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).
The US government took our hunting grounds, and then they started to divide our farmland and forced us to abide by private ownership. Before that, all of this land was communally owned, and all of the fields we worked together.
They forced us to have family-allotted plots. So they greatly reduced our farmlands, which reduced our ability to tend to our fields as a community. I argue that this was intentional, as a way to force us into wage labor at the labs, effectively privatizing our lands and forcing us into the wage economy.
They built the labs close to a place called White Rock, and the first part of it was just a weapons manufacturing facility. It wasn’t experimental—I mean, it was in the sense that they were developing the bomb, but that was all that they were doing there, manufacturing weapons. Today they’re doing other stuff, like energy-related research, for example. One of the first reactors they built was named the Tewa Reactor, which is profoundly offensive. The very first nuclear waste that was ever created was dumped directly into the kivas, because they were underground. They were like, oh look at these conveniently made pits, we’re going to put the waste here. If you’re familiar with Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and what those places look like, our structures looked similar. At the time that the US started pouring the first nuclear waste ever made into our sacred sites, they did not have any standard for testing the impacts of the waste, not even for understanding what it was or what it would degrade into, how it worked. That was all deprioritized. The priority was to create the weapons. And so, because these kivas are unlined, the waste has been seeping into our aquifers since it was put there. So at Bandelier National Monument, there’s two thirds of the kivas that are closed off to the public because of the nuclear waste, and the other third is open to tourism. So when you go there, be aware that you’re getting irradiated, for sure. Radiation doesn’t know arbitrary boundaries. In addition to that, they also started building the main lab facilities in the place that we consider to be our emergence place. Multiple shrines that mark our emergence into this world. That’s as sacrilegious as it gets for us. It’s the site of our emergence into this world, where we believe we came from the ground. Some of our most sacred spots, we cannot access. There are stories of elders going hunting and having guns pulled out on them. There are stories of elders who had no idea the extent of the facilities and how big they were. They were just shocked to realize how far it went into our hunting grounds. One of our mountains is completely hollowed out. There’s more underground infrastructure than there is aboveground. They have reactors, they have a hadron collider, they have all kinds of things. They decided it was best practice to try to store the waste that was produced on-site. Nonetheless, all of the infrastructure is in the heart of our holiest places, our homelands. It’s devastating. And all of that exists in addition to the economic and political repression that we still deal with today.
Nuclear colonialism in Japan ///
JM: The Jackpile uranium mine in Laguna Pueblo was once the biggest in the world, and there are over 500 abandoned uranium mines in the Navajo Nation right now. Today, there are attempts to reopen uranium mines on Native land throughout the US Southwest. We are being told that this uranium extraction is for “clean” nuclear energy, though we know that nuclear energy is anything but clean or safe for those who live near extraction sites and reactors. Turning to Japan, why has the Japanese state embraced nuclear energy despite dealing with the massive impacts of irradiation after the 1945 bombings? And why does Japan continue to embrace nuclear energy development after the 2011 Fukushima disaster? What are some lessons we can learn from how nuclear energy is talked about in Japan?
SK: Indeed, the beginning was the Manhattan Project developed in Los Alamos, the expropriated land of Tewa People. The nuclear genocide of 1945 instantaneously killed about 140,000 people in Hiroshima and about 70,000 people in Nagasaki, including not only the Japanese but also resident Koreans and other minorities. The actual use of these unprecedented weapons was one of the main causes that forced the Japanese Empire to surrender to the Allied Forces. Thereafter, while the fascist regime was disassembled, the nation-state was transformed into a proxy of US imperialism. Most importantly, the territories that the Japanese Empire had colonized, including Manchuria and Korea, were liberated from its rule. During the Cold War, the Japanese archipelago was made into the frontline of the US, to glare at its enemies on the Asian Continent and to invade their territories (as it happened in the Korean and Vietnam Wars). Several US military bases were installed from north to south. The Islands of Ryukyu Kingdom (now called Okinawa), that the Satsuma clan in Kyushu had invaded in the 19th century, were occupied by the US after World War II—they used one third of the territory for military operations. In this context, while Japan’s postwar regime focused on economic expansionism with nuclear energy for civilian use, Ainu Mosir—the Indigenous territory in Hokkaido—remained as its colony. Then, in 2011, the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster occurred.
Some Japanese friends describe the nation’s dual experiences of nuclear calamity as such: “the first one was a violence inflicted by the enemy at war and the second one was a violence inflicted by their own state.” These experiences attest to the fact that “Atoms for War” and “Atoms for Peace” lead to the same effect in the end. Thus, Japan’s continuation of nuclear proliferation is a mystery, absurdity, and insanity, considering also the fact that the Japanese Archipelago sits right on the Ring of Fire and is exposed to a permanent threat of earthquake. In my view, there are a few overdetermining causes for nuclear proliferation. One was the US policy that exerted a calculated campaign to introduce nuclear energy to Japanese society by circulating its image of “an ideal energy of the future.” It was a successor to the Atoms for Peace Policy that President Eisenhower instigated in 1953, to encourage the commodification of nuclear fission for electricity and mitigate the antagonism against US nuclear bomb so-called “tests.” Another cause was the divergence in public opinion vis-à-vis nuclear power and its dual function. During the period of so-called ‘high economic growth’ in the 1960s, an idea permeated: “nuclear weapons are bad, but nuclear energy is good,” under the influence of a growing faith in the advancement of techno-science.
Within antinuclear movements, too, differences in anti-nuclear positions appeared. In 1955, the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyo) was established in Hiroshima. But in the early 1960s, it split, between a group close to the Japan Communist Party—that opposed US possession of nuclear weapons but supported that of the Soviet Union—and a group associated with the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan (Sohyo) and the Japan Socialist Party, both opposing the possession of nuclear weapons by any state. In 1965, the latter group left Gensuikyo and established Gensuikin (Japan Congress against A- and H-Bombs). Later, Gensuikin came to hold the position to oppose both nuclear weapons and energy, aligning with the individuals and groups taking full anti-nuclear position.
After the Fukushima Accident, the majority of Japanese society rose up against the government and TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) to abolish nuclear power in its entirety. During this period, all nuclear reactors were in repose, due to both the security and the pressures of opposition. But the nuclear-free situation lasted only for two years. So, the resumption of nuclear proliferation remains a mystery, absurdity, and insanity to us in Japan.
Anti-Nuclear organizing in Japan ///
JM: Japan has a rich history of anti-nuclear organizing. I am especially impressed by the extreme organization that is required to protest in a place that heavily criminalizes direct action. What attitudes, tactics, and principles guide the organization of anti-nuclear and anti-imperialist organizers in Japan? Can you see any of this being applied in the context of Native people resisting nuclear colonialism?
SK: In my observation, Japan’s anti-nuclear organizing has a rich but difficult history. The difficulty is in sustaining unity among the varied initiatives that take part in anti-nuclear movements, thereby creating a society against nuclear power in a full sense. The prototype of the large-scale anti-nuclear movement was created by the aforementioned Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyo)—to influence public opinion, parliamentary politics, and international organizations through rallies, conferences, petitions, signature collecting, and public education. But, as I said, Gensuikyo suffered the split. While I acknowledge the necessity of these practices, I would emphasize here the importance of a less visible and more bottom-up mode of organizing by women and local inhabitants, which would resonate with Native people’s resistance. After the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, we saw a rise of projects to abolish nuclear energy and protect the everyday reproduction of the people from radiation contamination. Various strata of the society participated, and in different ways: street demos, direct actions for disrupting nuclear facilities, legal actions, radiation monitoring, and everyday care. Many of these initiatives were spearheaded by women (popularly referred to as “enraged mothers”). Some have seen in the rise of this power a new feminist movement against the historically congealed, patriarchal society. By the late 1960s, problems of industrial pollution revealed the troubling nature of Japan’s modernization and industrial development. By 1973, there were more than ten thousand movements against industrial pollution in Japan. Here we can situate the local struggles that successfully blocked nuclear developments. There have been fifty communities that stopped the construction of nuclear power plants; sixty communities, if we include reprocessing plants; and eighty communities, including radioactive waste storage facilities. Some of us in Japan conceptualize these struggles as “inhabitants’ movements,” beginning from a simple definition: people who inhabit a land defend their local living).
This conceptualization would connect various existing struggles for protecting autonomy against pollution, development, and the military, whose examples are seen in Japan among Sanrizuka Farmers’ opposition to the Narita Airport construction, Okinawan people’s resistance against the US military bases, migrant day-laborers’ struggles against the police and developers in their ghetto communities (called yoseba), and so on.
The constituencies of these struggles are not limited to nationals and citizens, but most importantly centered on Indigenous and diasporic peoples — the planetary inhabitants.
The Goal of Anti-nuclear Colonialism ///
SK: I have an imagination about indigenous cultures—though this might be romantic—that they internalize important lessons about humans’ relation with the earth, which distinguishes themselves from the capitalist practice of commodification of land. Can this aspect of indigenous cultures be defined by what is generally called animism? When we talk about “returning indigenous land,” we envision an abolition of colonial capitalism and a reconstruction of the rapport with the earth for the entire humanity. Is this correct? Taking this assumption into consideration, would you tell us about what you believe in terms of the struggle against nuclear colonialism’s goals?
JM: This is an interesting question because I just learned what “animism” meant a couple of weeks ago. I understand it basically to mean the belief that all things have some kind of “spirit.” I can’t go into too much detail about this, but yes, I think this is an accurate way to define our worldview. A cute example of this is the way my grandmother would say thank you and give an offering to her car when she would trade it in or get a new one, to offer gratitude for keeping her family safe. But this, of course, is how we interact with the very world around us too, the literal ecology. “The land” means very different things to different Native people. Some have been displaced from their homelands, some live in big cities, some had big cities encroach on their land, making their relationship to, and conception of, the land different. I’m coming to understand our fight as a fight for national liberation, one that is always linked to the national liberation struggles of those in the global south. One way we have historically articulated our relationship to each other and the world around us is through kinship, our kinship structures have been the basis for how we organize our societies and respect our non-human relatives, too. The impacts of LANL have directly impacted our kinship structures.
At the start of the Manhattan Project, we were working exclusively as maintenance people and domestic laborers for LANL. The men were construction workers, building the facilities, doing all the maintenance. To this day, they still are. And the women were all domestic laborers, nannies and maids. My great-grandma, my grandpa’s mom, was a domestic worker at the lab. She and most of the other women and girls her age were doing that. For that reason, she was disconnected from her own family. Her sons, my grandfather and his brothers, grew up with a very strained relationship to their mother, and in turn, that’s why I argue that LANL disrupted our kinship structure. It took away mothers from their children, leaving this whole generation in a new kind of poverty because we were scraping by paycheck to paycheck now, and couldn’t even perform day-to-day communal life because everybody was working at the lab. So it disrupts cultural life. It disrupts our society. It disrupts kinship structures. My aunt still talks about how her Grandma’s work in that job affected our families. Though we are still suffering from the impacts of having our kinship structure altered, our place in the story of nuclearism inherently connects us to all those who have been impacted by nuclear colonialism.
After visiting O‘ahu in Hawai‘i, I now understand that Oahu is actually the first site of the Manhattan Project, because that is the place where they started developing the tactics that they would bring here. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they started bribing spiritual leaders to regurgitate US propaganda to their people about why they needed military bases there. They started creating that fear about national security, that’s when they started co-constitutively building the militarization alongside the tourism industry, and that’s very apparent here. So I was like, wow, this is where they actually developed the things that they would come and bring here when they actually started building the atomic bomb. That was really life-changing and really helped me understand not just the scope of the Manhattan Project, but the scope of the resistance too. Because Kanaka ʻŌiwi people really do resist it, they are very culturally intact, and they know their land very well, and they still know their sacred sites from before colonization. That’s so important.
As for Japan, I believe Native people in the US southwest have an especially unique connection to the first victims the nuclear bomb, because the first victims of nuclear waste were Tewas, the first victims of nuclear extraction were Navajos and Laguna Pueblo people, and the first victims of nuclear tests were the Mescalero Apaches and Nuevo Mexicanos living on the Tularosa basin. We were reduced to test subjects in the first nuclear military experiment in contemporary history, and none of us had a say in it.
This binds us in a way that I believe we can forge a new kinship, international solidarity, and resistance. Even further than that, I’m also one who says that, San Ildefonso people, Tewa people– we are connected to the peoples who are victims of every atrocity the US commits.
Every instance of US imperialism, we’re at the center of it, always. Because Los Alamos is not only on our land, but quite literally on our sacred sites, and LANL represents not just the heart of US imperialism but the very heart of the monsters of capitalism and imperialism. I fear that this monster is not beholden to only one nation-state but to the very essence of exploitation and death.
The only hope for life on this earth to continue is for capitalism and imperialism to die. I think that even in a world without some of the great imperialist powers like the US or Japan, nuclearism will still be a threat if we cannot seize these weapons and facilities in one way or another. Those nukes are made of us. Our labor. Our blood, sweat, tears, and suffering. When it comes down to it, I want a world where there’s no nukes at all, but I think there may be a moment in history where it’s going to be us having to seize that power, for the sake of making sure that we can rid the world of it. ■