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Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country

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Description

Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo land within the U.S. Southwest, asking why certain landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Uranium mines and mills at the Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and energy programs. By 1942, mines at the reservation were the primary source of uranium for the highest-secret Manhattan Project. Lately, the Navajo Nation is home to more than a thousand abandoned uranium sites. Radiation-related diseases are endemic, claiming the health and lives of former miners and nonminers alike.

Traci Brynne Voyles argues that the presence of uranium mining on Diné (Navajo) land constitutes a clear case of environmental racism. Taking a look at discursive constructions of landscapes, she explores how environmental racism develops over the years. For Voyles, the “wasteland,” where toxic materials are excavated, exploited, and dumped, is both a racial and a spatial signifier that renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable. Because environmental inequality is inherent in the best way industrialism operates, the wasteland is the “other” by which brand new industrialism is established.

In examining the history of wastelanding in Navajo country, Voyles provides “an environmental justice history” of uranium mining, revealing how just as “civilization” has been defined on and through “savagery,” environmental privilege is produced by portraying other landscapes as marginal, worthless, and pollutable.

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