Introduction

The traumatic consequences of decades of uranium mining for Diné (Navajo) peoples are now infamous as striking examples of environmental racism and radioactive injustice. From the early 1940s onward, uranium ore was extensively mined on Diné lands to support American Cold War-era nuclear weapons and energy programs. Over the following decades, over half of the nation’s domestic uranium supply came from Diné lands – with more than 2,500 uranium mines employing over 3000 Diné mineworkers. The tragic impacts of these developments have been deep and widespread, from increased radon exposure and high cancer rates among mineworkers to the long-term contamination of soil and water resources in neighboring communities.1

Much less recognized, however, is how Diné and other Native Americans’ historical experiences with uranium have long been significant on a global stage. As George Rosza has recently noted, historical writing on the anti-nuclear movements of the late 20th century has often tended to overlook or sideline Indigenous anti-nuclear activists and their perspectives, particularly concerning the making of transnational and trans-Indigenous solidarities.2 Rosza and several other scholars have begun exploring Native Americans’ transnational organizing against nuclear development, generally focusing on the late 1980s and 1990s, when the launching of various global fora on Indigenous peoples’ uranium problems and intercontinental travel exchanges around Indigenous nuclear experiences coincided with the broader acceleration of the international Indigenous rights movement.3 This essay pushes the story of such transnational uranium activism further back in time, to some of the important, formative global connections that began in the late 1970s. At this moment, a host of energy companies began aggressively pursuing the expansion of uranium mining along the Grants Mineral Belt in New Mexico, propelling a new wave of Native American activism in opposition.4 As these resistance campaigns expanded at home and abroad, Diné communities’ traumatic uranium experiences reverberated in a variety of emerging “hot spots” around the globe where uranium mining’s expansion was being intensely contested by local Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists.

More particularly, Diné anti-uranium activists and their allies forged solidarities with Indigenous groups in southern Africa and northern Australia who were waging their own struggles against similar situations of “radioactive colonialism,” as famously described by Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke. These were parallel contexts where settler colonial power dynamics and multinational energy companies’ resource predations on Indigenous lands structured local communities’ vulnerabilities to uranium mining and its toxic effects.5 In Australia in the late 1970s, the planned development of uranium mines at Ranger and other locations in the Northern Territory, on lands traditionally owned by numerous Aboriginal communities, coincided with the enactment of new Aboriginal land rights and institutions in the territory. An outpouring of intense local and national activism arose in opposition to this latest uranium push, building from both the profound Aboriginal rights movement of previous decades and a growing environmental and anti-nuclear movement across the country. For many Aboriginal activists and non-Aboriginal allies, uranium development in the Northern Territory represented the continued marginalization of local Indigenous communities to serve the expansive interests of settler capitalist development.6 Meanwhile, in southern Africa, the apartheid South African government intensified its illegal hold over Namibia (South West Africa) by launching a massive uranium development project in 1976 – the Rössing mine. Initiated the same year as the infamous Soweto Uprising in South Africa, the exploitation of uranium and Namibian workers at Rössing soon became focal points of international solidarity campaigns: for boycotting trade with South Africa, condemning apartheid and human rights violations, and supporting the Namibian liberation struggle waged by the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO).7

The following discussion explores some of the revealing ways that Diné communities’ historical encounters with uranium became intertwined with these newly emerging and increasingly tense Australian and Namibian nuclear contexts, focusing on a few brief examples from 1978 to 1980. During these years, Diné and other Native American activists, along with non-Native allies in various Indigenous rights, environmental, and anti-nuclear movements, utilized a variety of transnational platforms – in Australia, the U.S., and western Europe – to share the tragic lessons of Diné communities’ ongoing and long-term experiences with the injustices of “radioactive colonialism.” This transnational sharing of Diné stories concerning uranium’s traumatic impacts helped forge solidarities with Aboriginal and Namibian actors, not only heightening their broader awareness of their common nuclear vulnerabilities as Indigenous people in settler colonial contexts but also bringing into sharp focus the tremendous personal suffering at stake in their respective uranium struggles. Moreover, as some of the following examples reveal, the circulation of Diné accounts of radioactive injustice served as relevant cautionary tales and foundations for transnational solidarity-building for other global communities facing impending threats of uranium development, especially particular Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups in western Europe.

From Native New Mexico to Northern Territory, Australia

The growing backlash in many southwestern Native American communities against the new uranium “rush” in the late 1970s was part of a broader critical response among Native American activists nationally to industrial capitalist extraction of natural resources on Indigenous lands and the deleterious impacts this posed for Native lives, livelihoods, and cultures.8 Activists at both the local and the national level increasingly viewed these struggles for environmental justice and Indigenous rights in transnational terms, building upon the global perspectives of the preceding decade of the Red Power movement and even earlier waves of Indian rights campaigns.9 Prominent organizations, such as the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) and the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), regularly criticized the impacts of multinational corporations, particularly in the energy sector, on Indigenous communities globally. For example, in 1977 the IITC organized a campaign, in coordination with U.S.-based SWAPO and anti-apartheid activists, against American Metal Climax and its deleterious copper mining operations among both the Northern Cheyenne in Wyoming and Namibian communities under South African control.10

In the case of resistance against uranium mining in the Southwest, Diné and other Native American activists at both the national and regional level particularly saw direct parallels with the emerging uranium problems among Aboriginal Australians and colonized Namibians. In 1978, as the National Indian Youth Council, in coordination with other Native and non-Native organizations, called for a moratorium on all uranium development in the Grants Mineral Belt, it explicitly invoked the comparable struggles of local Indigenous peoples in Australia and southern Africa. As the Diné associate director, John Redhouse, stated at a press conference in June that year: “There are many Indian People who are now supporting the struggles by the Australian Aborigines and the Black indigenous peoples of Namibia in Southwestern Africa to fight against similar uranium developments on their traditional homelands. We have recognized that we are facing the same international nuclear beast.”11

Later that summer, Redhouse again highlighted these comparative global dimensions of the problems Diné and other Native Americans faced, at the first national No Nukes Strategy Conference in Louisville, Kentucky. Native peoples of the U.S., he noted, were “beginning to work closely with the Australian Aborigines and the black indigenous people of Namibia in Southwestern Africa on the common uranium development issues.” Along with the goal of educating American anti-nuclear groups and others about Indigenous peoples’ uranium issues, Native American activists also aimed to “work more closely with native peoples of the world about organizing international resistance to uranium exploitation and other nuclear fuel cycle projects on their lands.”12

One way in which Redhouse and others followed through on this campaign was by directly reaching out to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists involved in the anti-uranium and human rights’ struggles in Aboriginal Australia and in southern Africa. By late 1978, now focusing his activism through the newly founded American Indian Environmental Council (AIEC) in Albuquerque, Redhouse corresponded with various individuals involved in the Australian Aboriginal rights, environmental, and anti-nuclear movements, strategizing about ways to lend their mutual support.13 In late April 1979, as part of nationwide anti-nuclear protests following the Three Mile Island disaster, Redhouse and the AIEC organized a rally at Mt. Taylor (nearby Grants, New Mexico) – an historically significant spiritual center for many Native communities in the area, and also the site of a Gulf Oil uranium mine. The protest drew a coalition of Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists from across the region and North America.14 And, as the event’s promotional literature reflected, the organizers emphasized the parallel struggles and support of Indigenous groups fighting uranium mining in Northern Australia and Namibia in particular.15

Moreover, Diné activists pursued other indirect, creative ways to extend these transnational connections, collaborating closely with a rising star in international activism around all things nuclear: Helen Caldicott. Caldicott at the time taught at Harvard Medical School and was a specialist in genetic childhood diseases at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Prior to permanently settling in the U.S. from Australia in 1977, she had become increasingly active in opposing the Australian government’s renewed promotion of uranium mining and export, spearheading information campaigns concerning the toxic health impacts of uranium exposure, in coordination with trade unions and pediatric physicians across the country.16 In the late 1970s, she moved more fully into full-time activism, authoring the book Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do (1978) and traveling around the U.S. and the globe speaking out against the numerous hazards and risks associated with all dimensions of nuclear development.

In preparation for the Mt. Taylor rally in April 1979, Redhouse and the AIEC arranged for Caldicott to attend and speak in solidarity with local Native American activists’ opposition to uranium development. Yet the reach of this collaboration extended much further. Several weeks prior to the New Mexico gathering, Caldicott was slated to travel to Australia on a cross-country book promotion tour. Her itinerary would include a key stop among Aboriginal communities on Croker Island in the Northern Territory, at a moment when uranium development and Aboriginal rights were being so intensely contested around the proposed Ranger mine. To capitalize on her having such direct access to local Aboriginal audiences, Diné activists provided Caldicott with information to directly share with them: a message of solidarity as they waged their parallel struggles against uranium extraction on their homelands; and a visceral warning, through a detailed slideshow and accompanying commentary, about Diné communities’ long-term and ongoing suffering from uranium mining’s harmful radioactive impacts on their bodies and landscapes. As a result, a brief yet revealing trans-Indigenous and trans-Pacific exchange resulted – with Caldicott as messenger – and was then fortunately captured on film, as part of the acclaimed documentary on Caldicott’s activism Eight Minutes to Midnight.17

In one scene in the film, Caldicott is shown at Minjilang on Croker Island in late March 1979, giving the slide presentation at a local Aboriginal community center. As she projects the image of a particular Diné man, she describes to her audience the message Diné activists have asked her to deliver:

This man is called Henry Black. And he’s a Navajo Indian, and he was a uranium miner. Now, they’re gonna want some Aborigines to mine uranium here. He’s dying of lung cancer. And he said the uranium companies never told him he could get cancer. And the Navajo Indians want you to see what’s happened to their land. They sent you this slide show to show you what’s happened to their land. They’re losing their land. Okay? . . . And if you have any messages for the Navajo Indians there, well, tell me. And I’m going to see them in three weeks, over there in New Mexico, and I’ll tell them what you said. Okay? Because they want to support you and help you. That’s why they sent this over – they want to help you to stop this happening to your land. That’s why I came.18

Following this, the prominent local leader Dick Malwagu, seated in the audience, offers a short response. At the time, Malwagu was not only the chairman of the local Minjilang community council but also served as an executive member of the Northern Land Council (NLC) representing many diverse Aboriginal communities in the northernmost areas of the Northern Territory. Just a few months before Caldicott’s visit, in fact, he had been one of the more outspoken NLC representatives actively opposing the final signing of the contentious Ranger mining agreement with the federal government, criticizing such things as the profit priorities of pro-mining interests, the flawed political process (such as inadequate consultation with Mandilarri-Ildugij and other traditional custodians of affected lands), and the myriad toxic risks to local residents’ and extended families’ spiritual, cultural, and physical lives.19 As the film reveals, after absorbing Caldicott’s presentation of Diné peoples’ traumatic uranium experiences, Malwagu clearly saw some direct and ominous parallels with the situation of his own communities; and he also envisioned potential opportunities for mutual support. “We’re sending over a word for them,” he tells Caldicott. “We’re saying here, … maybe that place, they would give us a hand in this part here, because we’re seeing this is a, … it’s a real ‘wreck-it.’”20

A few weeks later, when Caldicott spoke before a largely Diné audience at the Mt. Taylor rally in New Mexico, she elaborated further on Malwagu’s meaning. After her slide presentation, Malwagu and others had confided to her how deeply the images and stories of Diné suffering had impacted them. As the film depicts, she told the crowd at the rally:

The reason that I’ve come here today is that two weeks ago I was in Australia. . . . And the Indians of Australia are the Aborigines. . . . [She then explains the government’s push to mine uranium on Aboriginal lands in the Northern Territory.] You made a slide show for me, and I took those slide shows to show to the Aborigines. And there was a man called Dick, who is the tribal leader. . . . And Dick came out of the meeting and he said, “when I saw those pictures [of the Navajo and their lands],” he said, “it hurts my heart in here [demonstrating how he placed his hand over his heart] to see those pictures.”21

Caldicott’s trans-Pacific travels thus served as an important conduit for this revealing albeit brief exchange between Diné and Aboriginal communities about their shared problems of “radioactive colonialism” and their expressions of mutual support.22 Her slide presentation on Croker Island and follow-up speech at the Mt. Taylor rally were opportunities for Diné activists to broadcast how their communities’ traumatic physical suffering from uranium and ongoing struggles as Indigenous people were directly relevant to the threats Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory faced with the development of the Ranger mine. Such messages would also be disseminated to even wider audiences in the years to come through their documentation in Eight Minutes to Midnight, for the film was distributed internationally and eventually nominated for an Academy Award.

Winona LaDuke and Herb Blatchford’s 1979 European Tour

In October 1979, two prominent Native American activists – Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe), representing the IITC, and Herb Blatchford (Diné), a leading actor in the AIEC and one of the original founders in the early 1960s of the National Indian Youth Council – shared stories of Diné uranium suffering with a variety of activist audiences at different gatherings across western Europe. At events in the UK, the Netherlands, and Denmark, they met with anti-nuclear, environmental, and Indigenous rights activists, gave public presentations, and held press conferences to expand public awareness of the numerous uranium problems Native Americans faced amid accelerating global demand for nuclear development.23 In one extraordinary transnational and trans-Indigenous conference in Copenhagen, LaDuke and Blatchford were able to network directly with Indigenous actors from Australia, Namibia, and beyond, describing for them, in vivid detail, the toxic futures that Diné uranium experiences foretold for these parallel settler colonial contexts. And in Scotland, as they participated in an anti-nuclear protest with local activists, LaDuke and Blatchford emphasized the broader relevance of Diné people’s radioactive experiences for even non-Indigenous local communities fighting against nuclear expansion.

Held at the University of Copenhagen, the “First International Conference on Uranium Mining in the Third and Fourth Worlds” – an event LaDuke would later describe as “an international conference of irradiated natives”24 – resulted from the collaborative efforts of allied Danish NGOs committed to anti-nuclear and Indigenous rights issues. Most immediately, the event responded to multinational energy companies’ expanding designs for developing uranium deposits in Greenland, which had just been granted home rule by the Danish government, and the potential negative impacts of such plans on the territory’s majority Inuit populations. Building from a well-organized Danish anti-nuclear movement and local Inuit activists’ increasing engagement with transnational Indigenous rights organizations25, a coalition of NGOs decided to organize a conference that would address not only the uranium problems Greenland’s Inuit communities faced but also comparable issues of Indigenous rights and uranium development in some of the emerging flash points for such problems in the world. In addition to Inuit speakers, the organizers were able to include in the program various representatives from Indigenous rights and sovereignty movements around the globe who happened to be in western Europe at the time: LaDuke and Blatchford from the U.S.; two prominent Aboriginal activists – Mick Miller, of the North Queensland Land Council, and Tommy Smith, of the newly created Aboriginal Information Centre in London – who were jointly touring Europe to internationalize support for Aboriginal rights and anti-uranium campaigns; and, from Namibia, SWAPO’s official representative to the Scandinavian countries, Hadino Hishongwa.26

Over two days, and with a few hundred people in attendance, all of these representatives had the opportunity to speak at length about the particular challenges they faced in opposing uranium extraction in their own countries as well as dialogue about their shared structural conditions as Indigenous peoples. Participants emphasized how broader dynamics of settler colonialism, capitalist exploitation, and multinational corporate power commonly shaped their populations’ vulnerabilities to the numerous radiation hazards of uranium mining and their specific sovereignty and rights struggles. In this vein, LaDuke and Blatchford’s testimonials cast a particularly prominent light, for they were able to share details about the severe environmental and health impacts Indigenous peoples in the U.S. had already experienced by living in a “nuclear energy colony” and through their long-running encounters with uranium mining. Their statements thus presaged the radioactive suffering facing other subordinated peoples worldwide.27

In what was perhaps the most emotional and graphic testimony at the conference, Blatchford vividly depicted the traumatic toll uranium mining had taken on Diné bodies as a warning to his transnational audience. “A message to you from the elders of the Navajo Nation!,” he began:

We come from a country that is devastated by radiation. Not a day goes by but another one dies from cancer – cancer contained at the beginning of the nuclear chain. . . . People come to me and ask: ‘why is our hair falling out? why are our teeth falling out? why do our children always sleep without getting rest? why do some of them wake up and cannot breathe?’ We have asked and been told that these symptoms are the same as in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The radioactive radon gasses come to us like a criminal with the wind. People, trees and crops die. We lose the purpose of life.

He then ended with an urgent call for active solidarity among all of the Indigenous communities represented at the conference: “we are the objects of discrimination and racism. I can only appeal to you: downwind from where we live. . . Your children will suffer the same as ours – unless . . . unless . . . Unless!”28

Together with LaDuke’s contributions, Blatchford’s ominous testimony firmly placed Diné communities’ harrowing uranium experiences into the vocabulary of this expanding transnational network of Indigenous activists and thereby helped heighten the collective sense of urgency to their anti-uranium campaigns in Australia, Namibia, Greenland, and beyond. In fact, Blatchford and LaDuke’s statements were important catalysts in a cabled message sent jointly by all of the conference attendees to the UN Secretary General, expressing their “most serious concern over the effects of uranium mining upon their respective peoples, their land, and their environment.”29

Another especially revealing episode during LaDuke and Blatchford’s European tour, echoing some of their contributions at the Copenhagen conference, was their participation in a protest event with various anti-nuclear and citizens’ rights groups in Edinburgh, coordinated by the Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace (SCRAM). Over the previous two years, SCRAM had organized a variety of demonstrations at the construction site of the future Torness nuclear power plant, nearby Edinburgh, and local activists were particularly interested in discussing with LaDuke and Blatchford – given their deep familiarity with the harms of uranium production among Diné and other Native Americans – the Scottish government and energy companies’ plans to establish a uranium mine in the northeastern Orkney Islands to fuel the power plant.30 In what was described in SCRAM’s newsletter as “a well-attended and powerful meeting,” LaDuke and Blatchford “told of thousands of their people dead and dying of cancers, radiation sickness and genetic deform[i]ties caused by vast uranium extraction operations on their lands; and they told of the devastation of their reservations by 30 years of coal and uranium mining.” Fortunately, that same newsletter issue also published a lengthy written message, co-authored by the Native American visitors, that served as both a dire warning to SCRAM’s coalition of activists and residents of the Orkney Islands (Orcadians) fighting uranium development as well as a strategic call for solidarity in recognizing and mutually supporting the common struggles of Native Americans and Scots.31

“To sell the earth, or to allow the earth to be sold to or controlled by an interest far away is to lose control of your lives and your children and the generations to come,” they began. “As Indigenous Americans coming to Scotland, we see this happening here, and we want to speak from experience as to the consequences – the issue of nuclear power.”32 The authors then provided details on how Native American reservations supplied the lion’s share of uranium produced in the United States and the resulting health and environmental traumas experienced by the Navajo Nation in particular. “This is an energy colony; this is genocide,” the letter emphasized. “A Navajo and a Chippewa came to Scotland to help stop it from happening here.” Expanding on this point, and in a fascinating way, LaDuke and Blatchford then located the uranium predicament of Orcadians within a global comparative framework, connecting their radioactive fate to the settler colonial situations of Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and Africans that were at the center of their conference in Copenhagen:

What is happening on our land is a blueprint for what will happen in Scotland. We have come to communicate with the people because we are all being treated like ‘Indians’, ‘Aborigines’ & ‘Blacks’ now. The people are becoming burdens to the plans for technological ‘progress’ of the nation states and the multinationals. . . . We must organise to fight for the earth and future generations.

While LaDuke and Blatchford, at the Copenhagen conference, stressed the shared struggles of the participating Indigenous representatives against historical experiences of settler colonial domination and radioactive vulnerability, in Edinburgh their statement of solidarity with anti-nuclear activists invoked a more universal, underlying “blueprint” of uranium development’s impacts. National governments’ and multinationals’ expansion of uranium mining – whether in Namibia, Northern Australia, Greenland, or the Orkneys – fundamentally ignored the concerns and welfare of local communities and resulted in immeasurable trauma. LaDuke and Blatchford’s vivid accounts of the myriad, ongoing radioactive harms experienced by Diné and other Native Americans thus served as ominous warnings for, and strident calls for coordinated solidarity with, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities around the world resisting similar toxic fates.

The 1980 “Hearings on Namibian Uranium”

A final episode reveals how accounts of uranium mining’s devastating impacts on Diné communities also reverberated at the higher level of a formal international organization, inflecting transnational discussions of the Namibian liberation struggle in particular ways. The setting for these deliberations was the United Nations Council for Namibia (UNCN), which convened an exceptional week-long “Hearings on Namibian Uranium” at the UN headquarters in New York in the summer of 1980. The UNCN had emerged in the late 1960s amid the escalating international condemnation of South African apartheid, with the goal to push the South African state to end its illegal control of Namibia. In 1974 the UNCN put forth its first decree, banning any exploitation of Namibia’s natural resources. Once the Rössing uranium mine began operations in 1976, the Council intensified its efforts to delegitimize all aspects of South Africa’s involvement in uranium mining in Namibia. Such efforts eventually culminated in the uranium hearings in 1980. The event brought together a variety of invited speakers from intergovernmental agencies and international activist organizations to testify about the network of countries and corporations profiting from the illegal extraction and international distribution of uranium from Namibia as well as uranium mining’s harmful socioeconomic and biophysical impacts.33 Amid all of this, a telling aspect of the hearings was the inclusion of lengthy testimonies regarding the lessons to be learned from the ongoing, comparable uranium problems facing many Native Americans, particularly Diné communities.

In one of the hearing’s sessions, the immediate relevance of Diné radioactive suffering to the Namibian situation was spelled out in detail by a somewhat surprising source – Donald Morton, an exiled white South African activist representing the U.S.-based South African Military Refugee Aid Fund (SAMRAF). SAMRAF had been created a couple of years prior in New York City by Morton and other white South African resisters who saw the racist agenda of the apartheid state as illegitimate and ruthless, refused to serve in the South African military, and worked in exile to generate support for the liberation movements in both South Africa and Namibia. Their active support of the Namibian liberation struggle and their involvement in the UNCN uranium hearings were strongly endorsed by SWAPO leadership.34

During his extended testimony, as Morton took aim at the apartheid regime’s exploitation of Namibian people and resources, he explicitly emphasized the striking relevance of Diné and other Native Americans’ experiences of radioactive injustice and their struggles “for social justice, freedom and a cancer-free future.”35 Fundamentally, Morton argued, Indigenous peoples in southern Africa and North America faced similar toxic vulnerabilities due to their common historical experiences of being dominated by settler colonial capitalism:36

How startling[ly] similar the situation is of the indigenous people in South Africa, in Namibia and in the United States. . . . To the present, the invaders continue to usurp land control from the native peoples, now in the name of energy resources and for the corporate State. The colonized people are now the miners in the deadly work of mining uranium. . . . Indians continue to die from cancer caused by exposure to radiation through mining. As in Africa, their lands have been littered with millions of tons of uranium tailings and nuclear wastes, destroying the earth and its inhabitants – indeed, all life forms. Surely the African and Indian peoples are important allies in preventing this continued destruction of the earth and its peoples.37

In another session, the specific radioactive experiences of Diné communities were discussed in even greater depth. And this was by design: when the UNCN panel’s coordinators initially invited individuals with relevant expertise to testify at the hearings, they explicitly sought to include “[a] representative of the Navaho Indians of the United States (who have mined uranium . . . under conditions apparently similar to those at the Rössing uranium mine in Namibia),” reflecting the increasing global awareness of Diné uranium experiences by this time.38 In the end, although a Diné representative did not attend, a prominent affiliated advocate was instead able to participate: Joseph K. Wagoner, by then working at the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Since the early 1960s, Wagoner had researched and written extensively about the dire health consequences of uranium mining, milling, and waste disposal in Diné communities and beyond, and his extensive presentation to the UNCN recapped much of this research. The last section of Wagoner’s testimony especially zeroed in on the tragic physical suffering experienced by Diné mineworkers, families, and communities living in close proximity to uranium mines and tailings. Wagoner ended with what he called the “bitter lesson” of Diné uranium problems to underscore the comparable toxic traumas facing Namibians: “The question clearly is now before the entire world community, and that question is: Will we learn from history, or will history once again repeat itself, and especially so as a result of the exploitation of the natural and human resources of Namibia?”39

In response, the chairman and other members of the UNCN panel effusively praised Wagoner’s insights and emphasized their immediate relevance for approaching the similar health hazards resulting from the apartheid regime’s ruthless exploitation of Namibian resources and populations. SWAPO’s delegate to the UN, Theo-Ben Gurirab, particularly stressed how Diné uranium experiences bore direct implications for the festering problems of Namibians and thus the moral vindication of the larger liberation struggle:

[W]hat has happened to native Americans in this country. . . would serve to arouse the conscience of mankind, and the testimony given this afternoon should sufficiently arouse the concern of the Council and of the United Nations, in general. . . . I cannot help but express the concern of the Namibian people – the families, the husbands, the wives and the children of the miners at Rössing – who are suffering. . . . [B]y the time we become independent not only will we have been left with a country depleted of its natural resources; we will have been left with a population that will suffer permanent ill health because of the exploitation that is going on in Namibia.”40

These examples from the UNCN hearings suggest how stories of Diné radioactive injustice served as powerfully relevant sources for envisioning the shared struggles of Namibians and Native Americans and for building bonds of transnational solidarity. Gurirab’s reflections on Wagoner’s testimony particularly illuminate how accounts of Diné uranium experiences helped bring into sharp focus the toxic suffering at stake in Namibians’ struggles against uranium mining under apartheid South Africa control.

Conclusion

The diverse set of episodes presented above collectively reveal how narratives of Diné uranium problems inflected wide-ranging transnational discussions concerning the threats posed by uranium mining and the importance of forging activist alliances in resistance. The sharing of Diné communities’ past and ongoing experiences of radioactive injustice – whether at an Aboriginal community center on Croker Island, an international activist conference in Copenhagen, a nuclear protest in Edinburgh, or United Nations hearings in New York – served to heighten transnational awareness of Indigenous groups’ shared nuclear vulnerabilities and struggles in the face of settler colonial and multinational corporate power. In vivid and visceral terms, such testimonies of individual and community suffering further clarified for various transnational audiences the tremendous stakes of uranium mining’s expansion. As the example of LaDuke and Blatchford’s visit to Scotland highlights, this voicing of uranium mining’s traumatic consequences for Diné and other Indigenous groups served as relevant messages of warning and solidarity-building for even non-Indigenous communities.

By making visible such nuclear connections across these diverse global contexts, this circulation of Diné experiences reflected in some ways what Lou Cornum has referred to as the making of “the irradiated international.” Across the various transnational exchanges this essay has explored, coalitions of activists found ways to acknowledge but also look beyond the particular situations of nuclear expansion that specific groups faced in western New Mexico, Northern Australia, Namibia, Greenland, or even Scotland. Borrowing from Cornum, they were able to identify what “tied together and unbound those caught in the routes of uranium,” in order to envision the “intertwined possibilities of life and liberation across swaths of sea and land.”41 One of my goals in this essay has been to reveal how Indigenous uranium activists and their allies were engaged in such ways of imagining and building this “irradiated international” in earlier and more significant ways than previously recognized.

Following these transnational routes and interconnections can also instructively guide us to reconsider more familiar ways of “silo-ing” different historical narratives and sets of actors apart from one another – such as the histories of national and international Indigenous rights activism, mainstream environmental and anti-nuclear movements in the U.S. and Europe, and even the global struggles against South African apartheid. In the process, we can then more fully appreciate how particular stories often viewed as “local” – such as uranium mining and radioactive injustice among Diné communities – have in fact reverberated in revealing and perhaps unanticipated ways in other global arenas.

Notes

  1. For some key texts in the vast literature on these issues, see Voyles, Wastelanding; Pasternak, Yellow Dirt; Brugge, Benally, and Yazzie-Lewis, Navajo People and Uranium Mining; Benally, Stilwell, and Harrison, Memories Come to Us; Eichstaedt, If You Poison Us. [^]
  2. Rosza, “The Nevada Movement,” 100–1. [^]
  3. Voyles, Wastelanding, 76, 213; Harrison, “Cold War and Indigenous People,” 183–84; Yazzie-Lewis and Zion, “Leetso, The Powerful Monster,” 9–10; Nahr, Poison Fire, Sacred Earth; “Indigenous Uranium Forum,” The Energy Net, https://www.energy-net.org/01NUKE/UM-3.HTM; Rosza, “The Nevada Movement”; Kuletz, Tainted Desert, 153–6. [^]
  4. Nelkin, “Native Americans and Nuclear Power”; Voyles, Wastelanding, 140–50, 176–84; Yazzie, “Contesting Liberalism,” chapter 3. [^]
  5. Churchill and LaDuke, “Native America.” [^]
  6. Graetz, “Ranger Uranium Mine and the Mirarr”; Tolazzi, “‘Australia’s Decision’”; Roberts, Massacres to Mining; O’Brien, “Canberra Yellowcake.” [^]
  7. Hecht, Being Nuclear; Hecht, “The Power of Nuclear Things”; Cooper, Allies in Apartheid; Roberts, Rossing File. [^]
  8. Yazzie, “Decolonizing Development in Diné Bikeyah”; Grinde and Johansen, Ecocide of Native America; Churchill and LaDuke, “Native America”; Redhouse, Geopolitics of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute; Johansen and Maestas, Wasi’chu. [^]
  9. Rennard, “Becoming Indigenous”; Rennard, “‘We’re Still Here’”; Estes, Our History is the Future; Crossen, “Another Wave of Anti-Colonialism”; Tóth, From Wounded Knee to Checkpoint Charlie; Dunbar-Ortiz, “How Indigenous Peoples Wound Up at the United Nations”; Cobb, Native Activism in Cold War America. [^]
  10. People’s Grand Jury Committee, The AMAX War Against Humanity. [^]
  11. National Indian Youth Council, news release, June 24, 1978, MSS 711, box 3, folder 1, Roger A. Finzel American Indian Movement Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico Libraries, Albuquerque, NM. [^]
  12. John Redhouse, “Native American Uranium Issues Workshop Report,” National No-Nukes Strategy Conference, Louisville, Kentucky, August 19, 1978, MSS 711, box 3, folder 1, Roger A. Finzel American Indian Movement Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico Libraries, Albuquerque, NM; Barry, “Why Energy Companies Think.” [^]
  13. Peter D. Jones, Friends of the Earth Australia, to John Redhouse, Nov. 22, 1978, MSS 703, box 26, folder 5, National Indian Youth Council Records, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico Libraries, Albuquerque, NM. [^]
  14. Voyles, Wastelanding, 177–82. [^]
  15. “Stop Uranium Mining, Defend Native American Land Rights,” brochure for demonstration on April 28–29, 1979, box 1, folder 2, MSS 780, John Redhouse Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico Libraries, Albuquerque, NM. [^]
  16. Caldicott, Desperate Passion, 133–41, 149–52. [^]
  17. Eight Minutes to Midnight; see also Caldicott, Desperate Passion, 170–71. [^]
  18. Eight Minutes to Midnight, my emphasis. For more on Henry Black’s tragic case, see Barry, “The Navajo Nation.” [^]
  19. “Ranger: The Events Behind the Signing of the Agreement,” Chain Reaction. [^]
  20. Eight Minutes to Midnight; Caldicott, Desperate Passion, 170–71. [^]
  21. Eight Minutes to Midnight; see also Barry, “Land Rights, Not Uranium Mines.” [^]
  22. Churchill and LaDuke, “Native America.” [^]
  23. “Native Americans Fighting for Their Lives,” McGarel (Polytechnic of Central London Students’ Union newspaper) October 1, 1979, 7; Schwartz, “Unhappy Hunting Grounds”; “Uraniumdelving ten koste van Indiaan,” Nieuwe Leisdsche Courant, Oct. 10, 1979, 5; John Redhouse, Getting It Out of My System (memoir, Dec. 2014), 150, box 2, folder 16, MSS 780, John Redhouse Papers, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico Libraries, Albuquerque, NM; “Volgend Jaar Mogelijk Russell-Tribunaal in Nederland: Kernenergie bedreigt Indianen” Leidse Courant, October 10, 1979, 1; Harrison, “Cold War and Indigenous People,” 214–15; Moody, “Native Peoples Oppose Uranium Mining”; Holloway, “Uranium Land Owners First Meeting”; Schwartz, “Unhappy Hunting Grounds.” [^]
  24. Schwartz, “Unhappy Hunting Grounds.” [^]
  25. Buns, “Marching Activists”; Wittner, Struggle Against the Bomb, 68–9; Schoeppner, “Inuit Circumpolar Council”; Shadian, “Remaking Arctic Governance.” The main organizers of the conference were the Organization for Information on Atomic Power, the International Work Group on Indigenous Affairs and the Danish Association for International Co-operation. [^]
  26. Harrison, “Cold War and Indigenous People,” 214–15; Moody, “Native Peoples Oppose Uranium Mining”; Holloway, “Uranium Land Owners First Meeting”; Schwartz, “Unhappy Hunting Grounds.” [^]
  27. Schwartz, “Unhappy Hunting Grounds”; Holloway, “Uranium Land Owners First Meeting”; International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), “Survival Is the Issue,” IWGIA Newsletter no. 24, April 1980, 70; “Uraniumut akerdliunek – sorssungnerput kingugdlek,” Atuagagdliutit/Grønlandsposten Nov. 8, 1979. [^]
  28. Blatchford, “We Come Here in Our Last Breath”; IWGIA, IWGIA Newsletter no. 24, April 1980, 67–8; Cornum, “Irradiated International.” [^]
  29. “Statement of Fourth and Third World Nations.” [^]
  30. Schwartz, “Unhappy Hunting Grounds”; “Scottish Anti-Nuclear Power Campaign in Torness, 1977,” Global Nonviolent Action Database, Swarthmore College, https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/scottish-anti-nuclear-power-campaign-torness-1977; Ian Welsh, “Anti-Nuclear Movements: Failed Projects or Heralds of a Direct Action Milieu?,” Sociological Research Online 6, 3 (2001), https://www.socresonline.org.uk/6/3/welsh2.html; Oberloskamp, “Ambiguities of Transnationalism”; Linda Pentz Gunter, “Orkney’s uranium reprieve,” Beyond Nuclear International, April 18, 2021, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2021/04/18/orkneys-uranium-reprieve/. [^]
  31. “Uranium Mining and Native Peoples,” SCRAM Energy Bulletin 14 (October/November 1979), 8, https://www.laka.org/docu/magazines/scram/scram14.pdf. [^]
  32. All quotes in this paragraph from “Uranium Mining and Native Peoples.” [^]
  33. United Nations, Plunder of Namibian Uranium; Singham, “Namibia and Nuclear Proliferation”; Hecht, Being Nuclear, 81–82, 151–55. [^]
  34. For a brief overview of SAMRAF and access to some of the organization’s publications, see the online holdings at Michigan State University’s African Activist Archive, at https://africanactivist.msu.edu/organization/210-813-729/; and see also SAMRAF, The Right to Say No to a Crime Against Humanity, including the “Preface” written by SWAPO leader and UN representative Theo-Ben Gurirab; Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution; United Nations Council for Namibia (UNCN), Report of the Panel for Hearings on Namibian Uranium. Part Two: Verbatim Transcripts of the Public Meetings of the Panel Held at Headquarters from 7 to 11 July 1980, A/AC.131/82/Add.10 (Sept. 30, 1980), 243–44, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N80/230/24/pdf/N8023024.pdf. [^]
  35. UNCN, Report of the Panel, 241–42. [^]
  36. The anti-nuclear crusader Helen Caldicott, who also testified at the UNCN hearings, briefly provided a somewhat similar comparison between South Africa’s domination of Namibians and the exploitation of Aboriginal communities and uranium resources on traditionally-owned land in Australia, UNCN, Report of the Panel, 306–7. [^]
  37. UNCN, Report of the Panel, 238–41. [^]
  38. United Nations, General Assembly, Official Records, Thirty-Fifth Session, Supplement no. 24: Report of the United Nations Council for Namibia, Volume III, Part Five: Report of the Council on the Hearings on Namibian Uranium, Annex I: “List of experts and organizations invited to testify at the hearings,” A/35/24 (Nov. 24, 1980), 52 https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/17162/files/A_35_24%5EVol.III%5E--A_35_24--A_35_24Vol.III-EN.pdf. [^]
  39. UNCN, Report of the Panel, 191–204. [^]
  40. United Nations Council for Namibia, Report of the Panel for Hearings on Namibian Uranium. Part Two: Verbatim Transcripts of the Public Meetings of the Panel Held at Headquarters from 7 to 11 July 1980,” A/AC.131/82/Add.10 (Sept. 30, 1980), 205–6, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N80/230/24/pdf/N8023024.pdf. [^]
  41. Cornum, “Irradiated International.” In this latter quote, Cornum refers to the visionary projects of African American activists in the 1960s and 1970s who developed transnational networks of anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-nuclear organizing, as examined in Intoni, African Americans against the Bomb. [^]

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

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