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Abstract
Nuclear colonialism is a system of domination through which governments and corporations disproportionately target and devastate indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process. Though nuclear colonialism is an historically and empirically verifiable phenomenon, previous studies do not attend to how nuclear colonialism is perpetuated through discourse. In this essay, I argue that nuclear colonialism is significantly a rhetorical phenomenon that builds upon the discourses of colonialism and nuclearism. Nuclear colonialism rhetorically excludes American Indians and their opposition to it through particular rhetorical strategies. I identify three interconnected strategies of rhetorical exclusion that uphold nuclear colonialism. This essay discusses nuclear colonialism and rhetorical exclusion through examination of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste siting process.
This essay is expanded from her doctoral dissertation.
This essay is expanded from her doctoral dissertation.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank John Sloop and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable criticism and guidance. She is also grateful for the support and help at various stages in the essay's development from: Leah Ceccarelli, Barbara Warnick, Gerry Philipsen, Laura Black, Jay Leighter, Mary Stuckey, Helene Shugart, Daniel Emery, George Cheney, Isaac Gottesman, Wayne Davis, Richard Endres, Bryan Wallis, and the Research Fellowship in Environmental Humanities.
Notes
This essay is expanded from her doctoral dissertation.
1. See: Barry Brummett, “Perfection and the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Teleology, and Motives,” Journal of Communication 39 (1989): 85–95; Thomas B. Farrell and G. Thomas Goodnight, “Accidental Rhetoric: The Root Metaphors of Three Mile Island,” Communication Monographs 48 (1981): 271–300; Edward Shiappa, “The Rhetoric of Nukespeak,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 253–72.
2. Ward Churchill,* “Radioactive Colonization: A Hidden Holocaust in Native North America,” in Struggle for the Land: Indigenous Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide, and Expropriation in Contemporary North America (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1993), 261–328; Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke, “Native North America: The Political Economy or Radioactive Colonization,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 241–66; Donald A. Grinde and Bruce E. Johansen, Ecocide of Native America: Environmental Destruction of Indian Lands and Peoples (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1995); Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American Southwest (New York: Routledge, 1998); Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, (Boston: South End Press, 1999); Grace Thorpe, “Our Homes Are Not Dump Zones,” paper presented at the North American Native Workshop on Environmental Justice, ILIFF School of Theology, Denver, Col., 17 March 1995, http://necona.indigenousnative.org (accessed December 29, 2008). *I am aware of the charges of plagiarism and academic misconduct against Ward Churchill. After closely reading the report from U.C. Boulder, I found that Churchill's work on radioactive colonization is not indicted in the report. Although Churchill was the first to introduce the term “radioactive colonization,” much subsequent independent research has substantiated the phenomenon. See: Report of the Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder (May 2006), http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/download/WardChurchillReport.pdf (accessed December 29, 2008).
3. LaDuke, 97.
4. Indigenous Environmental Network, “Indigenous Anti-Nuclear Statement,” http://www.shundahai.org/IndigenousAnti-NuclearStatement.htm, (accessed December 29, 2008).
5. LaDuke, 97.
6. Grinde and Johansen, 203–4; Kuletz, 21.
7. Churchill, 264–82; Grinde and Johansen, 204–11.
8. Joseph G. Jorgenson, “The Political Economy of the Native American Energy Business,” in Native Americans and Energy Development, ed. Joseph G. Jorgenson (Boston: Anthropology Resource Center/Seventh Generation Fund, 1984), 9–20.
9. Grinde and Johansen, 217.
10. Cited in Grinde and Johansen, 212.
11. Arjun Makhijani, “A Readiness to Harm,” in Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects, ed. Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu, and Katherine Yih (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 8.
12. Speech by Corbin Harney, Mother's Day Gathering at the Nevada Test Site, 11–13 May 2007.
13. Cited in LaDuke, 99.
14. Joe Bauman, “A Fallout over Eligibility: Many N-victims Don't Live in Compensation Counties,” Deseret Morning News, 13 April 2005.
15. Kuletz, 70–73.
16. The Navajo Nation, “Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley, Jr. signs Dine Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005” [press release], http://www.sric.org/uranium/Navajo%20pres.%20signs%20uranium%20ban,%20for%20April%2030.pdf (accessed December 20, 2007); “Owe Aku & Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council Defeat Uranium Corporation” [press release], 9 November 2007, received via email on 9 November 2007.
17. M. V. R. Gowda and Doug Easterling, “Voluntary Siting and Equity: The MRS Facility Experience in Native America,” Risk Analysis 20 (2000): 917; LaDuke, 103.
18. Geoffrey Fattah and Suzanne Struglinski, “Pressure to stop N-Dump, Lawsuit Says,” Deseret Morning News 19 July 2007.
19. Kuletz, 137.
20. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossburg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 217–313.
21. Raka Shome “Caught in the Term ‘Postcolonial’: Why the ‘Postcolonial’ Still Matters,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 203–12; Raka Shome and Radha Hegde, “Postcolonial Approaches to Communication: Charting the Terrain, Engaging the Intersections,” Communication Theory 12 (2002): 249–70.
22. Glenn T. Morris, “International Law and Politics: Toward a Right to Self-Determination of Indigenous Peoples,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 55–86; Gail Valakakis, Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005).
23. Linda Tuhawai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999), 98.
24. Al Gedicks, The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 13.
25. Marjene Abler, Breaking the Iron Bonds: Indian Control of Energy Development (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990).
26. Charles F. Wilkinson, Indian Tribes as Sovereign Governments: A Sourcebook on Federal-Tribal History, Law, and Policy (Oakland, CA: American Indian Resources Institute, 1991), 26–27.
27. O'Brien, 292.
28. Gabrielle Hecht, “Globalization Meets Frankenstein? Reflections on Terrorism, Nuclearity, and Global Technopolitical Discourse,” History and Technology 19 (2003) 3.
29. Mary Stuckey and John M. Murphy, “By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25 (2001): 73–98.
30. Caskey Russell, “Language, Violence, and Indian Mis-Education,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 26 (2002): 98.
31. Morris; Sharon O'Brien, American Indian Tribal Governments (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); David E. Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the US Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); Wilkinson.
32. Johnson v. McIntosh, 1823; Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 1831; and Worchester v. Georgia, 1832.
33. Wallace Coffey and Rebecca Tsosie, “Rethinking the Tribal Sovereignty Doctrine: Cultural Sovereignty and the Collective Future of Indian Nations,” Stanford Law and Policy Review 12 (2001): 192.
34. Ambler; Gedicks.
35. John J. Borrows, “A Genealogy of Law: Inherent Sovereignty and First Nations Self-Government,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 30 (1992): 291–353; Coffey and Tsosie, 192–96.
36. Borrows, 352.
37. Piyush Mathur, “Nuclearism: The Contours of a Political Ecology,” Social Text 19, no. 1 (2001): 1–18; Bryan C. Taylor, “Nuclear Weapons and Communication Studies: A Review,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 300–15.
38. Taylor, “Nuclear Weapons,” 301.
39. Bryan C. Taylor and William J. Kinsella, “Linking Nuclear Legacies and Communication Studies,” in Nuclear Legacies: Communication, Controversy, and the US Nuclear Weapons Complex, ed. Brian C. Taylor and others (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 1.
40. Bryan C. Taylor, “Nuclear Waste and Communication Studies,” The Review of Communication 3 (2003): 288.
41. Taylor and Kinsella, “Linking Nuclear Legacies,” 2.
42. Carol Gallagher, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Kuletz; Mathur; Taylor, “Nuclear Weapons.”
43. Kuletz, 7.
44. William J. Kinsella, “One Hundred Years of Nuclear Discourse: Four Master Themes and their Implications for Environmental Communication,” in The Environmental Communication Yearbook Volume II, ed. Susan L. Senecah (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 49–72; Kinsella, “Nuclear Boundaries.”
45. Bryan C. Taylor, William J. Kinsella, Steven Depoe and Marybeth Metzler, “Nuclear Legacies: Communication, Controversy, and the US Nuclear Weapons Controversy,” in Communication Yearbook 29, ed. P. Kalbfleisch (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 382.
46. John Sanchez, Mary E. Stuckey and Richard Morris, “Rhetorical Exclusion: The Government's Case Against American Indian Activists, AIM, and Leonard Peltier,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23 (1999): 28.
47. John Sanchez, Mary E. Stuckey and Richard Morris, “Rhetorical Exclusion: The Government's Case Against American Indian Activists, AIM, and Leonard Peltier,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23 (1999): 28.
48. John Sanchez, Mary E. Stuckey and Richard Morris, “Rhetorical Exclusion: The Government's Case Against American Indian Activists, AIM, and Leonard Peltier,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23 (1999): 28.
49. Few scholarly works have engaged the concept of rhetorical exclusion except: Jeremy Engels, “‘Equipped for Murder’: The Paxton Boys and ‘the Sprit of Killing All Indians’ in Pennsylvania, 1763–1764,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8 (2005): 355–82; Mark Meister & Ann Burnett, “Rhetorical Exclusion in the Trial of Leonard Peltier,” American Indian Quarterly 28 (2004): 719–42.
50. Spencer Abraham, Recommendation by the Secretary of Energy Regarding the Suitability of the Yucca Mountain Site for a Repository Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (Washington D.C., February 2002), http://ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/sr/sar.pdf (accessed December 29, 2008).
51. US Department of Energy, “How Much Nuclear Waste is in the United States?” http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ym_repository/about_project/waste_explained/howmuch.shtml (accessed December 29, 2008).
52. There were 52 comments and statements made by self-identified Americans Indians from 26 nations (17 Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute reservations) and two organizations.
53. See: Steven Depoe, John W. Delicath and Maire-France Aepli Elsenbeer, eds, Public Participation in Environmental Decision Making (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004); Steven B. Katz and Carolyn R. Miller, “The Low-Level Radioactive Waste Siting Controversy in North Carolina: Toward a Rhetorical Model of Risk Communication,” in Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America, ed. C. G. Herndl and S. C. Brown (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 111–40; Jeanne Nelson Ratliff, “The Politics of Nuclear Waste: An Analysis of a Public Hearing on the Proposed Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository,” Communication Studies 48 (1997): 359–80; Craig Waddell, “The Role of Pathos in the Decision-Making Process: A Study in the Rhetoric of Science Policy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 381–400.
54. Mark R. Powell, Science at the EPA: Information in the Regulatory Process (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 1999); Caitlin W. Toker, “Public Participation or Stakeholder Frustration: An Analysis of Consensus-based Participation in Georgia Ports Authority's Stakeholder Evaluation Group,” in Communication and Public Participation in Environmental Decision Making, ed. S. P. Depoe, J. W. Delicath and M. A. Elsenbeer (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 175–200; Waddell.
55. Abraham; Nuclear Waste Policy Act as Amended, http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/documents/nwpa/css/nwpa.htm (accessed December 29, 2008), page 8; US Department of Energy, Site Recommendation Comment Summary Document (Washington, DC, 2002), http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/documents/csd_a/index.htm (accessed December 29, 2008).
56. “Treaty between the United States of America and the Western Bands of Shoshone Indians,” 1 October 1863, 18 Stat. 689–92.
57. US Department of Energy Public Hearing on the Possible Site Recommendation of Yucca Mountain (proceedings taken on 5 December 2001 at Pahrump, NV), 7. All public comment transcripts are available at http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/documents/sr_comm/index.htm and http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/documents/sr_trans/index.htm (accessed December 29, 2008).
58. Amnesty International, Indigenous Rights Are Human Rights: Four Cases of Rights Violations in the Americas, May 2003; United States v. Dann, 470 US 39 (1985).
59. Steven Newcomb, Failure of the United States Indian Claims Commission to File a Report with Congress in the Western Shoshone Case (Docket 326-K), Pursuant to Sections 21 and 22(a) of the Indian Claims Commission Act: A Report Prepared on Behalf of the Western Shoshone National Council (Eugene, OR: Indigenous Law Institute, January 2003), http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/shoshone/ili-report.html (accessed December 29, 2008).
60. UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedure, Decision 1(68), UNCERD 68th sess. (March 2006), http://www.indianlaw.org/pdf/ppa/ws/WS%20CERD%20Decision%202006–03.pdf?PHPSESSID=bf83c14359077a7fa279e574a8e2aa06 (accessed December 20, 2007). ; UN Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report No., 75/02, Case 11.140, Mary and Carrie Dann, United States (27 December 2002).
61. Hearing for Site Recommendation Consideration of the Yucca Mountain Site for Geologic Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste (proceedings taken on 12 December 2001, Las Vegas, NV), 102; US Department of Energy, Science and Engineering Report for a Geologic Repository for the Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste at Yucca Mountain (proceedings taken on 5 September 2001, Elko, NV), 9; US Department of Energy, Yucca Mountain Project Comments (proceedings taken on 5 October 2001, Las Vegas, NV), 13.
62. US Department of Energy, Yucca Mountain Project Comments (10/5/2001), 23.
63. Kuletz, 131.
64. Vine Deloria Jr. God is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1992), 62.
65. Native American Rights Fund Newsletter, Winter 1997, http://www.narf.org/pubs/justice/1997winter.html (accessed December 29, 2008).
66. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routlege, 1999), 8.
67. Stuckey and Murphy, 82.
68. Chad Smith, Letter to the Department of Energy (public comment #551117), http://www.ymp.gov/documents/sr_comm/sr_pdf/551117.pdf (accessed December 29, 2008).
69. Abraham, 32–45.
70. Abraham, 32.
71. Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1963; reprinted from 1828).
72. Abraham, 9.
73. Abraham, 9.
74. Sanchez, Stuckey and Morris, 33
75. Robin Patric Clair, Organizing Silence: A World of Possibilities (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998).
76. Barry Brummett, “Towards a Theory of Silence as a Political Strategy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1980): 290.
77. Derek T. Buescher & Kent A. Ono, “Civilized Colonialism: Pocahontas as Neocolonial Rhetoric,” Women's Studies in Communication 19, 2 (1996): 130.
78. “Assertion 1: The citizens of Nevada were denied an adequate opportunity to be heard; Assertion 2: The project has received inadequate study; Assertion 3: The rules were changed in the middle of the game; Assertion 4: The process tramples states’ rights; Assertion 5: Transportation of nuclear materials is disruptive and dangerous; Assertion 6: Transportation of wastes to the site will have a dramatically negative economic impact on Las Vegas; Assertion 7: It is premature for DOE to make a site recommendation for various reasons” (because of a GAO report that criticized the project, an unrealistic timeline, and the 293 technical items that the NRC said need to be resolved before licensing). Abraham, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39, 49.
79. Abraham, 31–32.
80. Damian Short, “Reconciliation and the Problem of Internal Colonialism,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 26 (2005): 275.
81. Based on Lexis Nexis search of all the articles containing “Yucca Mountain” in national newspapers in 2002.
82. Clair, Organizing Silence, 39.
83. Robert D. Bullard and Benjamin Chavis, Jr., ed., Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston: South End Press, 1993); Richard Hofrichter, ed., Toxic Struggles: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002); Jace Weaver, ed., Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis books, 1996).
84. Robert D. Bullard, “Environmental Justice in the Twenty-first Century,” in The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution, ed. Robert D. Bullard (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005), 32.
85. US Department of Energy, “Yucca Mounatin Repository,” http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ym_repository/about_project/why/remote.shtml (accessed December 29, 2008); US Department of Energy, “Restricted Access,” http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ym_repository/about_project/why/restricted.shtml (accessed December 29, 2008).
86. Matthew Glass, Citizens against the MX: Public Languages in the Nuclear Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Kuletz.
87. Maurice Charland, “Property and Propriety: Rhetoric, Justice, and Lyotard's Differénd,” in Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminacy, ed. John M. Sloop and James M. McDaniel (Boulder, CO: Westfield Press, 1998), 220–35.
88. Clair, “Organizing Silence,” 324.
89. Deborah Bulkeley, “Goshute Leader Calls N-Waste Rulings Thin,” Deseret Morning News, 14 September 2006.
90. This interview was part of the Nuclear Technology in the Great Basin Oral History Project at the University or Utah.
91. K. Rogers, “Western Shoshones File Yucca Lawsuit,” Las Vegas Review Journal, 5 March 2005.
92. Personal communication.