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Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country Paperback – May 15, 2015

by Voyles (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 29 ratings
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Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo land in the U.S. Southwest, asking why certain landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Uranium mines and mills on the Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and energy programs. By 1942, mines on the reservation were the main source of uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, the Navajo Nation is home to more than a thousand abandoned uranium sites. Radiation-related diseases are endemic, claiming the health and lives of former miners and nonminers alike.

Traci Brynne Voyles argues that the presence of uranium mining on Diné (Navajo) land constitutes a clear case of environmental racism. Looking at discursive constructions of landscapes, she explores how environmental racism develops over time. For Voyles, the “wasteland,” where toxic materials are excavated, exploited, and dumped, is both a racial and a spatial signifier that renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable. Because environmental inequality is inherent in the way industrialism operates, the wasteland is the “other” through which modern industrialism is established.

In examining the history of wastelanding in Navajo country, Voyles provides “an environmental justice history” of uranium mining, revealing how just as “civilization” has been defined on and through “savagery,” environmental privilege is produced by portraying other landscapes as marginal, worthless, and pollutable.
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  1. Print length
    310 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    University of Minnesota Press
  4. Publication date
    May 15, 2015
  5. Dimensions
    5.5 x 1.5 x 8.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    081669267X
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0816692675
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Wastelanding is simply a brilliant book. It is at once a beautifully written, rigorously researched and hauntingly moving account of U.S. settler colonialism’s violent making of racialized bodies and degraded landscapes in the U.S. Southwest. Traci Brynne Voyles draws together a rich set of critical approaches and weaves them into what will be the new bar for environmental politics."—Jake Kosek, University of California, Berkeley

"This groundbreaking book examines how race, gender, and nature coproduce one another through ‘wastelanding.’ Voyles’ masterful account explains how colonization, racialization, and resource extraction work together to produce sacrifice zones. She connects history, geography, Native American Studies, ethnic studies, and women and gender studies in a truly unique contribution to the literature of environmental studies and environmental justice."—Julie Sze, University of California, Davis



"Wastelanding is meticulously researched, covers extremely complex events that continue to have dire consequences for Native peoples on the Colorado Plateau in a well-organized discourse, and draws on the work of dozens of other historians and professionals as well as a multitude of source documents."—Indian Country Today

"There is a gap in geography in and around meaningfully engagements with Indigenous feminism. There is also a failure amongst radical scholars to place themselves within the landscapes they inhabit. This context of erasure makes Traci Brynne Voyles’ contribution all the more valuable and worthy of a thorough read."—Antipode

"Thought-provoking and challenging."—Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education

"Wastelanding is an often thought-provoking examination of settler colonialism’s impact on the Navajo people and their lands and should appeal to students of Native American history, geography, mining, gender studies, and the environment."—Western Historical Quarterly

"Sophisticated and insightful."—Journal of American History

"A timely and innovative work that applies a multitude of theoretical perspectives with remarkable elasticity to illuminate a critical instance of environmental injustice that is far from isolated."—The American Historical Review

About the Author


Traci Brynne Voyles is assistant professor of women’s studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.


Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Minnesota Press; 1st edition (May 15, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 310 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 081669267X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0816692675
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.5 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 29 ratings

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Traci Brynne Voyles

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Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
29 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

bailarina94
5.0 out of 5 stars Important read for the environmentally-minded
Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2018
Verified Purchase
This is absolutely a landmark environmental justice book. To those unfamiliar with environmental injustice, what this book contains will be downright shocking. To those that are, there is still much to learn from this book about how deeply, and insidiously to regular citizens, racial injustice is connected to land use and baked into the federal agencies that manage our land. I am in a graduate program for land management and will be recommending this to my professors for use in future classes, as I think it's critical that my peers be aware of these issues as we continue our careers. The ways we assign value to land are often unconscious and deeply tied to culture, and it's important to be aware of those influences if we want to engage stakeholders effectively and manage land equitably.

I found the author’s writing style somewhat tangential, and in places there seemed to be an excess of details that were not necessarily relevant to the overall point (a writing habit of which I myself am not innocent). Nonetheless, those are a minor gripes, and not ones that impacted my overall enjoyment of this book. To those interested in further reading on the subject, I recommend "Understories" by Jake Kosek, which is about National Forest management, also in the southwestern US.
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Ivan G Weber
5.0 out of 5 stars Voyles' insights into racial-environmental injustice inflicted on Indigenous Peoples via uranium mining
Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2017
Verified Purchase
This is one of the most important critical reviews ever written of racial-environmental injustice, compounded by the arrival in the West of self-obsessed, supremely self-righteous white Christians. Voyles pioneers understanding of what we're witnessing right now, the declaration of "wastelands" where national monuments, wilderness areas, and other forms of protected federal lands have existed, generally for decades. In the case of the Bears Ears National Monument, however, Trump, Zinke and the Utah Congressional Delegation have exercised their contempt for cultural ways other than Mormon, jerking out from under the Navajo-Ute-Zuni-Hopi coalition that persuaded President Obama to do the honorable thing, instead slashing landscapes known to be extremely rich in archeological, paleontological, and spiritual sites --- and, incidentally, scenic and recreational, values appealing to the dominant white culture --- into vastly less meaningful fragments, giving access to mining, grazing, drilling, 4-wheel drive access, and those who exist by pillaging ancient pottery, rock art, architecture and fragments of ancient ancestors of the people who still inhabit the place thousands of years later. Bears Ears National Monument, however it transpires, will stand forever as a monument to the insights of Traci Brynne Voyles, who manages to see simultaneously into family, landscape, spirit and industry, reflecting the greatest flaws in the political-religious culture of this sad time, the Trump Presidential years.
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ThommyBoi
5.0 out of 5 stars amazing book
Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2019
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this book rules. i loved it and think everyone should read it.
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thomas ward
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2017
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OK book
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Ai
4.0 out of 5 stars I enjoyed this book
Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2017
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I enjoyed this book, though I have to think through her theoretical framework more to see if I really think it is effective in what she wants it to do? Otherwise I think it's a creative way of thinking through these issues, and does good work in linking larger narratives of the height of nuclear activity. The chapter on gender was really great, especially in the ways it linked the perceived femininity of the past and the future as imagined by Diné women, but I think that really was the linchpin of the book and should have been pulled throughout the book rather than being relegated to a single chapter
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Zinnia
2.0 out of 5 stars Important work, but numerous instances of bias, misrepresentation, or omission
Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2019
Verified Purchase
This is important work documenting the environmental injustice and violence of uranium mining. Unfortunately, in numerous instances, facts are distorted, used out of context, or misrepresented to justify the author's assertions. This book is still worth reading, but with a grain of salt.
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