Welcome to the 60th issue of The Funambulist, which concludes the 10th year of publishing the magazine! In the past, we’ve dedicated issues commemorating the 150th anniversary of the 1871 Paris Commune (Issue 34, March-April 2021) or the 60th anniversary of the Algerian independence (Issue 42, July-August 2022). This issue commemorates a less glorious anniversary, 80 years after the US nuclear bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, which killed over 200,000 people in two devastating blasts. No doubt that many other publications will reflect on this anniversary come August, but I have a feeling that this issue will be somewhat different.
The idea for it came in June 2024, exactly 8,000 kilometers away from Nagasaki, on Chief Drygreese Territory, Treaty 8, land of the Yellowknives Dene nation and what the Canadian settler colony designates as Northwest Territories. Along a joyful group of activists and writers from Turtle Island, Australia, Hawaiʻi, and Palestine, I had the great luck and honor to be generously invited in Denendeh (Dene country) by Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning executive director Kelsey Wrightson. Together, we spent a week on the land, regrouping amidst the dreadful news coming from Gaza and Sudan, learning from Dene elders, and reflecting on the various levels of solidarity we can engage with. In his welcome to Denendeh around a campfire, Glen provided a historical outline of Dene resistance to Canadian colonialism. A similar outline can be found in his seminal book, Red Skin, White Masks (2014), which I had read years earlier. Yet, it’s one thing to read printed words in the remoteness of a Parisian home, and another to hear them uttered by Glen’s distinctive voice, on the very land that hosts this history.
I was particularly struck when he mentioned that a Dene delegation from Port Radium—about 400 kilometers north from where we were sitting—had visited Hiroshima in 1998 to issue a formal apology to the city residents for the role they and their land had played in the nuclear bombing.
In the 1940s, Sahtu Dene workers had been hired by Canadian authorities to extract uranium from their own land in the mine of Port Radium. The radioactive element was then transported to Tewa country, in Los Alamos to provide an essential component of the US Manhattan Project. Part of the Denendeh uranium, alongside a larger quantity coming from Katanga in the south of what was still Belgian-colonized Congo, composed the bomb that went on to destroy Hiroshima and murder over 150,000 of the city’s residents on August 6, 1945. Sahtu Dene—who were themselves dealing with the noxious, and sometimes deadly, effects of the radioactivity of the uranium they had been extracting without being provided with adequate protection—understood that both their labor and their land had been part of this death machine. It is in this spirit that their delegation traveled to Hiroshima in 1998 to issue an apology. The profound interconnectedness revealed by this understanding of a causality, however distant, between a community’s labor and pieces of its land and the destruction of a city on the other side of the planet, is the subject of this issue. I am grateful to Glen for accepting to write the foundational contribution for it, which you can read in the following pages.
Going back to this interconnectedness, we ought to ask: what is this obligation that the Dene delegation were formalizing through their apology? Assuredly, it is not a moral one. It is probably obvious that another group’s labor could have been used and—perhaps to a lesser extent—another land could have been extracted for the uranium bomb. The Dene nation and its land under Canadian colonial sovereignty, are not responsible for the killing of over 150,000 people. This obligation is, I believe, a material one: a careful and serious attuning to the causal connection between two seemingly distant geographies and their peoples. In some ways, this obligation is a form of teaching of what imperialism does. In its ambition to control, if not dominate, territories and nations at a global scale, imperialism produces a set of relationships between these territories and nations around the world. These relationships described in this issue are mostly exemplary through the ways in which Indigenous peoples and lands are forced—with varying levels of coercion—into the operation of the imperial machine.
However, the imperial production of these relationships also means that they can be turned into circuits of solidarity between peoples.
This issue examines a few of these relationships that partially trace a global cartography of US imperialism. Katanga and Denendeh, cited above in the context of uranium extraction, illustrate the complicity of Belgian and Canadian (itself a European settler colonial entity) colonial states in this cartography. At the heart of the US settler colony, the Manhattan Project—whose very name carries the colonial theft of Lenape land—deployed itself onto Tewa land in so-called “New Mexico.” As discussed by Jennifer Marley in conversation with Sabu Kohso, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the various nuclear bombings of the land to test the new weapon had a deadly impact on Pueblo land, in a continuum of dispossession by Spanish and US colonialisms.
The issue also mobilizes two Indigenous Oceanian geographies, Hawaiʻi and the Chamoru Mariana islands, weaponized by the US military after occupation in 1898. The aircrafts that left to southern Japan to drop the two bombs indeed left from Guåhan (Guam) and Tinian, two of the three most southern Chamoru islands. As Kia Quichocho describes in her text, the years that followed also saw the islands standing downwind of the US nuclear bombings (presented as “tests”) in the Marshall Islands, and in Micronesia. The impact on the Guåhan people’s health was deadly. As for Hawaiʻi—the central node of the US military infrastructure in Oceania—Kānaka Maoli could measure the degree to which the US occupation of their islands was placing the latter in jeopardy when the Japanese aviation attacked Pearl Harbor in O‘ahu, on December 7, 1941. In this text, Jonathan K. Osorio reflects on the interconnectedness US militarism created between Hawaiʻi and Japan as well as, later on, many other geographies subjected to it.
Before concluding, it is important to stress that Japan itself was an empire in 1945, one that was losing the Pacific War, but in the years prior had colonized Ainu Mosir (aka Hokkaido, 1869), the Ryukyu kingdom (aka Okinawa, 1874), Taiwan (1895), Korea (1910), Yap (1914), Palau (1914), Manchuria (1932), and, later on, occupied so-called “Inner” Mongolia, vast regions of China’s northeast and coastal areas in the south, so-called Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), Thailand, Burma, Singapore, the Philippines, Guåhan, Nauru, the northern part of Papua island, as well as what will later become Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and East Timor. The ultimate defeat of this empire meant the liberation of the peoples who lived under its rule, at least, this might be true for Chinese, Filipinos, Thai, Burmese, and Indonesians, but much less so for others. The Ryukyus and a large part of Ainu Mosir remained under Japanese sovereignty—while some Ainu islands were ceded to the Soviet Union, leading to the displacement of many to Hokkaido. East Timor and West Papua were occupied in the wake of Indonesian independence, while Papua New Guinea suffered an Australian occupation. Taiwanese would soon see Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces invade the island and impose martial law; Yap and Palau were placed under US administration; Guåhan returned to a US occupation. Northern Borneo and Malaya had to engage in a liberation struggle against Dutch and British colonialisms respectively; Vietnam as well as Cambodia and Laos initiated a victorious eight-year-long war against the return of French colonial troops on their land. Lastly, as we discuss with Christine Hong in this issue, Korea was prevented from recovering its sovereignty by a US occupation of the southern part of the peninsula less than a month after the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. This occupation led to the beginning of the war in 1950 and the crystallization of the deadly separation between North and South.
During World War II, the Japanese Empire displaced about 750,000 colonized Koreans and forced them into labor in various places of the archipelago.
About 30,000 of them perished in the nuclear fire of the Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as Lisa Yoneyama reminds us in her contribution. A smaller yet significant number of Chinese laborers had been similarly forcefully displaced, and about a thousand of them worked in the Nagasaki mines—the most famous one being Hashima, which hosted an e ntire miner town on a rock offshore from the city. Thirty-two of them were killed by the plutonium bomb of August 9, 1945. Accordingly, this issue is quite deliberate in its effort to avoid designating the victims of the two bombs as being Japanese people, but rather, the residents of the two destroyed cities, without distinction of nationality.
As illustrated throughout this issue, the two nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that we commemorate today, had a profound impact on many more geographies and peoples than solely on the hundreds of thousands of people murdered by the blasts. As often argued, they also created a new jurisprudence of potential global annihilation; but it is crucial to add to this potentiality that constituted the deterrence theory—central to Cold War geopolitical dynamics—the actual bombings of Indigenous land and seas in the half-century that followed these two foundational crimes. As we had discussed in our issues on The Ocean (Issue 39, Jan-Feb 2022) and The Desert (Issue 44, Nov-Dec 2022), the United States bombed numerous Indigenous lands in the southwestern regions of the settler colony, in the Marshall Islands and other locations of the Pacific Ocean, in the South Atlantic, as well as in Alaska. The Soviet Union later followed and bombed several regions of Siberia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine; Britain, the Australian desert and Christmas Island; France, the Algerian Sahara and the Polynesian atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa; the People’s Republic of China, the Uyghur region; India, Rajasthan; Pakistan, Balochistan; and Israel, and Israel, the southern Indian Ocean with the complicity of Apartheid South Africa. The radioactive effects of these hundreds of nuclear explosions are not merely part of “potential global annihilation”—they are still measurable within the land itself, as well as the deteriorating health of numerous Indigenous peoples downwind.
In this partial cartography of US imperialism focusing on the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this issue thus attempts to reveal already existing ties of interconnectedness between distant geographies and peoples—much like Roger Peet’s artwork on its cover—which can be turned into solidarity circuits against these imperial structures. I hope that, amidst the colonial violence and war devastation described in the following contributions, these potential bridges of solidarity will make themselves visible. Have a good read! ■