It has been forty years since Winona LaDuke and Ward Churchill published “Native America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism (Churchill and LaDuke 1986).” Their article reflects important concerns animating environmental discourse at the time, in particular the legacies of extractive and toxic industries on vulnerable populations. Scholars and activists were in the waning years of new Marxist approaches to social and environmental questions that helped fuel the important work of political ecology and environmental justice – each of which were new subfields in geography, sociology, anthropology, public health, and political science. Inspired by the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and others, historians were using theory to understand the unfolding of world events and how social structure was reproduced over time and under unique world-historical conditions.

At the same time, our understandings of nature and environmental problems focused on land destruction through new forms of mining and extraction, or the damage industries wrought on water and air through pollution. People in the United States were living in the shadow of the environmental policy act and new forms of regulation designed to curtail the worst forms of pollution. In Warren County, North Carolina, Black communities and organizers challenged PCB dumping near vulnerable communities that fell along white/black divisions. In other words, pollution followed social vulnerabilities, where the powerless, discriminated against, and most vulnerable were also made to deal with the exposure of the worst of industrial pollution. Their campaign and demonstration in the early 1980s became the foundation for what we call environmental justice today. They took the organizing infrastructure of the Civil Rights Movement, the spirit of Black liberation, and a call for racial justice, and merged these powerful ideas with a critique of environmental destruction.

LaDuke and Churchill were aware of these trends. They also took the example of the Churchrock Mine spill on the southcentral border of the Navajo Nation to think through environmental injustices in Indian Country. This was a notorious event for tribal people, especially members of the Navajo Nation. In the early morning hours of July 1979, a tailings pond containing radioactive waste broke and spilled into the nearby Rio Puerco, forever contaminating Navajo communities downstream. My own family lives in this area and were impacted by the spill. It is not something easily mitigated. LaDuke and Churchill took this environmental problem, an outcome of centuries of colonialism and racism, and thought about it through the new lens of environmental justice and critiques of political economy that animated the Marxist scholarship at the time. It was a smart approach and helped us understand some of the colonial forces that contributed to the making of the Churchrock Mine Spill. Radioactive colonialism became their way of talking about environmental injustice in Native America.

A lot has changed in forty years. LaDuke ran for Vice President with Ralph Nadar in 2000 and remains one of the most famous environmental organizers in Indian Country, publishing her own books and articles theorizing the environment through Native philosophies and understandings. For example, I really appreciate her latest work with geographer Deb Cowen, “Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure,” which reframes capital accumulation and dispossession through the Anishinaabe story of the Wiindigo (LaDuke and Cowen 2020). Ward Churchill is another story. He was a dominant voice in Native American studies as a swaggering, machismo self-styled revolutionary critiquing the history of the United States as empire and federal policy toward tribes as genocide. His arguments were provocative and sometimes helpful. But after an essay about 9/11 in which he referred to some victims working in the twin towers as “little Eichmanns,” reactionary activists convinced the University of Colorado to terminate his employment (Churchill 2003). This incident is mired in controversy as an issue of academic freedom, accusations of plagiarism, and the advent of reactionary canceling of professors who say and publish things they find offensive. More importantly, however, Ward Churchill was shown to lack enrollment in any tribal nation and was posturing for many years as Indigenous with no real basis for these claims. His anti-Marxist views in the early 1980s and provocative radicalism made some already suspicious of him when he popped onto the scene then. Today most people in Native Studies avoid his work and have turned to actual Indigenous scholars such as Nick Estes or Kim TallBear to make the kinds of critiques we found useful in Churchill’s work.

But all this is about the past leading to the present. What does this volume offer that builds on but also changes the original contribution of “Radioactive Colonialism” from forty years ago? I am one reader of this work, and everyone will have their take, but I find it to be a smart, fascinating and innovative way to think about nuclear and coloniality in combination, as both an object of research and an analytical approach. The editors of this special issue lay out the theoretical ground in the introduction. It moves from the political economy work of forty years ago to thinking through the postcolonial concept of coloniality and how colonialism is infused in everyday practice and understanding of both the colonizers and the colonized. It’s an important way to theorize these issues, because our environmental problems have also changed in the last forty years. Climate change is a dominant environmental concern. This makes organizing more difficult, as action must be done at a planetary scale. In a similar way, our concepts, analysis, and critiques must have planetary ambition. The essays in the volume extend the idea of nuclear relations of coloniality beyond the geographic fixity of radioactive colonialism from forty years ago, as mainly an idea to critique the history of colonialism against Native Americans in the United States. The essays think through the lingering impacts of nuclear testing on our understanding of time and militarism, on how the nuclear is discussed and practiced in apartheid societies like Israel and South Africa, on the history of anti-uranium mining among Diné (Navajo) activists in the Navajo Nation. It bridges the worlds of colonialism here and colonialism there and makes a connection to a similar project of empire tied to capital expansion and accumulation under the guise of modernization, development, and progress. Today when nuclear power is often discussed as the solution to climate change, it’s more important than ever to remember its destructive histories and the apocalyptic potential of the nuclear.

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