Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country

Abstract

In this sophisticated and insightful book, Traci Brynne Voyles argues that the process of “wastelanding” helps explain the history and persistence of environmental injustice. Environmental racism stems not only from constructed discourses of race but also from constructed conceptions of place. Asserting their colonial dominance over the Navajo, Euro-Americans defined indigenous lands in the American Southwest as wasted and useless, making those landscapes, and the people who inhabited them, pollutable. Wastelanding enabled the development of uranium mining and milling on Navajo land, a continuation of the colonial project with dramatic, if slowly evolving, violence inflicted on both the land and people. “The power exerted over environmental resources,” Voyles explains, “and the ways in which those in power construct knowledge about landscapes, are a central part of how what we now call social injustices are produced” (p. ix). In exploring the legacy of uranium mining in Navajo country, Voyles draws from tremendously powerful histories: the forced sterilization of indigenous women paired with the reproductive health impacts of radiation exposure; Navajo houses constructed from radioactive uranium mill tailings; and the virtually unknown Rio Puerco accident in 1979, when the containment barriers of a tailings pond in New Mexico failed and sent a radioactive slurry into the river and through reservation lands—the largest accidental release of radioactive material in American history. From these and other stories Voyles builds a convincing case for connections between colonialism, wastelanding, and environmental injustice. She brings her account to the present by examining grassroots activism regarding land tenure, environmental health, and the prospect of renewed uranium mining, underscoring her historical argument by demonstrating the ongoing link between the demands for decolonization and justice.