Fall 2021
600 yards. 600 yards between tribal members and cancer, acute radiation sickness, skin burns, or cardiovascular disease and more, when an accident eventually occurs (National Cancer Institute 2011; Environmental Protection Agency n.d.). That’s all that sits between tribal homes in the Prairie Island Indian Community and the highly radioactive waste sitting in the 40 year old Xcel Energy Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant.
The Prairie Island Indian Community has repeatedly protested the plant and other forms of environmental violence, such as flooding from industrial federal dams that shrink the livable area of traditional lands. Only 35 miles from Carleton College’s campus, a microcosm of federal treatment of Indigenous people has formed over decades with little national attention in non-Native circles.
Environmental Racism against the Prairie Island Indian Community
Since its installation in 1973, the plant has had accidents and security breaches on average once a month, frequently without promptly alerting tribal authorities and the public (Prairie Island Indian Community n.d.). Regardless, today, “twenty-nine dry casks filled with 1.5 million pounds of nuclear waste sit outside the Prairie Island plant with no permanent storage solution,” according to the Prairie Island Community’s official nuclear position.
On a federal level, projects to create deep geological repositories to store and dispose of nuclear waste, such as the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository project, seem to go nowhere. For example, in 2009, President Obama slashed funding for the Yucca Mountain project, even though the government promised to Prairie Island communities that it would create a permanent solution to nuclear waste storage (Prairie Island Indian Community n.d.). In their Nuclear Position statement, the Prairie Island Community clarified that they’re not against nuclear power as an energy source, but that they find the continued generation of nuclear power without responsible storage and disposal tactics irresponsible and contrary to promises made to the tribe.
Historically, as long as white people have been generating nuclear waste, that waste has been dumped on or near Indigenous land. In fact, the Department of Energy incentivized this waste storage on tribal lands by offering $100,000 study grants to systemically impoverished communities that agreed to host monitored retrieval storage (MRS) facilities until the Yucca Mountain project was finally (funded and) completed, regardless of the long term environmental desecration they promise. As put by First Nations, “American society wants the benefits of nuclear power, but no one wants the waste in their backyard, so it’s sent to Indian country” (Calloway 2019, 603). Beyond nuclear waste storage, the US government used the Marshall Islands and specifically Bikini Atoll as a testing ground for nuclear weapons, forcing 167 Indigenous Bikinians to leave their homelands and inflicting permanent ecological damage. In American public memory, superficial caricatures like SpongeBob Squarepants have plastered over the traumatic memory of violence against Indigenous people while appropriating their names and culture (Barker 2019).
On top of their proximity to the looming nuclear disaster, the Prairie Island Community’s ancestral lands were flooded after the Army Corps of Engineers erected a lock-and-dam system for commercial navigation that whittled the reservation from 534 acres to a paltry 300 acres. Floodwaters have interrupted all facets of Indigenous life; in 2019, roads to hunting grounds were closed, hay that the tribe’s buffalo herds feast on was damaged, and a traditional children’s maple syrup harvesting event for preserving culture was canceled (Richert 2019). This construction of dams by the government at the desecration of Indigenous ancestral lands is nothing new. For example, in the 1950s, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nation lost most of their land after the Garrison Dam flooded their Fort Berthold Reservation (Calloway 2019, 600). Dam construction has proved a convenient strategy for government control of Indigenous lands; as long as the acres of a reservation are feet under water, Indigenous people are relegated to smaller and smaller subsets of space.
Indigenous Response
As a practical response to the dam, tribal leaders in 2018 purchased 1,200 acres of land near Pine Island, Minnesota, ceding their rights to sue the federal government over flooding. The Pine Island land is 35 miles away from the original community in order to distance Prairie Island people from nuclear fallout.
“The trust land would provide a safer alternative location for our members to live and work. The importance of that can’t be understated.”
Shelley Buck, former president of the Prairie Island Tribal Council, in an interview with the New York Times.
Xcel Energy Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant evidently refuses to leave the Native land they occupy or meet Indigenous demands. In response, in 2020, the Prairie Island Indian Community launched a net-zero emissions energy project, partnering with Native-owned companies. The project will cost $46 million and will be funded by the Minnesota legislature as a condition of the tribe’s permission of the nuclear waste storage (Prairie Island Indian Community 2021). The net-zero project is a prime example of internal responses to violence against Native communities; in the creation of a re-imagined, sustainable future, Native visions and people are prioritized.
References
Barker, Holly M. 2019. “Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom.” The Contemporary Pacific 31 (2): 345–79. https://doi.org/10.1353/cp.2019.0026.
Calloway, Colin G. 2019. First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). n.d. “Radiation Health Effects.” Accessed November 19, 2021. https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-health-effects.
National Cancer Institute. 2011. “Accidents at Nuclear Power Plants and Cancer Risk.” April 11, 2011. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/radiation/nuclear-accidents.
Prairie Island Indian Community. 2021. “Prairie Island Indian Community Selects Consultants for Net-Zero Project.” August 10, 2021. http://prairieisland.org/prairie-island-indian-community-selects-consultants-for-net-zero-project/.
Prairie Island Indian Community. n.d. “Nuclear Positions.” Accessed November 19, 2021. http://prairieisland.org/policy-positions/nuclear-positions/.
Richert, Catharine. 2019. “Prairie Island Eyes New Lands amid Environmental Woes.” MPR News, December 13, 2019. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/12/13/environmental-nuclear-worries-force-prairie-island-tribe-to-seek-new-lands.
