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Nuclear Power on Ancestral Homeland: The Idaho National Laboratory and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes

Énergie nucléaire sur des terres ancestrales : le Laboratoire National de l’Idaho et les tribus Shoshone-Bannock
Energía nuclear en tierras ancestrales: el Laboratorio Nacional de Idaho y las tribus Shoshone-Bannock
Lucie Genay

Résumés

Le laboratoire national de l’Idaho (INL), créé par la Commission de l’énergie atomique des États-Unis comme station nationale d’essai des réacteurs en 1949 et connu pour être le berceau de l’électricité atomique et de la marine nucléaire états-unienne, se trouve sur les terres ancestrales des Shoshones et des Bannocks. Bien que le traité de Fort Bridger de 1868 les ait relocalisés dans la réserve de Fort Hall, à une soixantaine de kilomètres de l’installation nucléaire, les Sho-Bans conservent des traditions de chasse, de pêche, de cueillette et de cérémonie dans tout l’est de l’Idaho, y compris sur les terres occupées par le site nucléaire. Cet article retrace les moments clés des relations entre l’INL et les Sho-Bans, de l’invisibilité à la confrontation et au dialogue, négocié grâce à des manifestations d’ampleur dans les années 1990, afin d’examiner comment ces interactions reflètent les divergences (et certaines convergences) dans la perception de la terre : les différentes cultures de la terre et de son utilisation, ainsi que la notion de valeur environnementale. Comme dans de nombreux autres endroits de l’Ouest nucléaire, l’histoire spatiale et cartographique du sud-est de l’Idaho est faite de strates, d’itinéraires et d’habitats qui se chevauchent ; elle est le produit d’une constante cartographie et contre-cartographie.

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Introduction

1In 1995, a resident of the Fort Hall reservation in southeastern Idaho reminded the governmental and Navy delegation who had come to discuss radioactive waste transportation across tribal lands, “We were forced here. This is all we have. Our treaty has been broken. All we have left is our hunting and fishing rights. And what are we going to do out there? Go hunt for radioactive elk?” (Dobner J., 1995b). The Shoshone-Bannock tribes, who were relocated to the reservation created through an Executive Order in 1867 and made permanent with the 1868 Fort Bridger Treaty, live on a small portion of the extensive territory inhabited by their forebears: western bands of the Northern Shoshone and bands of the Northern Paiute. They have about six thousand members according to the 2020 Census. For generations (over 12,000 years), Newe and Bannaqwate, “the people” respectively for the speakers of the Shoshone and Bannock Numic languages, have roamed the Snake River Plain to gather, hunt, and fish, according to traditional subsistence cycles. These practices continue to this day despite the inclusion of the region into the United States’ “internal, domestic empire” (De Voto B., 1989: 496).

  • 1 The NRTS became the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) in 1974 and the Idaho National Eng (...)

2Since 1949, the Tribes—or Sho-Bans—have been sharing their ancestral homeland with a unique kind of neighbor. First called the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS) and now known as the Idaho National Laboratory (INL),1 the state’s nuclear research facility that spreads over 890 square miles is most famous for being the birthplace of atomic electricity and of the US nuclear Navy in the 1950s. After World War Two, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had selected the southeastern Idahoan desert to experiment on prototype reactors—more than fifty of them over the years—because of remoteness and plentiful water available in the Snake River Plain aquifer. The Tribes, whose reservation lies about forty miles southeast of the nuclear facility, were not included in the decision-making process. Today, the relation between INL and the Tribes can be termed one of respectful cooperation that involves collaborations whenever the interests of both parties are at stake. This is a relatively recent development, however. It took years of power-assertion efforts, protest strategies, and alliances with local antinuclear forces for the Sho-Bans to overcome the invisibility initially imposed on them. This article examines how the relations between INL and the Tribes—and the gradual acknowledgement of tribal concerns—reflect the challenge of reconciling fundamentally different land cultures, contrasting approaches to land use, and opposing views of environmental value, particularly when these are rooted in kinship with the land and living beings rather than in profit. As in many other locales across the nuclear West, a term coined as “the atomic West” by historian Patricia Nelson Limerick (1993; Hevly B.W. and J.M. Findlay, 1998: 16) to refer to the military industrial complex born out of the Manhattan Project that perpetuated cycles of conquest in the region, the spatial and cartographic history of southeastern Idaho is one of overlapping layers, routes, and habitats: the product of constant mapping and countermapping.

  • 2 Funding for this research was provided by a grant from the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

3This research relies on sources recovered during a three-month research trip2 across the state of Idaho, including official laboratory documentation, grey literature, archival collections of political figures and associations, and close to forty interviews with Idahoans in various communities and positions, out of which four were conducted with members of the Tribes during several visits to Fort Hall and the Shoshone Bannock Tribal Museum (the semi-structured interviews were recorded, consent-based long discussions about INL, tribal concerns, and climate change). Largely chronological, the article first examines the invisibilization of the lab’s Native neighbors during its early decades, then highlights the turning point of the 1990s—a decade shaped by the end of the Cold War, damaging revelations about the Energy Department and its predecessors, and shifting perceptions of Indigeneity in the US. It concludes by exploring twenty-first-century collaborations between the Tribes and the lab, along with the new challenges the Sho-Bans face in an era of climate change and nuclear revival.

Invisible presence, ignored borders

A presence of the past rather than of the present

  • 3 The opinions expressed by interviewees are personal and do not reflect any official position of the (...)

4In the late 1940s, the newly created AEC was looking for a large, empty expense of land, or “wilderness” (Merchant C., 2003), where atomic engineers and technicians could experiment with the peaceful applications of the atom. They selected the Pocatello Naval Proving Ground in southeastern Idaho, a place described in terms of “desolation” and “bleak lava beds” (Salt Lake Tribune, 1950). Yet the area had a millennia-long history of human presence, as it was part of the travel corridor used by the Shoshone and Bannock peoples to harvest animals, clays, and plants, including the highly culturally significant camas bulbs—access to these resources had led to the Bear River Massacre of 1863 and the Bannock War of 1878 (Madsen B. and C. Peterson, 1985). The immensity of the Sho-Bans’ ancestral lands is a fact easily forgotten by outsiders. As an interviewee3 put it, “people think that since we were moved to Fort Hall, this is where we’ve always been, which is not the case. We were all over” (Anonymous tribal member, personal interview, April 2023). Northward to Canada, southward to Mexico, and eastward to the Midwest, their ancestors traveled and traded, following seasonal cycles of scarcity and abundance along ecologically and culturally defined routes transmitted across generations through oral histories.

5When the NRTS was established, the Tribes continued to exercise their treaty-protected right to access their ancestral lands. Today still, many young tribal members become aware of INL’s presence in their backyard as they drive across the nuclear reserve to reach hunting and fishing grounds along the south fork of the Salmon River, because in many families, harvested food remains a dietary staple complemented with home gardens and store-bought items. Children are taught that game is healthier than processed meats, and harvesting traditions reinforce transgenerational links, with the youth learning spearing techniques from elders and hunting for those who are too old to partake (Wadsworth Z., personal interview, April 2023).

6So long as the scientific and tribal communities did not disturb each other’s activities, relatively quiet coexistence was achieved. In the early decades, if tribal presence in relation to the testing station was mentioned, it could simply be anecdotal and romanticized. For instance, in 1973, the local Arco Advertiser reported with a touch of exoticism on the Sho-Bans operating “new atomic age businesses” by producing protective apparel for nuclear workers or “nuclear age ‘moccasins,’” i.e., canvas slip-on shoe covers worn in work areas having potential for radioactive contamination. The journalist additionally notes that the NRTS operating contractor Aerojet Nuclear “draws on skilled Indian manpower at the station itself, where colorful surnames like Calico, Afraid-of-Bear, Eagle, and Bear Stops appear on employee rosters” (Arco Adviser, 1973).

7Aside from such “colorful” mentions, Native presence was primarily noted when traces left by earlier generations were uncovered by the site’s archeologists on laboratory lands. Echoing US history textbooks, the official literature produced by the site over the years—e.g., booklets, leaflets, newsletters—would often begin by telling the story of “those who were here first” (Inside INEEL, 1999). Likewise, the official history of INL by Susan Stacy commissioned for its fiftieth anniversary opens with the Aviator’s cave story: a collapsed lava tube on a remote portion of the site discovered by a security helicopter crew in 1989 (Stacy S., 2000: 2). The cave was occupied by three groups of Shoshone hunter-gatherers as a stopover point on their way to the Birch Creek Valley or the Snake River and “yielded hundreds of Indian artifacts.” Skip Lohse, anthropology professor at Idaho State University (ISU) stressed the uniqueness of the find, “because the deposits are undisturbed. They are literally as people left them. […] The fact that it is on the secured federal site saved it from almost certain looting” (Times-News, 1989). To the descendants of those who left these traces, the excavation of materials and their transfer to museums—e.g., the Idaho Museum of Natural History in Pocatello, as the state repository—“locked away in a box, in a dark room or in a drawer,” equates to “erasing [their] history and [their] footprint.” One called it “legal looting” (Anonymous tribal member, personal interview, April 2023).

8One notices the tendency to relegate Native peoples to the past and the influence of a classic conservationist argument on the effective federal stewardship of historically and ecologically significant landscapes. In fact, a similar argument served to promote the National Environmental Research Park created in 1975 from the site’s buffer zone to study “plant and wildlife species in an intact and relatively undisturbed ecosystem” (Inside INEEL, 1998). Because the “sagebrush desert area has been cut off from the influence of man since the 1940s” and had been “left undeveloped” for decades, the land had turned into a “natural hideaway” for rare species (Bailey M., 1975). In other terms, removing human presence was deemed the best policy for both historical and ecological preservation, a rationale that, in some cases, has fueled processes of green colonialism defined by Alexander Pearl (2024) as the “dark side” of the history of natural conservation in the US “that resulted in a significant loss of land and access to lands which are uniquely meaningful to those Indigenous peoples” (p. 114).

Making tribal voices heard by enforcing border control

9Tensions between the nuclear site—renamed Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, INEL—and the Sho-Bans crystallized on more controversial traces of human presence on the plain: radioactive waste. Since the foundation of the local antinuclear watchdog, the Snake River Alliance (SRA), in 1979, over concerns about contamination of the Snake River Plain Aquifer and against projects involving nuclear weapons production, criticism of the nuclear facility had reached unprecedented volume. Idahoans mainly expressed their objection to further importation of spent fuel from US and foreign reactors, which was shipped to the lab along an itinerary that necessarily crossed the Fort Hall reservation.

10On October 20, 1988, Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus ordered the State Police to block waste shipments coming from Rocky Flats—a plutonium pit manufacturer in Colorado—out of exasperation with unkept DOE promises that the waste stored in Idaho would be removed to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), a geological repository in New Mexico whose opening had just been postponed. Inspired by the governor’s stance and sharing the concerns of antinuclear activists over environmental impacts, the Fort Hall Business Council passed a resolution to ban nuclear waste on reservation land on January 24, 1991. Chairman Kesley Edmo invoked his people’s sense of rooting: “the Shoshone and Bannock peoples cannot move elsewhere. If even more of our land and resources are destroyed, our people will be harmed forever” (Stuebner S., 1991). Previous resolutions had been systematically ignored by DOE. It took forceful, physical resistance to end the cycle of invisibility.

11On February 6, 1991, tribal police stopped a truckload of spent nuclear rods from a decommissioned nuclear reactor in Fort St. Vrain near Denver, Colorado, on interstate 15 at the boundary of the reservation and sent it back to a state port of entry near Inkom. Tribal attorney Jeanette Wolfley filed a suit aimed at forcing DOE to conduct an environmental impact statement on shipping, handling, and storing the waste, and to provide funds for the Tribes to train their own personnel and prepare an emergency response plan in case of an accident or a spill on reservation land. Council member Marvin Osborne refused to see Idaho used “as a dumping ground for the stuff” and betrayed his exasperation at his community repeatedly being made invisible: “We’ve been trying to get something done for years, and nothing has happened” (Idaho Statesman, 1991b; 1991a). Osborne further complained about being “neglected and left out of the Department of Energy’s decision-making process,” and preempted accusations of backwardness by stating, “We’re not against science, we want a high quality of life, just like anyone else. But we don’t support waste coming through the reservation that’s mishandled and mismanaged” (AP, 1992). The sentiment was shared by Edmo, who declared, “While DOE gives lip service about recognizing tribal governments, when it comes to actual shipments running through our land, our tribes are blatantly ignored. DOE and Public Service Co. [the Fort St. Vrain reactor operator] are running roughshod over us” (Richert K. and R. Barker, 1991).

12Four years later, another round of missed opportunities for dialogue resulted in the Tribes’ most iconic action on October 24: a tribal police cruiser parked on the train tracks blocking a Navy shipment of radioactive waste for six hours. Chairman Delbert Farmer agreed to end the blockade only after DOE, DOJ, and Navy officials promised a meeting to discuss the terms of future shipments. The train was then escorted across the reservation by tribal police. Farmer had written to Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, whose reply had finally arrived on the eve of the blockade, promising again that the department would contact the Tribes with “a decision on whether or not the DOE would recognize the Sho-Bans’ authority as a regulatory agency” (Dobner J., 1995a).

13The issue was that DOE already had recognized another partaker in the State of Idaho, with whom negotiations were underway. Governor Phil Batt had just entered a highly criticized deal to end the state’s moratorium on waste shipments in exchange for a guarantee that most of the waste stored at INEL be removed from the state by 2035. As Farmer pointed out though, “The state of Idaho and Governor Batt do not represent nor speak for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes.” The Tribes, “as a government, have a responsibility and duty to make decisions affecting tribal lands. All of the waste in and out of INEL will cross the Fort Hall Reservation” (Times-News, 1995). Power thus came from the map, from the fact that the reservation stood on the only train track leading to the waste’s destination. This lack of alternatives and physically reminding their presence gave the Tribes the necessary leverage to obtain a long-overdue seat at the negotiating table.

The long road to two-way communication

A clash of worldviews, alliances, and shifting stereotypes

14In December 1995, as talks were finally underway between officials and the Tribes to strike their own deal, the Sho-Bans repealed the resolution to ban shipments. The federal delegation that visited Fort Hall included Assistant Energy Secretary Thomas Grumbly, O’Leary’s lieutenant on nuclear waste, and Navy general counsel Steven Honigman. In front of about a hundred people gathered at the local school, Honigman apologetically recognized, “Frankly, we were wrong. The Navy should have treated the tribes as partners sooner” (Jackson T., 1995). Scientific progress accounted for this shortcoming, he argued, for INEL was the only place in the country that could conduct sophisticated analytical tests on spent fuel. The voices of officialdom repeated assurances of good intentions, emphasized national security, and provided safety statistics: “Proof positive, they said, that nothing can go wrong.” But what if something did go wrong? From the Sho-Bans’ perspective, the visitors were missing the point: safety concerns were crucial, but even greater was the land. “What if there is a spill? Who’s going to promise us good, clean land again?” one attendee asked. Referring to the US’s damning history of broken treaties with Native peoples, she added, “they give us land and then every time they want to use it, they take it away.” One particularly interesting perspective was that of Mark Towersap, a tribal member and INEL computer programmer. Torn between loyalty to his employer and his cultural heritage, he agreed with some of the reassurance about safety but stressed, “they don’t get it. They can always pick up and move to another state, but the reservation is home” (Dobner J., 1995b).

15Interestingly, a similar comment was made by SRA representative Beatrice Brailsford: “If you’re in Washington, DC, Idaho looks like the middle of nowhere. If you’re here, it looks like home” (Dobner J., 1995b). The Alliance unsurprisingly was most enthusiastic about the Sho-Bans’ successful protest. In a letter to Delbert Farmer, Alliance member Bill Chisholm commended the Tribal Chairman for his “courage and leadership” and extended an invitation to participate in a caravan across Idaho and a rally on the statehouse steps (Chisholm B., 1995). Part of the Tribes’ strategy was to forge alliances with entities that could help carry voices. For example, in 2002, they allied with the Confederated Tribes of the Yakama Nation, the SRA, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the states of Washington and Idaho to challenge in federal court DOE plans to reclassify high-level waste buried in tanks at the Idaho lab, the Hanford Site, and the Savannah River Site, South Carolina, as “waste incidental to processing” so that it could be shipped to WIPP. The plaintiffs were concerned that the plan might be “a ploy” to leave some of the waste in Idaho (Jones E., 2002). If trust clearly was an unreachable goal for the government, communication, particularly on land issues, could be improved, and the cultural context of the late twentieth century seemed conducive to change.

16Perceptions and assumptions about indigeneity were evolving and becoming particularly fashionable in some circles, notably the antinuclear and ecological movements, which had been inspired by various forms of eco-spirituality since the 1960s. Commending Native people’s relationship with “Nature” and the figure of “Mother Earth” were common features in antinuclear rhetoric. One SRA pamphlet listed among its objectives “Enriching our ties with American Indian people through Water for Life, shared goals and common spirit” (Snake River Alliance). In the organization’s newsletter, an activist who visited the Duck Valley Reservation in Owyhee County, Idaho, reported,

The warmth and generosity of the Shoshone-Paiutes are wonderful, as are their quiet determination and resilience. No one should have the right to tamper with the spiritual strength and tradition of a people who have more respect and knowledge of peace and our planet than so many other cultures do (Stewart M., 1993).

17While evolving, the temptation to romanticize remained in the 1990s. From the bloodthirsty savage of the western genre, Hollywood’s portrayal of Native peoples morphed into tales of victimhood and casualties of colonialism in productions such as Dances with Wolves (1990), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), and Disney’s Pocahontas (1995).

18While commendable in some respects, in others, such narratives remained rooted in hackneyed images of “noble savages” or innocent, cultureless “children of Nature” (White R., 1985) and in the myth of the “ecological Indian” (Krech S., 2000). Environmental historian Richard White pointed out the paradox about fishing rights controversies in the Northwest, where environmental organizations claimed, “Indians were destroying the fisheries,” while holding them up “as sort of primal ecologists.” Likewise, a popular belief spread by environmental (and antinuclear) organizations was that wherever Natives had been, their presence went unnoticed because they left no trace. For White, the idea “demeans Indians” by making them “simply like an animal species and depriv[ing] them of culture” and “demeans the environment by so simplifying it that all changes come to seem negative—as if somehow the ideal is never to have been there at all” (White R., as cited in Tydeman W., 1995: 23). On the contrary, Native Americans were “active modifiers of the landscape” through their activities, such as tracing commercial routes or creating conditions favorable for certain animal populations (Tydeman W., 1995: 23). Dialogue about land value—with all partakers, be they INL, DOE, the State, or potential allies—was therefore unavoidably infused with such enduring stereotypes.

A new era of collaboration

19Romanticization notwithstanding, the turn of the century brought significant, concrete change in the relationship between the Sho-Bans and their nuclear neighbor, starting with a formalized Working Agreement on September 29, 1992, followed by a series of Agreements-in-Principle (1998, 2000, 2002, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2022), to ensure the two parties work transparently together to address energy-related matters, educational opportunities, and continuous access to natural and cultural resources. This commitment led to the creation of the Tribal Department of Energy (TDOE) funded by DOE and the hiring of cultural resource technicians to monitor cultural sites at the INL. According to Louise Dixey, Cultural Resources Director in the Tribes’ Language and Cultural Preservation Department, the relationship is “a lot more open” now, even though trust remains unattainable because “They have a proven history of deceiving people” (Dixey L., personal interview, April 2023). After all, true collaboration had only started after the 1995 standoff. Dixey was a council member at the time and remembers a trip to the Pentagon to meet with the generals, which was “really overwhelming because of the power of the federal government. […] And you just have to make your point. You have to be strong enough to do that”.

20Communication efforts included reciprocal education. Lab scientists volunteered to teach students on the reservation about “fish ecology and growing fertilizers in space” or let students collect herbs and medicinal plants on laboratory land in the summer. The Tribes sponsored a three-day workshop in 1999 with lectures on tribal treaties and rights with the hope that it would enable better understanding of how lab decisions affect the Sho-Bans (AP, 1999). The dynamics of the relationship had changed. “Now, they’re knocking on our door instead of us having to knock on theirs,” council member Hobby Hevewah noted (Langston J., 1999). Still today, INL’s K-12 STEM Education team partners with the Tribes to help the Shoshone-Bannock School gain a STEM designation and tribal students prepare to apply for jobs at national laboratories.

21In 1997, the lab had been renamed the Idaho National Engineering Environmental Laboratory, since its primary mission was pivoting from nuclear reactors development to environmental tasks involving waste treatment and land remediation. The latter partly involved mapping out and investigating contaminated areas, for which a Shoshone-Bannock Risk Assessment Committee was appointed to review the sites and establish a protocol for ecological and human health risk assessment that would integrate tribal culture (Idaho Statesman, 2000). The lab requested the Tribes submit a summary “of what is important to them” (INEEL Environmental Restoration Program, 2002: 1). Under a section called the “Native American scenario,” the lab’s 2002 Community Relations Plan read:

The Tribes consider [cultural] resources of great importance in maintenance [sic] their spiritual and cultural values and activities, oral traditions and history, mental and economic well-being, and overall quality of life. […] In the holistic worldview described in the tribal analysis, concerns about land, air, water, plant, animals and humans are paramount and all are interconnected. Changes, disturbances, and perceived voids in this native landscape ecology create an imbalance that extends through the entire traditional and spiritual ecosystem. At the INEEL, contamination and modern disturbances contribute to a perceived imbalance and are unacceptable to the Tribes. […] While the qualitative tribal perspective is distinct from systematic ecological risk assessment methodologies, the two approaches do share a common goal of preserving a diverse and healthy environment. Therefore, it is understood that remedial actions to protect human health and the environment, in conjunction with ongoing tribal consultation, can begin to address the holistic Native American concerns (INEEL Environmental Restoration Program, 2002: 5).

22This excerpt is representative of the turning point in INL-Tribes relations toward visibility. Practices also evolved regarding traces of human presence found on laboratory lands. The INEEL Cultural Awareness Working Group—made up of historians, anthropologists, archeologists, and most importantly, representatives of the Tribes—was tasked with identifying and preserving the integrity of artifacts. Now, the Cultural Resources/Heritage Tribal Office facilitates contact between the Tribes, the INL archeologists, and the Idaho State Historic Preservation Office. Archeologists leave materials at their original locations, marked with GPS points for monitoring, as requested by the Tribes, who also require that repatriated items be returned to their documented original locations whenever possible.

23Compared to other sites, tribal access to DOE land at INL is relatively exemplary according to one interviewee who worked with the TDOE and had a chance to compare their experience with other communities neighboring Hanford and Los Alamos. “They understand now. They’re more open to what we say and our feelings.” Working “on both sides” is still challenging though, because it involves a split between the science of archeology and tribal tradition. Tribal students pursuing archeology degrees might struggle with theoretical and cultural anthropology classes when their knowledge clashes with that taught by university professors (Anonymous tribal member, personal interview, April 2023). Meanwhile, the head of the cultural resource management team proudly states on INL’s website, “We derive so much from our regular interactions with the Tribes. […] Our work is so much improved by their voices, involvement and knowledge” (Goff M., 2024). Making space for alternative forms of knowledge production is a process with which academic and scientific communities have been grappling increasingly, particularly in the context of environmental, energy, and climate crises, “super wicked problems” that demand holistic approaches (Lazarus R., 2009).

Catch 22: tribal concerns, energy needs, and the Green Atom

The challenges of the ecological transition

24Tribal members interviewed for this research expressed concern about climate change and remarked on the effects they have been observing firsthand in the vegetation, the length of wildfires and drought seasons (made worse by the spread of invasive species), lower waterways and reservoirs, disturbed travel routes for waterfowl, modified migration paths for mammals, and collapse in animal population numbers—for which habitat loss to the urban sprawl and the spread of farmland can also account. The conundrum for Fort Hall residents, like many others, is being faced simultaneously with a multitude of intercorrelate threats to ecosystems that require navigating complex hierarchies of eco-social priorities.

25A conversation with two young employees of the tribal Fish and Wildlife Department revealed that their traditional upbringing incentivized them to pursue biology degrees at ISU in order to help their community adapt to those challenges and preserve resources on and off the reservation for future generations. Zachery Wadsworth’s motivation was particularly fueled by a prediction made by his grandfather, an elder of the Tribes: “this modern world might not always be here, and we need to know how to take care of ourselves and remember our old ways because that’s what’s going to get us through.” The technosolutionist and cornucopian discourse was particularly worrisome to Wadsworth because of the unforeseen health effects of practices such as geoengineering—he mentioned silver iodine used in cloud seeding to control rain and snow fall—might bring down the road (Wadsworth Z., personal interview, April 2023). A recurrent recommendation in the conversation was the need for holistic foresight and respect for complex interconnections. Fellow biologist Marquette Bagley remarked, “I know they’re really smart out there [at the lab], but you know, there’s some stuff that you can’t mess around with because it messes up the balance in the ecosystem.” Echoing Murphy’s law, she argued no matter the level of control, “there’s always stuff that happens that are unexpected” (Bagley M., personal interview, April 2023). One might apply this statement to the history of nuclear mishaps and disasters but also to the myth of containment (Orsini D., 2024).

26A central dilemma of the energy transition lies in the fact that several non-nuclear, carbon-free options present significant challenges for the Tribes. For instance, hydropower, from which the state of Idaho derives over half of its electric generation, affects anadromous fish runs (salmon and steelhead) on their journey from the mouth of the Columbia River to the headwaters of the Salmon River to spawn. In this Catch-22 situation the fish suffer from the water heating up, as higher temperatures endanger the smolt and modify migration patterns by prompting premature departure, and the very dams that contribute to mitigating the temperature rise from climate change by providing non-fossil energy are lethal obstacles to migrating fish and also raise water temperatures as a corollary of creating reservoirs on originally free-flowing rivers.

27Salmon is culturally crucial to the Sho-Bans. Wadswoth, who is of Lemhi ancestry, insisted that salmon “is our entire identity.” The name “Lemhi” comes from the Book of Mormon, because of a mission established in the 1850s, but in the Shoshone language, they are the Agai-deka, “salmon eaters” or, as Wadsworth put it, “the salmon people.” The Tribes petitioned and obtained in 1991 that Sockeye Salmon be classified endangered, which limited harvesting numbers. They have invested in a fisheries program to fit eggs in the ground, in the creeks and the rivers, to ensure the return of Chinook salmon. Sho-Bans have had allies among Idahoan environmentalists, who have long been mobilized against dam construction. In fact, the Hells Canyon Preservation Council strongly supported nuclear energy in the 1970s as an alternative to hydroelectric exploitation of Idaho rivers.

28Wind power was criticized for the danger that turbines represent to bats and birds, especially eagles and hawks who are culturally significant to the Tribes as well. Aesthetics and size were cited as other drawbacks. Solar, which is actively promoted by the SRA, seemed to gain more support. As all specialists concur, a perfect source of energy has yet to be invented, as each option entails both direct and indirect problems. However, a shared consequence of electrifying entire sectors of the economy, no matter the sources of power, is the extraction of minerals to produce batteries. In regions already affected by the legacy of past mining, seeing new permits granted is perceived as a serious menace—one should also note that nuclear power is connected to the complex legacy of uranium mining on indigenous lands in the Southwest, as evidenced by a rich academic literature (Eichstaedt P.H., 1994; Brugge D. et al., 2006; Pasternak J., 2010; Berthier-Foglar S., 2012; Voyles T.B., 2015; Montoya T., 2019).

29When asked about potential health impacts of INL, which was listed by the EPA as a superfund site in 1989, some spontaneously divert their answer to the phosphate ore processing facilities near Blackfoot west of Fort Hall. What is now called the Eastern Michaud Flats superfund includes a plant operated by the FMC Corporation to produce elemental phosphorus until 2001 and another operated by the JR Simplot company to produce fertilizers. The two companies mined phosphate at the Gay Mine on the reservation until 1993 and have an agreement with the EPA and the Tribes to investigate remediation, due to concerns about the release of selenium, cadmium, vanadium, and nickel into the environment.

30Now that climate change is boosting the sales of electric vehicles, the Sho-Bans fear the consequences of a new mining boom in the state with the opening of cobalt mines in the Salmon-Challis National Forest to the north, which is part of their hunting and fishing grounds but also host to Idaho’s cobalt belt, one of the largest deposits in the US. After the closure of the Blackbird Mine in 1982 in the same area, cleanup of waterways took decades. Faced with the multiplication of fronts on which to mobilize, Marquette Bagley expressed the feeling of being “hit” from many different sides, so that all in all, INL did not rank tremendously high on their list of concerns: “they’re the ones who are actually better than a lot of other companies” (Bagley M., personal interview, April 2023). Be it contamination from radionuclides or chemicals seeping into the ground from INL facilities or from surrounding mines and farms, groundwater pollution (in the aquifer and the Portneuf river that flows onto the reservation) is the ultimate source of anxiety for the Tribes, but the saturation of pollution factors is imposing, as elsewhere, the lesser-of-all-evils approach.

The Green Atom and the ongoing issue of radioactive waste

  • 4 Specialist of the British nuclear industry Lucie de Carvalho writes about “the climatization of nuc (...)

31Since the 2000s, the lesser-evil argument has been gaining traction among environmentalists, enough to steer some of them away from the traditional antinuclear stance of the previous century and make them embrace a concept I have named the “green atom,” i.e. nuclear science as an ecofriendly pursuit and a solution to a variety of environmental woes—chief among them climate change4. INL pioneered the green atom insofar as touting the environmental benefits of nuclear energy and adopting a green communication strategy early on (Genay L., forthcoming). In the US, groups such as the Breakthrough Institute think tank or ecomodernists have contributed to popularizing the idea that the nuclear option should be reexamined in light of the climate crisis, because abundant, clean energy will be key to guarantee a “great Anthropocene” (Asafy-Adjaye J. et al., 2015: 6). The pronuclear environmentalist perspective was also given a platform through an expanding literature and documentary films that included footage of INL: Pandora’s Promise (2013), The New Fire (2017), and Nuclear Now (2022).

32The Sho-Bans, however, remain wary, principally of the unsolved waste issue. “But it’s so deadly, so toxic” was one reaction (Dixey L., personal interview, April 2023). According to Talia Martin, who was TDOE director from 2015 to 2023, while commercial reactors are still operating and nuclear waste is still being generated, “one of [their] major concerns is the fact that the nuclear waste or the spent fuel that will be generated has no place to go, no home.” Wherever interim storage takes place, oftentimes near Native communities, cooperative agreements are established between DOE and private companies: “where do the tribes fit in? It has always been a question that has not entirely been answered by DOE nor by the company.” Tribal input still is last in the consent-based siting process. Tribes still often feel “spoken to rather than listened [to] as well.” Martin considers that a “two-way dialogue” is still in construction and concludes, “I really do see some improvement and need for improvement as well.” (Martin T., 2021).

33Since 1987, the official site selected to be the US’s permanent repository for high-level radioactive waste has been Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a political hot potato that has generated over forty decades of debate and was mothballed in 2009 (Genay L., 2021). The Tribes, the State of Idaho, and the Snake River Alliance would like the waste shipped out of INL, which should not be a perpetual repository. However, when asked where the waste should go, most, like Martin, admit, “We don’t have to have a destination. You know, we don’t wish upon waste to be involuntarily put on someone else, but we definitely don’t want it on our ancestral lands, on our tribal lands” (Martin T., 2021). Another tribal member, who grew up in Idaho and southern Nevada, also addressed the conundrum and pointed out that Yucca Mountain is still on Shoshone homeland. “Destroying a piece of the earth is just not good to store nuclear waste in,” they added (Anonymous tribal member, personal interview, April 2023). Or as put by Louise Dixey, “Unfortunately the only place where they put all these facilities is on ancestral lands of Native tribes” (Dixey L., personal interview, April 2023). The adjacency of nuclear sites and indigenous communities is a worldwide phenomenon that has been thoroughly demonstrated in terms of environmental injustice and nuclear colonialism by activists and scholars alike (Endres D., 2009). Increasingly, links are also being drawn with the impacts of global climate disruption which disproportionately affect vulnerable populations of the arid US West and Pacific islanders (Maurer A., 2024).

Conclusion

34As reflected in the following assertion by Talia Martin, the Tribes’ core sense of land culture and value is a powerful transgenerational legacy. “The reservation, the people, they’re not going anywhere. We’re connected to the land, and even after the DOE leaves and the other federal agencies that might’ve been there leave, we’re going to continue to be there” (Martin T., 2021). During a previous research project, the same heartfelt sentiment was voiced by an interviewee in the Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh near Los Alamos, New Mexico. “This land is not their home. […] They don’t care, but we do. We will be here for many more generations. I don’t see any tribe ever moving anywhere else” (Archuleta N., personal interview, September 2013). The similarity in the wording is striking and underscores emotional connections across the map of the nuclear West. Furthermore, this declaration of attachment, even dependence, to the land is a powerful reminder of the infringeable bond between habitat and inhabitants that governs sustainable habitability.

35In Idaho, in New Mexico, and other locales where indigenous communities cohabit with nuclear facilities, visibilization strategies have involved defending this shared sense of land stewardship and teaching non-Native neighbors and visitors lessons of millennia-old holistic worldviews. As recommended by DOE’s Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation in the late 1990s, learning more about tribal values and attitudes regarding land could “lead to a more satisfactory and equitable outcome of future land use decisions for INEEL” (Burger J. 1999). The Shoshone-Bannocks of Fort Hall have consistently been contributing to recalibrating land perceptions in southeastern Idaho through the defense of their culture, homeland, and sovereignty. The inclusion of such voices is certainly vital to the advent of an eco-social approach to anthropogenic environmental damage.

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Notes

1 The NRTS became the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) in 1974 and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) in 1997, before acquiring its current name in 2005.

2 Funding for this research was provided by a grant from the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

3 The opinions expressed by interviewees are personal and do not reflect any official position of the Tribes.

4 Specialist of the British nuclear industry Lucie de Carvalho writes about “the climatization of nuclear power issues” or “nuclear power going green” (2021: 68). Paul Josephson asked, “How Green Is the Atom?” (2024). “Green atom” was used in the title of a 2009 Canadian MA thesis but not developed (Lopston K., 2009).

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Lucie Genay, « Nuclear Power on Ancestral Homeland: The Idaho National Laboratory and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes »IdeAs [En ligne], 26 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 octobre 2025, consulté le 06 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ideas/21758 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14v7b

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Auteur

Lucie Genay

Professeure des universités en civilisation des États-Unis et membre de l’Institut des langues et cultures d’Europe, Amérique, Afrique, Asie et Australie à l’Université Grenoble Alpes, Lucie Genay est spécialiste de l’histoire du nucléaire dans l’Ouest états-unien. Ses deux publications majeures sont Land of Nuclear Enchantment: A New Mexican History of the Nuclear Weapons Industry et Under the Cap of Invisibility: The Pantex Nuclear Weapons Plant and the Texas Panhandle, publiés par les presses universitaires du Nouveau-Mexique en 2019 et 2022.
lucie.genay[at]univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

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