Intimacies of the Atom: On Rocks and Decolonization in the Work of Leslie Marmon Silko

In an effort to promote domestic uranium extraction in the late 1940s, the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) made public its "orebuying schedule" and successfully incentivized aggressive prospecting in the sandstone-rich lands of the Southwest.¹ In 1951 the Anaconda Mining Company identified a huge uranium deposit underneath the Laguna Pueblo village of Paguate in New Mexico.² By 1958 Anaconda's Jackpile mine had grown to become the largest open-pit uranium mine in the United States, supplying much of the raw material for a period of great nuclear exuberance. On the one hand, the AEC was rushing to build up a national armory in the early years of the Cold War; on the other, following President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1953 "Atoms for Peace" speech, the commission sought to quell anxieties around the bomb with an optimistic vision for the civilian uses of nuclear science. At a radiotoxic site of extraction like Jackpile, however, this implied distinction between weaponry and energy appears especially subtle or even nonpertinent. Indeed, sites of extraction are situated many translations in the nuclear supply chain away from uranium enrichment, which itself reveals that the distinction between energy and weaponry is one primarily of degree. Exploiting an uncontrolled rendition of the nuclear fission that produces nuclear power in a reactor, the atomic bomb is an energy technology, and, in both its military and its nonmilitary guises, nuclearity is fundamentally about the extraction and intensification of energy from ore rock.³

To study the extractive disposition toward subsurface minerals as latent energy, we might attend to literatures that mediate nuclear processes and legacies. One such archive emerges from Indigenous perspectives on the atomic age. Across the settler colonies of the United States, Canada, and Australia, Indigenous peoples have been disproportionately impacted by the nuclear industry at all stages of production—as forcibly removed communities, as downwinders and downstreamers to "tests" and tailings waste, and as cheapened labor in mines and mills. During the peak years of extraction, Jackpile mine was one among thousands of uranium mines in the Colorado Plateau, and in the US Southwest alone the industry has variously affected the Navajo, the Zuni, the Mescalero Apache, the Western Shoshone, the Southern Paiute, and numerous of the Pueblo nations. This, in the Southwest and elsewhere, has led to a large body of work by Indigenous authors, much of which pays particular attention to the ore-bearing rock, its severance from a local ecology, and the deathly ways it has been energized by the settler colony.

For example, in her 2002 play Burning Vision, the Métis playwright Marie Clements confronts the history of uranium extraction on Dene land at Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Over the course of the play, Clements personifies pitchblende as a "beautiful Native boy" named Little Boy (after the bomb), charting his transit from Great Bear Lake to the Manhattan Project's Trinity Site for military testing.⁴ Similarly, in A Blanket of Butterflies, the Dogrib graphic novelist Richard Van Camp grapples with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki via the memories of a Dene grandmother, as she recalls Dene and white laborers "taking black eggs out of the earth and putting them into the bellies of these birds" that "dropped two eggs on people who look just like us."⁵ Against the immateriality of nuclear exposure, these two texts make recourse to ore rock as a way to map and make visible a triangular relation between the point of extraction (Great Bear Lake), production (the US Southwest), and detonation (Hiroshima and Nagasaki).⁶ Although radioactivity resonates with what Elizabeth DeLoughrey, following Gayatri Spivak, names "planetarity"—an uncanny phenomenon that is entirely resistant to capture or visualization—it does not preclude a practice of reckoning with what is visible and material.⁷ This is not radiation itself but its most charged objects.

The material current running through this Indigenous archive on the atomic age serves as a reminder that energy resources in the Americas are colonized earth matter: energy resources have been removed...