"The nuclear industry, which has waged an undeclared war, has poisoned our communities worldwide. For more than fifty years, the legacy of the nuclear chain, from exploration to waste, has proven through documentation to be genocidal and ethnocidal and a most deadly enemy of Indigenous peoples. We, the Indigenous Peoples gathered here for this summit, standing in defense and in protection of our Mother Earth and all our relations, hereby unanimously express our total opposition to the nuclear power and weapons chain and its devastating impacts and deadly effects on our communities." - Indigenous Anti-Nuclear Summit Declaration, September 1996, Albuquerque, NM.

Since the advent of the nuclear era, Native peoples have suffered disproportionately more than other populations from this technology. Our peoples and territories have been contaminated with radiation from uranium mining, milling, atomic testing and in isolated communities like Point Hope, Alaska, we have served as guinea pigs for the federal government in its radiation experiments. Now our lands serve as potential sites for radioactive waste dumps.

The federal government and nuclear industry have targeted Native lands for waste storage for a decade. Now the industry is escalating its efforts with a huge push to create a temporary dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, on Western Shoshone land. At the same time, utilities are staking out a private deal to lease Goshute reservation land in Utah. A parallel situation is taking place in Canada.

After fifty years of modern science and technology, the largest investment in any single energy source and pretty much everything they have asked for, the industry has a uniform solution to the problem of nuclear waste--load it up on some trucks and trains, drive it down a dirt road and unload it on an Indian community.

Honor the Earth took up the issue of nuclear waste storage on Native lands in 1997 with a specific call to stop the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. This bill would authorize the mass transportation of lethal high level nuclear waste across the country to a dump at Yucca Mountain. Yucca Mountain --a sacred site to Western Shoshone and Paiute peoples--would be turned into a radioactive parking lot. We held 15 press conferences on this issue along the East Coast, from New York to Florida. We met with editorial boards at 15 newspapers, profiled Virginia Sanchez of the Western Shoshone community at seven benefit concerts, distributed close to 30,000 booklets with action material on the issue and collected 15,000 postcards to the President requesting he uphold his promise to veto this bill when it comes to his desk.

A few key outcomes of this work were:

a) both national and local anti-nuclear groups took up the Native issues around this legislation in a central, rather than peripheral way;

b) the Western Shoshone community was revitalized and empowered to continue their ongoing efforts to stop the dump; and

c) our media work was so successful that the public relations arm of the nuclear industry began distributing a counter-letter to newspaper editors attacking Honor the Earth and our anti-nuclear position.

Nuclear waste is clearly the achilles heel of a dying industry. The federal Monitored Retrievable Storage (MRS) program was defunded two year ago, fraught with controversy, in part because sixteen of eighteen participating communities were Native. A new private initiative, comprised of eleven utilities, has stepped forward and now is negotiating with the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes, a tribe of 150 members. Similarly, Canadian government proposals are directed at two small and isolated bands--Meadow Lake and Grassy Narrows-- who only recently received running water from their white man's government. All of these communities share decades of government neglect, poverty, pollution of adjacent lands and no environmental protection. Real victories in this area-- led by Native peoples and communities--are achievable given sufficient resources.