A Message From the Most Bombed Nation on Earth
By Ian Zabarte, Al Jazeera
29 August 20
More than 900 nuclear tests were conducted on Shoshone territory in the US.
Residents still live with the consequences.
You never know what is killing you when it is done in secret.
I watched my uncle suffer from horrible cancer that ate away at his throat
and my grandfather die of an auto-immune disease that is known to be caused
by exposure to radiation. They say he had a heart attack, but when your skin
falls off, that puts stress on your heart.
Many of my cousins have died. Last year, my cousin, who is about 50, had a
defibrillator put in his chest. Now his daughter, who is a toddler, has
heart problems as well. At around the same time, one of my cousins told me
his mom has cancer. And then a week later, he found out he has it, too.
A few months ago, an elder here died from a rare form of brain cancer.
Every family is affected. We have seen mental and physical retardation,
leukaemia, childhood leukaemia, all sorts of cancers.
The US military industrial complex
I am the Principal Man of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of
Indians - the most bombed nation on earth.
Our country is approximately 40,000 square miles (25.6 million acres), from
just west of Las Vegas, Nevada all the way to the Snake River in Idaho,
including a 350-mile (563km) wide strip in the Great Basin. There are
approximately 25,000 to 30,000 Shoshone lineal descendants but the United
States places the number much lower based on blood quantum (a percentage of
ancestry).
We have been on this land for at least 10,000 years.
Our relationship to the US is based upon the Treaty of Ruby Valley signed in
1863. In the treaty, the Shoshone continued to own the land but we agreed
that in exchange for $5,000 a year for 20 years, paid in cattle and other
goods, the US could establish military posts on the land, that US mail and
telegraph companies could continue to operate telegraph and stage lines on
it, that a railway could pass through it, that the US could mine for
minerals on it.
But shortly before the end of World War II, we started to be overrun by the
US military industrial complex, in ways we are only now beginning to
understand.
Nuclear fallout
In 1951, in violation of the treaty, the US established the Nevada Proving
Grounds (what would later become known as the Nevada Test Site and is now
known as the Nevada National Security Site) on Shoshone territory and began
testing nuclear weapons - without our consent or knowledge. We suspect that
Nazi scientists brought to the US as part of Operation Paperclip - to help
the US develop nuclear weapons - were involved.
On January 27, 1951, the first nuclear test took place on our land, when a
one-kilotonne bomb was dropped from a plane flying over the site.
Over the next 40 years, it became the premier testing location for American
nuclear weapons. Approximately 928 nuclear tests took place on the Shoshone
territory - 100 in the atmosphere and more than 800 underground.
When the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, 13 kilotonnes of
nuclear fallout rained down on the Japanese city. According to a 2009 study
in the Nevada Law Journal, between 1951 and 1992, the tests conducted on our
land caused 620 kilotonnes of nuclear fallout.
I was born in 1964, a year after above-ground testing of nuclear weapons was
banned. But the US continued to test weapons of mass destruction under our
land almost every three weeks until 1992.
The downwinders
The fallout from these tests covered a wide area, but it was Native American
communities living downwind from the site who were most exposed - because we
consumed contaminated wildlife, drank contaminated milk, lived off
contaminated land. For Native American adults, the risk of exposure has been
shown to be 15 times greater than for other Americans, for young people that
increases to 30 times and for babies in utero to two years of age it can be
as much as 50 times greater.
When the fallout came down, it killed the delicate flora and fauna, creating
these huge vulnerabilities across thousands of square miles of Shoshone
territory. The pine trees we use for food and heating were exposed, the
plants we use for food and medicine were exposed, the animals we use for
food were exposed. We were exposed.
As a result, we have watched our people die. Some of the strongest defenders
of our land, of our people, just gone.
But we have to protect our land and our people. Our identity is the land.
Our identity is the pure pristine water coming out of the ground, flowing
for millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years. We see that
pure water as a medicine. People need that pure water to heal.
But what we find is that we have the US brokering for the nuclear industry,
brokering for the mining industry, the destruction of our property for
profit.
We cannot endure any further risk, whether from nuclear weapons testing or
coal ash or oil tracking, any radiation source at all.
Hammers and nails
We are beginning to understand what has happened to us. For more than 50
years, we have been suffering from this silent killer and the US
government's culture of secrecy keeps it silent. But we need relief.
In every other part of the world where there have been nuclear catastrophes
or nuclear testing - such as Kazakhstan, Japan, even Chernobyl - there are
health registries to monitor those who have been exposed, even if the
numbers are kept artificially low in some places. We do not have that here
in the US. We do not have that for Native American downwinders. We need that
kind of testing. We need health registries. We need monitoring. We cannot
wait any longer for the health disparities we are experiencing to be
identified.
We are having to fight the US to get it to understand our basic health
needs.
We have managed to obtain documents that were declassified in the 1990s. But
there are almost two million pages. Trying to understand all of that is
daunting. We do not have any funding and we do not have the support of the
US to get that work done. So we are having to do this ourselves as we suffer
through this continuing health crisis.
And all the while, military activities are still being conducted on our
land.
We continue to endure and we live with the understanding that the radiation
is there on the ground, it is there in our plants, in our animals, and
inside of our people.
Killing Shoshone people was never part of the treaty we signed. Our people
would never have engaged in something that would result in our own
destruction.
Our custom is sharing, but when all you have is a hammer, everything is a
nail, and that is what the US military has been doing, hammering the
Shoshone with bombs.