Indigenous women's resistances at the start and end of the nuclear fuel chain

Abstract

Abstract By focusing attention on the beginning and end of the nuclear fuel chain, which mostly takes place on Indigenous lands, this article examines the gendered effects of uranium mining and nuclear waste dumping on North American Indigenous women and their resistances to these processes. In so doing, the article reveals how mining and dumping are made possible by the denial or deflection not only of Indigenous peoples' sovereignty over their lands, but also of Indigenous women's political and cultural authority and bodily autonomy. The article further shows how Indigenous women's reassertions of their nations' and their own self-determination through resurgent practices, like water-walking in the case of the Anishnaabe women, contribute significantly to the resolve of Indigenous nations to refuse to consent to further nuclear colonialism; an example of this is the case of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation's referendum that stopped the siting of the deep geological repository for nuclear waste on their territory. This case suggests it is incumbent on non-Indigenous feminist IR critics of nuclear politics to engage with Indigenous feminist thought and centre Indigenous women's resistances to the nuclear fuel chain, in order to address the consequences of nuclear waste dumping in anti-colonial, and socially and environmentally just, ways.