organizations like these, it is unlikely that federal or tribal governments would have ever passed landmark legislation like the 1990 Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act or the 2005 Diné Natural Resources Protection Act (DNRPA) that banned uranium mining on Navajo land. As the legacies of the atomic era persist and tribes continue to face health, environmental, and economic problems as a result, Native American land rights and sovereignty remain a topic of community concern and mobilization.

Sources

Ackland, Len. Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico, 1999.

Brugge, Doug and Robert Goble. “The History of Uranium Mining and the Navajo People.” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 9 (2002): 1410-19.

Cordova, Tina. “The Fight for Recognition: The Tularosa Basin Downwinders and the Injustices of Trinity.” Global-E, April 22, 2021. Accessed June 16, 2021.

Masco, Joseph. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Powell, Dana. Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Voyles, Traci Brynne. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.