Overview

This text maps the nuclear landscapes of the US inter-desert southwest, a land sacrificed to the Cold-War arms race and nuclear energy policy. Valerie Kuletz documents in detail the consequences of these policies on the southwestern land and its native peoples. Consequently, a double exposure emerges of one landscape superimposed upon another: a landscape of national sacrifice over what many Americans understand as a geography of the sacred. Kuletz investigates how culture influences both native and scientific representations of nature as well as strategies for managing the relationship between nature and human society. The author draws on interviews with the Native Americans affected by nuclear activity while using mapping strategies, textual analysis and an ethnoecological approach to document the zones of national sacrificial land.

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9780415917711

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Reviews

This is an important and serious book that deserves a wide audience, both in and out of the classroom. -- International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters ...present detailed understandings of the environmental and social impacts of advanced industrial society on diverse American Indian communities...they make important contributions to understanding the broader differential benefits and burdens of science and technology in the late twentieth century, particularly as it concerns environmental degradiation...will be of particular interest to students of the American West, American Indian communities, and scholars of environmental justice and of societal change in the postindustrial world. -- Environmental History The author's inclusion of Native-American perspectives and voices, her critique of the objectivity of science, and the timeliness of the topic...all make this one of the most important environmental books of our time. -- The Bloomsbury Review The Tainted Desert brings to mind Rachel Carson's Silent Spring as a wake-up call to Americans. -- The Bloomsbury Review Tainted Desert is a powerful, important, and readable explication of the nuclear devastation of the American Southwest. -- San Francisco Bay Guardian [Kuletz] has written a striking...portrait of the consequences of `nuclearism' in the American West, and particularly of the tragic, largely unacknowledged overlap between the domain of Native Americans and that of uranium mining, weapons testing, and nuclear waste storage... Her study invokes the richness of a landscape that has been overlaid with devestation... This is an important and, at times, eloquent book. -- Audubon ...a moving account of the 'secret nuclear holocaust' spawned in the Southwest desert by the nuclear experimentation of the 1940s, '50s and '60s...readers will find a deeply disturbing indictment of our government's neglect and lack of responsibility to the land and its people. -- Publishers Weekly Offering a unique perspective on a controversial topic, this is recommended for academic environmental and sociological collections. -- Library Journal Kuletz does a solid job of presenting [Native American] views... -- Kirkus Reviews The Tainted Desert is a powerful, important, and readable explication of the nuclear devastation of the American Southwest... In her very fine text, Valerie Kuletz explores the ways in which the deadly convergence of militarism, science, and the nuclear industry resulted in environmental havoc that threatens both the indigenous peoples of the region and the rest of us who live on the planet... She makes compelling arguments without resorting to jargon... will change the way you look at the world. -- San Francisco Bay Guardian The Tainted Desert vividly shows how contending constructions of nature map the earth and how these constructions--scientific, policy, Native American, tourist, sacred, and secular--collide in the management of nuclear waste. This is an important book and a deeply satisfying read. -- Donna J. Haraway, author of Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium Valerie Kuletz presents an astonishingly powerful indictment of the interrelated processes of genocide and ecocide that the US nuclear establishment has visited upon the western regions of our continent since 1945. Thoroughly documented and eloquently argued, this book offers one of the best overviews of America's self-imposed radioactive holocaust. It is absolutely essential reading for anyone in the least concerned with the future of the land, or of life itself. -- Ward Churchill, Coordinator of American Indian Studies, University of Colorado Through the powerful tools of visual and narrative mapping, Kuletz makes visible the human cost of nuclear development and testing and raises the lid on the pressing issue of waste storage. ... [A] comprehensive work that demonstrates clearly how science, once thought to be objective, arises from a cultural viewpoint. -- Booklist ... a thorough analysis of intercultural differences. -- Choice A disturbing look at how the federal government has carved up the American West into gunnery ranges, army bases, testing grounds, and nuclear waste dumps, and destroyed the environment and Native American culture in the name of 'defense'. -- Sunday Record, Hackensack, N.J.

Nuclear waste meets Native American folkways in this garbled account of desert ecopolitics. Kuletz (Univ. of Canterbury, New Zealand) has turned her doctoral dissertation into a book, and its origins are evident. The text bristles with jargon and zigzags over a vast swath of territory, without settling on a single narrative path. At the heart of her discussion is a truism, well reported in the current literature: The American West has tong been seen, at least by the powers in Washington, as a dusty outback that is just right for testing nuclear weapons and dumping toxic wastes of various kinds ( these dry, arid regions are perceived and discursively interpreted as marginal within the dominant Euroamerican perspective ). That outback is the domain of Indians, who view it differently, as sacred geography; thus, Kuletz's argument follows, the government's misuse of Western lands is a form of environmental racism ( Those who benefit least from nuclear developments end up paying the highest price for the excesses of our nuclear culture ). More interestingly, but not necessarily to the point, Kuletz is interested in mapping out the spiritual geography of groups like the Western Shoshone and Paiute, who live near threatened places like Yucca Mountain, Nev.; traditionalists among these people consider the ecological despoliation wrought by nuclear-waste dumping and weapons testing to be a desecration. Kuletz does a solid job of presenting their views, but she doesn't pursue the harder story: Tribal medicine elders don't command much respect in Washington, but tribal attorneys do, and these attorneys have made concessions for half a century to allow the testing and dumping Kuletz rightly decries in places like Alamogordo and Fallon. Solid scholarship that doesn't translate into readable or pointed argument. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Valerie L. Kuletz, the daughter of a weapons scientist, grew up near a Department of Defense research and testing center in the Mojave Desert. She has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and currently is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Her work on this book won the American Sociological Association's 1997 Robert Boguslaw Award for Technology and Humanism.

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