Wastelanding
Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7307169 |
|---|---|
| Authors | James W Feldman (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 103 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 449-449 |
| Publication date | 2016-08-29 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | REVIEW |
| Review of | Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country, Traci Brynne Voyles, 2015 |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaw197 |
| OpenAlex | W2947819886 |
| Language | EN |
In this sophisticated and insightful book, Traci Brynne Voyles argues that the process of “wastelanding” helps explain the history and persistence of environmental injustice. Environmental racism stems not only from constructed discourses of race but also from constructed conceptions of place. Asserting their colonial dominance over the Navajo, Euro-Americans defined indigenous lands in the American Southwest as wasted and useless, making those landscapes, and the people who inhabited them, pollutable. Wastelanding enabled the development of uranium mining and milling on Navajo land, a continuation of the colonial project with dramatic, if slowly evolving, violence inflicted on both the land and people. “The power exerted over environmental resources,” Voyles explains, “and the ways in which those in power construct knowledge about landscapes, are a central part of how what we now call social injustices are produced” (p. ix). In exploring the legacy of uranium mining in Navajo country, Voyles draws from tremendously powerful histories: the forced sterilization of indigenous women paired with the reproductive health impacts of radiation exposure; Navajo houses constructed from radioactive uranium mill tailings; and the virtually unknown Rio Puerco accident in 1979, when the containment barriers of a tailings pond in New Mexico failed and sent a radioactive slurry into the river and through reservation lands—the largest accidental release of radioactive material in American history. From these and other stories Voyles builds a convincing case for connections between colonialism, wastelanding, and environmental injustice. She brings her account to the present by examining grassroots activism regarding land tenure, environmental health, and the prospect of renewed uranium mining, underscoring her historical argument by demonstrating the ongoing link between the demands for decolonization and justice
Colonialism · Environmental justice · Ethnology · Geography · Grassroots · Indigenous · Injustice · Navajo · Political science · Politics · American Environmental and Regional History · Ecology · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities · History · Law
Eco-uncertainty as a Frame and Way of Life
“Mute Endurance”
“All of That Wealth Underneath”
Religions and Social Progress
Kidnapped Water and Living Otherwise in a World of Drought, Fires, and Floods
‘Keeping Them Down’
EDC's as Industrial Chemicals and Settler Colonial Structures
From Kern Island to the Streets of Bakersfield
Mapping Racial Capitalism
To the Last Drop - Affective Economies of Extraction and Sentimentality
Disrupting the Patrón
Ferc, hydropower, and tribal rights
When a pipe breaks
Framing extractive violence as environmental (in)justice
Wasteland by design
Ethnographic refusal in traditional land use mapping
Introduction
Relational values in environmental assessment
Remaking “the people”
Survival narratives
The Nevada Movement
Inhabiting more-than-human ecologies of Extended urbanization
Burning Matters
Aggregate Airs
Extracting knowledge
Rethinking Society for the 21st Century
Toxic truths
Animal Colonialism—Illustrating Intersections between Animal Studies and Settler Colonial Studies through Diné Horsemanship
Filthy Flourishing
Radioactive Intimacies
| Highly cited | No |
|---|