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Paper short abstract:

Examines how Diné actors, negatively impacted by uranium mining, pursued transnational survivance strategies: forging solidarity ties and reshaping global anti-nuclear debates through their interactions with Japanese and Pacific Islander environmental, anti-nuclear, and indigenous rights activists.

Paper long abstract:

The historically traumatic impacts of uranium mining on the Diné (Navajo) peoples of the American Southwest – from high cancer rates among mineworkers and their families to the contamination of local reservation resources – have become well-known cases of environmental injustice. Much less understood is how these experiences reverberated on a global stage. Diné activists in the late 1970s and early 1980s pursued particular transnational survivance strategies as they contended with their ongoing settler colonial predicaments and vulnerabilities to the predations of multinational energy corporations: seeking allies and building solidarity networks in ever-widening transnational and trans-indigenous directions. This paper examines how Diné actors in these years especially forged solidarity bonds with Japanese environmental, anti-nuclear, and peace activists as well as indigenous rights and anti-nuclear activists from across the Pacific. At rallies, workshops, and conferences – from the Navajo Reservation to Nagasaki – Diné participants’ personal accounts of uranium mining’s toxic toll encouraged Japanese activists to move beyond their narrower conventional concerns over bombs and energy production, to instead confront all implicated stages of the nuclear fuel cycle and their toxic impacts – from uranium mining on indigenous lands in North America to nuclear waste dumping’s effects on Pacific Islanders. At the same time, through their growing interactions with indigenous actors from across the Pacific, Diné activists helped foster and widely communicate a deeper appreciation of the interconnected nuclear predicaments and vulnerabilities of indigenous people globally, and how such problems were intimately tied to deeper questions of sovereignty and survival.