Wastelanding : legacies of uranium mining in Navajo country / Traci Brynne Voyles.

Author
Voyles, Traci Brynne [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2015]
Description
xv, 291 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm

Availability

Available Online

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks E99.N3 V69 2015 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Summary note
    "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"--The publisher.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    Contents
    • Preface: In search of treasure
    • Introduction: Sacrificial land
    • Empty except for Indians : early impressions of Navajo rangeland
    • Prospecting for magic ore in America's new frontier
    • Cowboys and Indians in Navajo country
    • Hot spots: justice, power, and gender in the radioactive present
    • Monsters and mountains: competing geographies of uranium
    • The big hurt: boom and bust on contested ground
    • Conclusion. Zombie mines: the future of uranium and Native sovereignty.
    Other title(s)
    Legacies of uranium mining in Navajo country
    ISBN
    • 9780816692644 ((hc ; : alk. paper))
    • 0816692645 ((hc ; : alk. paper))
    • 9780816692675 ((pb ; : alk. paper))
    • 081669267X ((pb ; : alk. paper))
    LCCN
    2014028049
    OCLC
    894746316
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