Department Lecture Series: Long Exposures: Radioactive Legacies, Indigenous Sovereignty, and the Power of Narrative
Long Exposures: Radioactive Legacies, Indigenous Sovereignty, and the Power of Narrative
A roundtable conversation between Glenna Cole Allee, Dmitri Brown, and Emily Washines with Mark Auslander, discussant.
Thursday, March 31, 2022 at 1:00 pm (Eastern)
Department of Anthropology, Boston University
The publication of Glenna Cole Allee’s book “Hanford Reach: In the Atomic Field” (Daylight Books, 2021) occasions a roundtable discussion of the legacies of nuclear weapons production and the Atomic Age, with close attention to the life-sustaining power of art and storytelling. We consider two complex locations: The Hanford nuclear reservation, one of the most contaminated sites on planet Earth, was the site of the Manhattan Project’s production of the plutonium used in the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, as well as the Cold War production of the majority of the plutonium deployed in the US strategic nuclear arsenal. Four decades of plutonium production at Hanford—which displaced the Wanapum and Yakama communities, and other indigenous peoples—released at least four times as much radiation as Chernobyl. In turn, Site Y, otherwise known as Los Alamos, the top secret scientific headquarters of the Manhattan Project, was positioned amidst the Tewa Pueblo communities of the Parajito plateau. Across seven decades, Tewa communities have had complicated cultural and environmental engagements with this nuclear weapons research site, centered on land alienation, under-compensated labor, and radioactive contamination.
See Glenna Cole Allee’s Hanford Reach project at: https://glennacoleallee.net/sec…/413415-HANFORD-REACH.html
For the book please visit:
https://glennacoleallee.net/…/1-The-Book-Hanford-Reach…
Contact Prof. Merry White (corky@bu.edu) for additional details.
