Environmental Racism, Native Americans, and Nuclear Waste

By Josh Davison

The United States is a dominant political, military, and economic forced throughout the world.  While this may be a great thing, this does mean that it has generated waste, pollution, and ecologic destruction.  Even if this is something that cannot be stopped, we must look at the problems the U.S. growth machine has caused in terms of people and ecologic damage.

America, itself, was founded as a free land that was “stolen” from native Mexicans and Native Americans.  While, countries have taken land from the age of Charlemagne to Israel in the late 1940’s (among a legion of other choices), the case of America could be categorized into environmental racism by some.  Racism has shaped the political, economic, and ecologic areas of the U.S. since the signing of the Declaration.  This discrimination forced Native Americans off of their land so that white settlers could have choice land and maybe cultivate that land with their black slaves.  Getting past this “white man first” mantra has been hard over the decades and is still taking place today.

Today, many people in Nevada and Utah live downwind from former nuclear testing sites.  Tribes, like the Navajo, have borne the brunt of this problem by providing miners and land for nuclear waste sites.  The federal government and the nuclear industry have targeted Native American reserves for nuclear waste sites for many, many years.  In 1987, the Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator sent letters to many tribal and reservation areas offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to use their land for nuclear waste sites.  It is plausible to think that Congress offered these people because many of them live in very impoverished areas.

Eventually the tiny Skull Valley Band on the Goshute Indians Reservation was targeted for a nuclear waste dump.  They live in Utah, not far from the testing of the nuclear age.   They accepted the cash and now the nuclear dump is almost their only means of economy.  They now have health concerns.  This seems to be a textbook example of a violation of environmental justice because these people were already living in a poisoned land from the nuclear age, quite possibly were suffering health and economically wise, and now they were targeted for being impoverished.

However, this is not to say that these Native Americans had to accept the money the second time around.  It is still a sad story of the powerful preying on the weak in terms of environmental racism and justice.

Source:http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/pfsejfactsheet.htm

http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/PovpolEj.html