Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country

by Traci Brynne Voyles

Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo land in 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 on the Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and energy programs. By 1942, mines on the reservation were the main source of uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, 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. Looking at discursive constructions of landscapes, she explores how environmental racism develops over time. 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 way industrialism operates, the wasteland is the “other” through which modern 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Indigenous, Ecology, Environment, American History, Grad School

417 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 15, 2015

Reviews

[The Esoteric Jungle]

This is packed full of detail on who exactly destroyed Navajo & very sacred Hopi land for the sake of killing millions in a more efficient way (it is now made public the Manhattan Project had more than 10,000 sworn to secrecy working in relation to it - your open, free, glorious, modern, representative republic doing its duty for you and you didn’t even have to know).

One must see today’s pics of the children around co-opted India’s Jadugoda Mines, their heads split in two and limbs puffed out treble their size, to know more precisely how much this uranium radiation effects all mankind (and for hundreds of thousands of years to come).

Please though, tell me exactly how you aren’t asleep if even highly sacred, thoughtful and conscious beings like Frank Waters and Mabel Dodge Luhan lived closely to, and conversed with, such atrocity inventors & their mine, doing absolutely nothing, all the while purporting to be “In The Work.” How much more than..us?

Great Book.

[Niall · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Wastelanding, I argue, has been a key and underexplored component of environmental racism. The "wasteland" is a racial and a spatial signifier that renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable.' 9

'Wastelanding reifies – it makes real, material, lived – what might otherwise be only discursive. Like race, which is a social construction made material by the embodied consequences of racism ... ideas about the value of environments are manifested by the material consequences of environmental destruction (or, in the inverse by environmental protection).' 10

'Toxins in particular haunt our lives and bodies in ways that both threaten and beckon morbidity and death; they are supernaturally transhistorical and transboundary. Through environmental racism and wastelanding, they come to inhere social meaning, being marked with racial gender, and sexual otherness.' 215

[N Sheppard · Rating 5 out of 5]

10/10 recommend, especially if you’re interested in environmental justice, land sovereignty, decolonization, feminism

EXCELLENT analysis of US settler colonialism’s violent exploitation and degradation of Diné bodies and land.
Considering I lived in NM for two years, it is shameful I didn’t know about the uranium industry sooner.

Read for HON 297

[Ai Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, though I have to think through her theoretical framework more to see if I really think it is effective in what she wants it to do? Otherwise I think it's a creative way of thinking through these issues, and does good work in linking larger narratives of the height of nuclear activity. The chapter on gender was really great, especially in the ways it linked the perceived femininity of the past and the future as imagined by Diné women, but I think that really was the linchpin of the book and should have been pulled throughout the book rather than being relegated to a single chapter.

[Kylo Sten · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very profound work of environmental justice history that drives into theory, advertising, cartography, and local culture to demonstrate active colonialism through uranium mining in the Midwest. It’s SO good.

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I BEG of you. Don’t watch Oppenheimer. Read this book.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nearly incredible, but tragically real scholarly work that makes visible the many and deep layers of egregious harm and injustice inflicted on the Navajo people before, during and after uranium mining in the desert Southwest. Tragically sad, maddening, eye-opening and deeply thought provoking, and oh so relevant as we see this history repeat around the world even today in places like Ecuador, where we sacrifice indigenous meanings and claims to land in our insatiable quest for ore of one kind or another. Five stars.

[Neal Holtschulte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Historical and modern. Important and devastating. Radicalizing. A blast of cold water for those of us who looked to nuclear energy to save the world from climate change.

[Aden · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent history of uranium in America, some of the best academic writing I’ve read. Voyles concepts here ring really true. Enormously helpful for my thesis.