Expansion into Nuclear Energy: Indigenous Dispossession in Disguise?

Image of Yucca Mountain, a mountain considered sacred by Indigenous people and is also the site of a high-level waste storage system. Photo courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management.

American nuclear programs have a long history of exploiting indigenous land. During the Manhattan Project, the government conducted testing at the Nevada National Security Site, leaving nuclear fallout on the Navajo Reservation in its wake. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. continued nuclear testing in the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Tribe’s territory without the tribe's consent or knowledge. From 1946 to 1958, the U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests that were equal to “1.7 Hiroshima bombs dropped every day for 12 years.” In 1979, a nuclear accident coincided with a dam failure, resulting in the radioactive contamination of the Puerco River with 360 million liters of wastewater. The exploitation of indigenous lands for nuclear testing was no coincidence. The U.S. has historically used rhetoric to craft a narrative that justifies the dispossession of Indigenous people. The terms used to describe this process validated American nuclear colonialism and justified American nuclear expansion. The degrading language conceptually validates the U.S. government’s cycle of destroying indigenous land in furtherance of nuclear development. Thus, the U.S. abused its power, repeatedly preventing Indigenous nations from making decisions about their land.

Long before the nuclear age, colonial rhetoric was used within the U.S. legal system to validate indigenous dispossession. In the 1851 Supreme Court case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Indigenous nations were first affirmed as sovereign. However, the term ‘domestic dependent nations’ was introduced to describe the relationship between the U.S. and Indigenous nations, signalling that their freedom was dependent on the government’s acknowledgment as a grantor. This insidious rhetoric helped form a system of domination where the US targets Indigenous peoples for their lands. By hinging Indigenous freedom on federal acknowledgment, the US held all the power, as any Indigenous resistance could result in revoking sovereignty.  ‘Dependency’ paternalistically suggested that these nations needed guidance, or in other words, that they needed the U.S. to decide what is best for them. By labeling them ‘domestic dependent nations, ’ the federal government can appear to be protecting the ‘poor’ and ‘immature’ Indigenous people in need of help. 

Additionally, the term “wasteland” reinforced legal terminology, first validating colonialism and later nuclear colonialism. First coined by John Locke in the 17th century to refer to Indigenous lands, the word suggests that such lands are barren, arid, and uninhabitable, and purposeless. Locke’s term was then used to describe Indigenous lands within American policies, such as the ‘Swamp Land Act of 1850.’ The use of the term in law reveals how the federal government viewed these lands as disposable and ‘unfit’ for life to sustain itself—a justification for the government to take the lands to make ‘use’ out of it—similar to later strategies that would be used to build high-level waste storage systems. The term implies that Indigenous populations are extinct, as there is no life on a wasteland. Indeed, historically, calling an area a ‘wasteland’ has been used to justify some level of intervention that benefits those who employ that term. In the case of nuclear energy, it was to exploit Indigenous lands. 

No such example of language rationalizing harm and intervention is more prevalent than the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant, which opened in 1973. The plant’s development involved serious degradation of Indigenous lands. The Sioux Tribe–from which the Prairie Island Tribe descends —had already been displaced from the Central Mississippi Valley to Minnesota in 1851. Nonetheless, the Sioux had their new lands—reservations—deemed barren, with the belief that “nothing could survive on these unfriendly regions.” In other words, it was a wasteland. In 1991, Northern States Power (NSP, now Xcel Energy) installed a storage site for additional waste in dry casks next to the Prairie Island Indian Community, one of the Dakota Tribe’s communities. In 1994, Congress passed a law that limited NSP to use only seventeen casks for nuclear waste storage instead of the previous forty-eight. However, the federal government broke its promise to remove the stockpile. The stockpile has since tripled in size. 

The lack of regard for Indigenous lands was justified through rhetoric that depicted them as wastelands, as the process of re-naming sets the norm. Thus, once the American government began painting Indigenous lands as wastelands, they justified using these lands destructively—a norm that has followed into policy and the ignorance towards legal rulings. In 1990, a judge opposed the nuclear waste site on Prairie Island due to the government’s repeated failures to find a permanent storage facility and continuous broken promises to Indigenous communities. The judge issued a recommendation that NSP not build this storage system. However, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission ruled that the plant could still store waste, and the government established the nuclear waste site despite the judge’s recommendation. By suggesting no human can live on these lands and failing to acknowledge the people who do still live there, the U.S. government shifted its guilt, as it pushed the narrative that these lands would have no use otherwise. In 1992, another judge recommended that the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission deny an application to allow waste to be stored on the Prairie Island Indian Community land. The commission ignored the recommendation, establishing a high-level waste storage system on the Prairie Island Indian Community land. The repeated disregard for legal recommendations is fueled by a dangerous narrative that validates Indigenous lands as disposable, with the ‘wasteland’ rhetoric condoning the government and corporations’ behaviors. The impact was disastrous, as chronic flooding and nuclear waste from the stockpile have now left the area with only 300 livable acres.  

In another nuclear storage site, the U.S. government decided to make Yucca Mountain—a sacred mountain in Indigenous culture—into a site for high-level waste storage. In 1982, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act gave the Department of Energy (DOE) authority to investigate potential high-level waste sites. The following year, the government established a program to assess Yucca Mountain for that purpose. The DOE’s website pushed the continued ‘barren land’ narrative, finding that “There are no known natural resources of commercial value at Yucca Mountain (such as precious metals, minerals, oils, etc).” Although the DOE did not directly call Yucca Mountain a wasteland, the DOE used the same rhetoric that the term ‘wasteland’ evokes: unfit for profit and utility, arid and sterile. 

Four years later, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, authorizing Yucca Mountain as a site for high-level waste. When Indigenous people requested formal negotiations to stop the development of the site, they were refused by the DOE, stating that if Indigenous nations wanted to make complaints, they could not meet on a “government-to-goverment basis”, and had to use the public scoping process, in which participants are considered members of the U.S. public. By telling Indigenous nations to go through the public scoping process, the government implied that Indigenous nations are participants of the American public rather than sovereign nations. The U.S. reinforced the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty by denying their status as separate, sovereign governments. This denial of national freedom gave the federal government the ability to validate the taking of indigenous lands by excusing their actions as being in the ‘national interest,’  a term stemming from the assumption that nuclear weapons and power are critical for national security. Therefore, sacrificing their lands for the greater good of their nation for energy security was perceived as a necessary task to balance individual interests (the ‘public,’ which included indigenous peoples) and national interests (the government). Ultimately, it was within the interests of the U.S. to include Indigenous nations into their ‘public’ so they could destructively use their land for nuclear development. 

Clearly, nuclear energy is on the rise. Prominent individuals such as Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos are all increasing their investment in nuclear energy, a testament to its increased incorporation into modern life. However, we must reckon with our history of nuclear colonialism before we consider expansion. We must stop testing on Indigenous lands and listen to Indigenous nations when they object to our placement of high-level waste storage systems—in other words, we must honor their sovereignty and their right to their land. If the narrative of nuclear colonialism persists, Indigenous people will continue to be displaced from their native lands. We cannot allow the U.S. federal government to continue to ignore the needs of Indigenous people while using false narratives to justify its nuclear expansion. 

Fiona Hu (BC’28) is the Nuclear Energy Representative for Columbia Academics in Foreign Affairs. She is studying philosophy and political science with aspirations to attend law school.