by Craig Simpson
Three days after the Oscar sweep of the Oppenheimer bio movie, Massachusetts Peace Action held a webinar with another side of the story.
Oppenheimer the film is not an anti-nuclear weapons film. It is a film about a White male scientist who, in his inner mind, may or may not have had a guilty conscience about developing a weapon of mass destruction which not only caused the deaths of 175,000 people almost immediately, but also set off a global arms race which is still going strong today.
The film never discusses – and its creators apparently never had any intention that it would discuss – the people whose lives were upended by the grabbing and destruction of their land: that is, the Indigenous and Chicano people who lived in and around Pajarito Mesa, now Los Alamos, New Mexico. The film never discusses the people that lived within the 100-mile radius of the Trinity Test in July 1945, when it wasn’t even known if the whole world would be blown up by the explosion. The people in the farming and ranching communities of the Tularosa Basin were mostly people of color. Oh, and the film never mentions the workers on the Navajo Reservation, the Dine people who mined uranium in 1942 and up until the 1970s, whose lives were impacted with no protection or compensation for the mining and milling. Or the Churchrock breakings of tailings piles in the 1970s into the water table of the Rio Puerco.
MAPA organized this powerful webinar (more than 300 people signed up and more than 170 attended) four days after the Oscar Love Fest celebrating the Oppenheimer film. The combined efforts of the MAPA Nuclear Disarmament working group and Indigenous Solidarity action group brought together four speakers impacted by the experiments on the New Mexico Mesa.
Roberto Roibol, an anti-war and racial justice activist from Santa Fe, moderated this panel of four, all deeply involved in activism in New Mexico. Tina Cordova from the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium grew up 25 miles from the Trinity Bomb sites. She and her family and neighbors never had warnings of the top secret project to blow up the world. They are still suffering from the fallout with cancer and sickness over generations. She has organized most of her adult life to get compensation for the Trinity test from her government.
Talavi Denipah Cook (Pueblo, Dine, Hopi) Environmental Justice Coordinator for Tewa Women United spoke passionately about what happened in Los Alamos. Her home, the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, near Espanola, NM knew the real story of the confiscation of land, the impact of unregulated scientific explosions, the contamination of water and land that happened during the Manhattan Project and continues today. She talked about the impact on her people and the environment by the nuclear weapons lab and the Tewa peoples’ resistance in the area.
Leona Morgan grew up Dine on the Navajo Reservation and is a student at the University of New Mexico. She is a co-founder of Haul NO! or Dine resistance to nuclear waste and is working to oppose the past and continued mining of uranium on the reservation with new threats to mine in the Grand Canyon. Haul No! has been working to train Dine people to monitoring the radiation in old and abandoned mines all over the reservation and to work for removal of the waste.
Lily Adams joined us from the Union of Concerned Scientists. She updated webinar
participants about the RECA (Radiation Exposure Compensation Act) renewal legislation and allocation of money to support victims of the development and testing of the nuclear weapons program from 1942 to the present. During the webinar she asked us to call legislators in Washington to get more support.
The RECA, originally implemented in 1990 and renewed for two years in 2022 by President Biden, is due to run out this July. The Senate recently passed a bill that would extend the legislation for five years and expand it to cover more sites and more people suffering from the effects of exposure to radiation. Biden has said he would sign the bill. But first, it could face a tough fight in the House, with some representatives raising concerns about the cost. The bill needs broad support! Please join us in this effort! Call to the House to Expand RECA – click here.
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Craig Simpson is a member of MAPA’s Indigenous Solidarity Action Group. Thanks to Josna Rege of the Indigenous Solidarity Action Group and Susan Mirsky of the Nuclear Disarmament Working Group for their help with this article.
