Traci Brynne Voyles Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country is a ghastly tale of zombies, marxistly vampiric corporations, the Naayéé’ of carnotite ore and tailings piles rearing its ugly head from up behind Mount “Taylor”, the Ragnarok of nuclear weapons and attendant industries that will, in the words of Leslie Marmon Silko, be lain “across the world / and explode everything.” This world is replete with the toxic residues of radioactive leachate and racial, gender, sexual, economic, and environmental oppression, depositing and inhering in the sedimented layers of Diné Bikéyah and of American society. Wastelanding is about the rhetorical construction of othered places as empty and therefore pollutable, (effectively) unpopulated (at least of people who count as people) and therefore depopulateable, as backward and primordial and therefore catapult-able into the future. It is also about, thanks to the suasiveness of this rhetorical construction, the large scale uranium mining and milling operations that have taken place in Diné Bikéyah since the 1940s. Its first chapter opens to an epigraph from Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature which prophesies that when the “four tectonic plates of liberation theory— those concerned with the oppressions of gender, race, class, and nature— finally come together, the resulting tremors could shake the conceptual structures of oppression to their foundations.” Wastelanding is an attempt to inch those tectonic plates a little closer together, skillfully weaving analyses of the gendering and racializing of Navajo bodies, landscapes, and knowledge with the racist, classist, gender-oppressive, and ecocidal consequences of the uranium industry in Navajo Country.

Voyles’s Wastelanding obliterates the nature-culture divide of Western epistemology. Sometimes this obliteration takes place outside human bodies, as when Oppenheimer’s “two great loves” — physics (read, culture) and New Mexico’s desert (read, nature) — literally fuse (read, the physical process of plasmic fusion) minerals into radioactive trinitite. More often, though, this obliteration of the nature-culture divide directly implicates human bodies. The only potential ontological barrier between humans and the non-human world — the material envelope supposed to separate us from that which is not us, i.e., skin — is a permeable membrane constantly conducting ordinary material exchanges of water and minerals between us and our environment. For extra-ordinary exchanges, of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation acquiring ever-increasing ordinariness in a nuclearized world, skin can hardly be called “permeable” or “a membrane” at all — the “barrier” between us and that which is not us becomes nothing more than another frictionless medium through which ionizing radiation passes. Drawing on Ned Blackhawk, who posits that the ultimate symbol of colonial progress and modernity is the indigenous body in pain, for Voyles, wastelanding is the territorial equivalent: the process by which environments are ravaged in the performance of colonial progress and modernity. In the Voyles’s story, the wastelanding of Diné Bikéyah is inextricable from the wastepeopling of the Diné themselves. Radioactivity neglects to recognize the Western artifice that is the nature-culture binary, rendering it materially meaningless. The material boundarylessness evinced by ionizing electromagnetic radiation necessitates an epistemological boundarylessness between environmental, racial, gender, sexual, and economic injustice, ontologically reifying, with all too horrifyingly real consequences, the intellectual projects of environmental racism, “the environmentalism of the poor”, eco-feminism, queer ecology, and others. Voyles writes a history of a technology of great complexity with the only intellectual infrastructure that makes sense in the context of such categorically transcendent injustice — an intersectional one. Voyles captures wastelanding’s irreverence of environments and bodies alike and its transcendence of material and intellectual realities through its multiscalarity:

Wastelanding, too, is multiscalar: in uranium country, destroying the environment through uranium mining does not just mean destroying the nonhuman world and ecosystems. It means to wasteland, to render pollutable, the lungs, the cells, and the respiratory tracts of everyone involved in the nuclear cycle. It also means to wasteland Navajo worldviews, epistemology, history, and cultural and religious practices.  In order for uranium mining to occur on the level it did (and still does), indigenous ways of knowing landscapes and their worth must be themselves rendered pollutable, marginal, unimportant.

 

In this way, Voyles establishes linkages between the territorial colonialism of uranium mining and its epistemic colonialism, something I think could be very instructive for my own scholarship. Voyles does much of the work to establish this linkage through the political contests over access to Tsoodził (Mount Taylor). On first reading, the case of Tsoodził, with its overlapping tribal jurisdictions, centuries old nuevomexican land grant claims, “private” settler property, and the mineral rights of uranium and vanadium prospectors, represents a purely territorial contest. For the Navajo and other indigenous people with claim to the mountain, however, Tsoodził is not just a geologic entity reducible to the strictures of topographic delineation and cartographic representation and therefore the moot application of US property law, it is a site of ritual performance and cultural continuance, the loss of access to which is not simply a loss of access to U3O8 or x acres of pasturage, but the loss of access to cosmological and natural knowledge essential to their survivance and existence. I think there are many aspects of this book that will be directly applicable to my research, but I struggle with the applicability of “wastelanding”. Changing agricultural practices like seed development and the chemical composition of the fertilizer used does not make for as spectacular or dramatic a change in the landscape as uranium mining. In thinking through this while I read Wastelanding, did Mexican and Rockefeller agronomists rhetorically construct campesino and ejido land in the way that, or in ways analogous to, mining companies and American colonizers constructed Navajo country? There were certainly efforts (especially by the Mexican federal government and its agronomists) to represent campesino and ejidal farms as insufficiently or inefficiently productive, but I am not sure if this rhetorical framework sought to connote the same kind of “worthlessness” on the land to make possible its interventions. Curiously, the most (financially) successful implementations of the Green Revolution in Mexico were in the northern borderlands ecologically very similar (and actually directly adjacent to) Arizona and New Mexico, and so this connection is worth investigating there. Similarly, the Green Revolution is constructed by its detractors as having analogous kinds of deleterious environmental consequences, especially in terms of chemical pollution — all of which is to say that I need to think deeply about the applicability of Voyles’s terminology and methodological approach to my own project.

 

• • 6 – The basic premise behind environmental justice as a social movement and as a field of academic inquiry is that our growing environmental problems— polluted air, water, soil, changing climate, accelerating industrialism, and so on— are disproportionately born by racially and economically marginalized communities both in the United States and globally and moreover that these marginalized communities are often targeted for environmental degradation.
  • 8 – In this book, I argue that the history of the uranium industry on and near Diné Bikéyah demonstrates how landscapes of extraction are, to borrow from geographer Gillian Rose, forms of representation as well as empirical objects. Notions of Navajo country as “uninhabited” wasteland create a representational criterion by which ideas about the land have been formed. 
  • The land, occupied and claimed by tribes, with its own unique sets of ecological conditions and realities, ceased to be an empirical object— the material conditions of Narbona Pass, with its shimmering greens and crisp air, is forgotten in favor of an interpellation of Navajo country writ large as wasteland.
  • This book is a history of contested representations of landscapes, representations that produce starkly urgent material conditions with high stakes for humans, animals, air, water, and earth. Following Valerie Kuletz, who argues that deserts are targeted for environmentally destructive industries because they are understood as worthless in a Euro- American worldview, I explore the mapping of Navajo land and, by extension, other kinds of lands rendered pollutable through discourses of race, gender, class, and/or sexual difference as “wasteland.”
  • The wasteland discourse, as Kuletz framed it, is a current in the American environmental imagination that sees deserts as threatening, marginal, and— revealing the distinctly gendered framework of this marginalization— “barren” places predisposed to what she calls deterritorialization.
  • 9 – The treadmill requires “wastelands” from which resources are increasingly extracted and where (often toxic) waste is increasingly dumped. Patterns of environmental racism tell us that race has become a primary way by which those landscapes of extraction and pollution are marked as racialized spaces excluded from or ignored by the regulatory protection of the state. Because environmental inequality is an inherent feature of the way in which industrialism operates contemporarily— raw materials for products, after all, must come from somewhere, and toxic waste must go somewhere— the wasteland is the “other” through which the treadmill of production is constituted.

 

• In this way, just as civilization has been constituted on and through savagery, environmental privilege is made out of the discursive process of rendering a space marginal, worthless, and pollutable.

• To put it another way: if, as historian Ned Blackhawk has argued, the indigenous body in pain is the ultimate symbol of colonial progress and modernity, indigenous land laid waste is its territorial corollary. I call this process wastelanding.

 

• • 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.
    • Instead of waste-land, what about waste-species? Somehow that mexican indigene maize and other crops were degraded or without value, justifying either their replacement or contamination with GMOs — how does this story get told for crops?
  • 11 – Wastelanding, too, is multiscalar: in uranium country, destroying the environment through uranium mining does not just mean destroying the nonhuman world and ecosystems. It means to wasteland, to render pollutable, the lungs, the cells, and the respiratory tracts of everyone involved in the nuclear cycle. It also means to wasteland Navajo worldviews, epistemology, history, and cultural and religious practices.  In order for uranium mining to occur on the level it did (and still does), indigenous ways of knowing landscapes and their worth must be themselves rendered pollutable, marginal, unimportant.
  • 23 –  This book contends that settler colonialism is so deeply about resources that environmental injustices, whether on Native lands or lands of others, must always be viewed through the lens of settler colonialism.
  • In the context of extreme and ongoing environmental violence, decolonization cannot be imagined outside of environmental justice, and vice versa. They are twinned projects. I argue in this book that, although uranium mining provides a powerful, and pulsing, explication of the twinned interests of environmental justice and decolonization, it is but one piece of a much larger system of power relations.
  • 26 – This kind of analysis moves environmental justice studies, particularly studies of environmental injustice on Native land, to a more complex understanding of nature and justice in the past, present, and future of settler colonialism. It is precisely this more complex understanding of nature and justice that this book seeks to engage. In looking closely at the representations of the territory on which settler colonialism is grounded, we fi nd, more often than not, wastelanding at work. Through wastelanding, the logic of settler colonialism denies that its “wastelands” could be sacred, could be claimed, could have a history, or could be thought of as home. Instead, to wasteland a space is to defend the notion that the land is, always has been, and always will be “empty except for Indians”: to mark it and make it, ultimately, sacrifi cial land.
  • 31 – Just as the “hardy” pioneers of McAtee’s Nomina were able to “impress” upon the conquered wilderness “a rich vocabulary” that constructed the land as a sexual object and explorers as penetrators— rendering the land, as Andrea Smith points out, “rapable”— these ways of talking and writing about Diné Bikéyah as barren impressed themselves on the landscape over the period of U.S. exploration and examination of Navajo country through the intimacies and excesses of federal intervention.

 

• In this chapter, I explore stock reduction and soil conservation, looking to the ways in which declensionist federal discourses about the Diné and their land relied on formal and informal representations of the Diné and Diné Bikéyah as troubling to hegemonic notions of normative ecological practice. The formal program of stock reduction, in short, was accompanied by a less formal representational project that constructed the Diné as nonnormative. 

 

• 67 – The photograph begs the question whether Oppenheimer, who once deplored what a “pity” it was that his “two great loves,” physics and New Mexico’s desert country, “can’t be combined,” saw this moment as the fi nal, and most intimate, coupling of those two “great loves.”33 Here, Oppenheimer’s scientifi c work transformed the ground itself into trinitite, the radioactive offspring of the marriage between physics and desert, a coupling that, as the photograph suggests, occurred through the conduit of Groves and the militarized federal resources he represented.
• 69 – In uranium mining, technology was most frequently imbricated through desert pastoralism, and by extension, atomic power was imbricated through the primordial space of the Southwest. This has occurred through a contrast between the “Indian” and the atomic—what Anne McClintock calls “anachronistic space” with the space on which futuristic technology is built.
  • Is the mexico of the campesino planting double-cross hybrid crops with synthetic petro-chemical fertilizer an anachronistic space?
• 93 – Within two weeks, prospectors were “pouring into town” to search for promising mineralization on the railroad’s land; the town’s “two long- distance lines buzzed with calls” and “its 17 bars all proudly displayed ore samples.”
  • What about this idea of bars/pubs as informal museums?
• 95 – The primordial image of an “Indian” riding a horse “through a pinon forest” is juxtaposed harshly against the technological and political immediacy of atomic warfare and bomb technology. It signifies a radical compaction of the imagined future and the imagined past in a geography that is at once both primordial and space age. Through this juxtaposition, the story engages the complex temporality of the Southwest in the atomic era, a region constructed (like the frontier in general) as caught somewhere in the gears of history, inclined by its pastoral nature and Native inhabitants toward the past but providing the raw materials for the progressive industrialism of the future.
• 95-96 –  In the end, Paddy Martinez’s story ushers the Diné into the uranium story and then straight back out again. Martinez himself rides horseback (or naps his way) into the uranium industry (described as though it always already would exist in the region) and then seems to melt away, leaving behind only his fictionalized story. . . . This account likewise indicated that economic development of Native life, the “civilizing mission” itself, was an always already failed project.
  • This grammatical construction “always already would” or “an always already” warps the temporality of grammatical causality, reflecting the Dine that is simultaneously an inert primordial wasteland and an energetic futuristic lode
• 110 – In crediting the uranium industry with fi rst drawing the maps and then building the roads that make this land accessible to tourists and fi lmmakers, uranium mining becomes the unlikely catalyst allowing the wasteland to be reclaimed by the imagined community of the nation- state, part of its origin story in the context of the Cold War. The result: the nostalgic reclamation of the wasteland with no real reclamation— of mines, mills, or sovereignty itself. 
• 135-36 – Although employees in mining and milling occupations were primarily (but not, as we will see, exclusively) men, women were exposed to radioactivity when men came home from work covered in radioactive mud and dust; when they laundered workers’ clothes; when radioactive dust settled onto the swept dirt fl oors of their hogans, where children played; and when they slaughtered, prepared, and ate contaminated livestock. Women, moreover, did most of the work to shear and weave the wool from sheep that had grazed downwind from mines, mills, and the open- air trucks that carted exposed uranium ore across rutted roads. . . . The private and public were interwoven, radiating into and between one another. If these transits of radioactive dust were to be mapped, they would reveal a fl uid and highly mobile radioactive geography, illustrating quite clearly the relationships between sheep and humans, between the mine and the hogan, between wind and tissue.
  • This is fascinating because it bootstraps one of the much touted peaceful uses of the atom — radiotracing — to trace the environmental history of radioactive landscapes
• 144 – Women’s activist politics in the struggle against uranium thus help environmental justice scholars move beyond an analysis of environmental injustice not merely as an issue of the distribution of environmental harm, but as evidence of a much larger, systemic problem— in this case, of the deeply intersectional nature of race, gender, and reproduction in colonization for Native women.
• 154 – In wastelanding this eastern part of Diné Bikéyah, non- Navajos rendered pollutable Diné ways of seeing the land and its importance, effectively marginalizing Diné epistemologies about place and place- making. Diné resistance to uranium mining must therefore tackle both the environmental effects of wastelanding and the epistemological ones, advocating for the land’s inherent worth both ecologically and culturally.
• 189 -The social, economic, and environmental costs of boom and bust industries have been well documented by scholars, and what has been termed the Gillette syndrome— the range of ill effects that often accompany energy industry mining booms in rural communities— is in conspicuous evidence in this part of New Mexico.7 Boom time economies, with rapid infl uxes of new wealth and new people alike, are associated with increases in a range of social problems: domestic violence, alcoholism, mental health issues, and violent crime tend to rise, while the temporary nature of mining jobs creates economic insecurity despite the infl ux of new money. The arrival of economically motivated newcomers likewise strains community cohesion, a problem compounded by lagging infrastructure development to accommodate the booming population.
  • Oklahoma? Definitely ND right now