A CONVERSATION BETWEEN SABU KOHSO AND JENNIFER MARLEY
When we asked Jennifer Marley to reflect on the connections that could be drawn between Tewa land, stolen by the US settler colony for the construction of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, and Hiroshima–Nagasaki, she told us that she had recently been in touch with Radiation and Revolution author Sabu Kohso. We subsequently commissioned this dialogue around the relationship between both nuclear geographies, which they generously accepted.
Tewa people’s experiences of nuclear colonialism ///
SABU KOHSO: I have the sense that the nuclear experiences of Indigenous communities cover many aspects of the colonization of their lives, histories, cultures, and societies. They would also illuminate the interrelationship between nuclear production and other modes of capitalist production. Could you describe the experiences of Tewa people (and others) in this light?
JENNIFER MARLEY: At the beginning of the Manhattan Project, ancestral San Ildefonso, Jemez, and Santa Clara lands were chosen by the US military for their semi-rural location, out of the way enough to be hidden yet close to cities like Santa Fe and Española. I believe they also considered that the Native people and the Nuevo Mexicanos here who were still living off the land could be easily funneled into the wage economy by becoming a convenient labor force for Los Alamos, which is exactly what happened. Our subsistence economies had not been disrupted until the onset of the Manhattan Project in this area. Up until then, we were still depending on our hunting grounds, our fields, and even bioengineering with the case of Frijoles Canyon, a now heavily radioactive canyon we once cultivated for bean production. This was how we sustained ourselves into the 1940s. Because we had never been displaced, Pueblos were in a unique situation compared to all the other tribes in the United States, who had already been forced to sell their resources or adopt a new economy. Even my grandma, not just my great-grandma, lived this way. They lived off the land, off the fields they grew and harvested, and still did community hunts. It is in very recent memory, not even three generations back, that we had our subsistence economies. I’m always talking to people about the class aspect and how it transformed our society and our economy. There’s a good book by Joseph Masco called Nuclear Borderlands, in which he coined the term, plutonium economy, to describe the new economy that was installed in this region with the coming of Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL).