American Indian Culture and Research Journal

At the December 1991 annual meeting, David Leroy, recently appointed director of the Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator, appeared before the National Congress of American Indians in San Francisco to offer all federally recognized Indian tribes a new deal for economic development: tribes could negotiate with his quasi-private offshoot of the Department of Energy to store highly radioactive spent fuel rods from the commercial nuclear industry on their reservation lands. Citing the famous Duwamish Chief Seattle on stewardship of the earth, Leroy offered tribes a no-strings-attached bid to consider this storage, suggesting they could negotiate for nearly anything they needed: all agreements would be on tribal terms. As he put it, “No one wishes to buy your land, no one wishes to mortgage your future. Instead, the Negotiator process [for storing nuclear waste] is the embodiment of a New Federalism. . . . [It] recognizes and emphasizes Indian rights and ownership of trust lands. . . . With atomic facilities designed to safely hold radioactive materials with half-lives of thousands of years, it is the Native American culture and perspective that is best designed to correctly consider and balance the benefits and burden of these proposals.” Thus unfolded our ongoing story of US-Indian relations, the most recent phase involving the marketing of nuclear waste to American Indians as a means of economic development, an offer wrapped in a “toxic multiculturalism” that highlights Native ties to land, spinning US society’s premier environmental “bads” into economic good. In marketing nuclear waste (and other forms of industrial garbage) to American Indians, the US government and corporations have seized upon a glaring contradiction in contemporary American Indian life embedded in its colonial legacy: an expanding political sovereignty within the context of continued, indeed in key ways heightened, economic vulnerability.