Early into the Fierce Nonviolence journey, we intended to travel to Wellpinit, the largest town on the Spokane Indian Reservation just north of the city of Spokane, to meet with Twa-le Abrahamson, a fierce advocate for accountability in the fight to clean up the uranium operations like the abandoned Midnite Mine on her reservation. This plan had to be changed due to a forest fire breaking out near the mine, so instead, Twa-le came to us.
The increase of forest fires in the Pacific Northwest is a product of our consumption of fossil fuels, trapping greenhouse gases like methane and CO2 in our atmosphere at unprecedented levels. The Climate Crisis is an existential threat that many young people are well acquainted with. Nuclear weapons is one we are not. How these threats to life intertwine is something that is unfolding before our eyes.
Twa-le informed us that the contamination of radioactive uranium goes well beyond the Midnite Mine. Uranium has seeped into the groundwater. There are two additional radioactive sites on or near her reservation, like the Uranium mill at Ford. Waste rock from the sites were piled haphazardly, and much of it fell out of open trucks along the roads to and from the mine. Uranium workers used waste rock as gravel to pave their driveways, and dust from the mine had scattered into the nearby forest, which was now burning. The ash and smoke from the forest fire quite possibly contained radioactive dust.
When the city of Spokane learned that radioactive waste would be transferred through its central railroad, the mayor and the entire city were in an uproar. Twa-le informed us that for years, radioactive waste from the Midnite Mine has been trucked through Spokane on its way to a radioactive dump in Utah.
The day before we met, we were visited by Doresty Daniel, a local Marshallese Community leader who has the difficult job of helping her community, with their unique immigration status and language differences, navigate the already confusing and dysfunctional American healthcare system. Due to US Nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, this is a community with extremely high rates of cancer, thyroid issues, and other co-morbidities that stem from exposure to ionizing radiation, cultural displacement, and colonization.
When the United States came to the Marshall Islands, they were greeted as liberators from Japanese occupiers. But the US came to the Ri Majel with a sinister purpose.
Just a few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the residents of Bikini Atoll were told they would need to leave their islands. The US needed to do something there that would “end all wars”. It would be “for the good of mankind”. They would be allowed to return. The Bikinians, who numbered in the hundreds, were in no position to refuse the American military. They agreed to America’s promise.
The United States was not satisfied with the power displayed by the atom bombs in Japan, which split atoms through nuclear fission. In the Marshall Islands they tested their largest weapon, the Hydrogen Bomb “Castle Bravo” which was a weapon of atomic fusion. 67 atmospheric tests later, the US spread radiation through the entire islands. Bikini has never been safe to return to. The island of Runit was chosen to store radioactive waste from the tests, which was capped with a concrete dome and left to the now sovereign nation of the Marshall Islands to deal with. There it sits a few feet above sea level. Nuclear waste from the United States’ Nevada tests was stored there as well. The dome is visibly cracked.
Doresty told us that her Ri Majel community watches climate change swallow their islands every year. She shared with us her precious jewelry, meticulously woven seashells with plant fiber, each a work of art that undoubtedly took countless hours to create. When she holds the shells, she is reminded of warm sands and clear waters, far away in at times frigid Spokane.
When deciding where to test new nuclear weapons, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said about the Marshall Islands “there are only 90,000 of them, who gives a damn?” The Marshallese were sacrificed for US nuclear hegemony.
In Washington state, we often exclaim proudly that our economies are run by hydroelectric power, renewable energy that allows us to break free from the sinful fossil fuels of coal, oil, and liquified natural gas. Products of the New Deal and Great Society, the complex series of dams along the Columbia and Snake Rivers represent an era of public jobs creation, and led to a series to irrigation and barging projects that allowed the arid Columbia Plateau to become our region’s breadbasket. The system of barging has created a major shipping port all the way in landlocked Lewiston, Idaho. In Yakama, a tribal elder explained that this cheap water and electricity is why Boeing came to Washington, and the Manhattan Project to cool the reactors of its largest Plutonium production site.
Both the Spokane and Yakama tribes are fundamentally salmon people. As much as eighty percent of their diets consisted of salmon, which ran in extreme abundance up the mighty Columbia River and its tributaries. When the Grand Coulee dam was constructed, there wasn’t so much of a thought to install a fish ladder. The great fishery at Kettle Falls was lost. These massive concrete structures bisect the rivers, and cut off the historic seasonal migrations of millions of animals, salmon, sturgeon, and lamprey.
There is one undammed reach of the Columbia, where the majority of Columbia River salmon now spawn. That is the area that was claimed by the federal government for the Manhattan Project: the Hanford Reach.
Our group took a boat tour up the Hanford Reach, guided by tribal members and employees of the Yakama Nation’s Environmental Waste Management and Restoration department. My boat captain was an enthusiastic outdoorsmen, who told us when he died, he wanted his ashes to be spread at the White Bluffs on the Reach. He told us that he enjoyed catching and eating the invasive “Walleye” in the Reach, an introduced species that preys on juvenile salmon. We passed by Hanford’s nuclear reactors, many now entombed in concrete. The nuclear waste at Hanford will need be stewarded for tens of thousands of years. It is unclear if Hanford will ever by “cleaned up”.
We passed by one ripple of water. Our captain informed us that this was the Coyote Rapid, the last large rapid on the entire Columbia River. It scours the river bed, creating the largest gravel bar and best salmon spawning grounds in the reach. One of our guides told us that nearby, there is a part of the river that has no insect or bug life, likely from a pollutant called “hexavalent chromium”. Another guide told us of the petroglyphs that are buried beneath the slackwater created by the dams, the same slackwater that is heating up from climate change, making salmon passage even more difficult.
In Toppenish and along the Pend Oreille River near Spokane, we were treated to feasts prepared with traditional ingredients that were stewarded, foraged, and prepared by our hosts. Huckleberries, lomatium and camas roots, smoked sturgeon, and salmon prepared more ways than I could count. How unworthy, I felt.
If this is the price for cheap apples and electricity, then I no longer wish to pay it. If this is the price of a nuclear deterrent, then we can’t afford to pay it again. I’ll remember this when I turn on the lights, and when I don’t have to face the direct consequences of my country’s actions due to an extensive nuclear umbrella.
The reality of our existential crises, be it the climate crises, the biodiversity crises, or nuclear waste and weapons, is that they all stand to crush the world under the weight of their own momentum. Untended, climate feedback loops, nuclear material, and invasive species will destroy life as we know it. Humanity, who has broadly been painted as the villans of this story, is now the only force that can undo these looming catastrophes. We would do well to remember the Spokane, Yakama, and Marshallese people, who lived for thousands of years without dams and nuclear weapons, in relative peace with their environment. They are a part of our human family and know a better way. A better world is possible. I’ll be against these dams, fuels, and bombs until the end of my days.
Written by Sean Arent