See updates on Water Protectors' resistance to the Dakota Access [Oil] Pipeline

Indigenous resistance mounts against the so-called Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)

See Beyond Nuclear's Human Rights website section, for updates on Native and non-Native resistance to DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline).

Longtime Native American allies of the anti-nuclear movement, Indigenous Environmental Network and Honor the Earth, have issued an urgent call for solidarity (including an appeal for human rights observers from the UN, NGOs, churches, etc.) in their struggle against yet another dirty, dangerous, and expensive energy industry -- the so-called Dakota Access Pipeline for pumping Bakken crude oil, targeted at the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's land on the Missouri River in North Dakota. Environmental groups have long stood in solidarity with traditional indigenous peoples to successfully block high-level radioactive waste dumps targeted at the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in Utah, Western Shoshone Indian land at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and many other Native lands across the U.S., as well as to resist uranium mining on Native lands (including in the Dakotas) and beyond. We must again now stand with our environmental justice allies in their time of escalating crisis -- as local, state, and even federal governmental and law enforcement agencies are unnecessarily increasing the tension, and safety risks, in an attempt to disperse a peaceful, growing encampment of many hundreds of Native Americans (including women, children, and elders), who have gathered to protect sacred land and water against an illegal, polluting, and dangerous crude oil pipeline. More

Native American Forum on Nuclear Issues, Oct. 10-11, 2016, U. of NV Las Vegas

Native Community Action Council logoBeyond Nuclear is honored and privileged to be invited by the Native Community Action Council (NCAC) to present at its Native American Forum on Nuclear Issues, taking place on October 10 & 11, 2016, at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas (UNLV).

See the event flier here.

See the agenda/program here.

The Forum is sponsored by the UNLV Academic Multicultural Resource Center and UNLV Boyd School of Law.

Learn more about NCAC at its website.

Native American environmental defenders urgently ask for support amidst escalating "energy wars"

Indigenous resistance mounts against the so-called Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)Longtime Native American allies of the anti-nuclear movement, Indigenous Environmental Network and Honor the Earth, have issued an urgent call for solidarity (including an appeal for human rights observers from the UN, NGOs, churches, etc.) in their struggle against yet another dirty, dangerous, and expensive energy industry -- the so-called Dakota Access Pipeline for pumping Bakken crude oil, targeted at the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's land on the Missouri River in North Dakota. Environmental groups have long stood in solidarity with traditional indigenous peoples to successfully block high-level radioactive waste dumps targeted at the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in Utah, Western Shoshone Indian land at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and many other Native lands across the U.S., as well as to resist uranium mining on Native lands (including in the Dakotas) and beyond. We must again now stand with our environmental justice allies in their time of escalating crisis -- as local, state, and even federal governmental and law enforcement agencies are unnecessarily increasing the tension, and safety risks, in an attempt to disperse a peaceful, growing encampment of many hundreds of Native Americans (including women, children, and elders), who have gathered to protect sacred land and water against an illegal, polluting, and dangerous crude oil pipeline. More

Resisting environmental racism at Yucca Mountain, Nevada

Corbin Harney (standing), Western Shoshone spiritual leader, and Raymond Yowell, then Western Shoshone Indian Nation chief, at Peace Camp, NV, Oct. 2002, leading protests against nuclear weapons testing, militarism, and radioactive waste dumping at the Nevada Test Site. Photo by Gabriela Bulisova.November 20th marked the end of a rushed, "going-through-the motions" Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (DSEIS) by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), a thinly veiled attempt to revive the cancelled Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste dump in Nevada.

NRC didn't even bother to provide advance notice to the affected Indian tribes downstream from the targeted site, let alone consult with them in a government-to-government manner, as is the agency's legal obligation. But at least NRC is consistent: it didn't provide any funding to the tribes, either, placing an extraordinary burden on the tribal nations to meet the arbitrarily-short deadline. In this regard, NRC's SDEIS public comment proceeding itself was a violation of environmental justice (EJ), not to mention the agency's biased push to bury 70,000 metric tons, or more, of high-level radioactive waste on indigenous land, guaranteed to leak into the precious, even sacred, drinking water supply.

Despite NRC's own EJ violations, the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe and the Native Community Action Council met the deadline, with powerful comments. They thereby continued a tradition of protecting Yucca Mountain, and its groundwater, that dates back not just years or decades, but centuries and millenia, to time immemorial. More.

Resistance commemorates dark Atomic Age anniversaries in New Mexico

July 16th marks two dark Atomic Age anniversaries in New Mexico of national and even global significance. It's 70 years since "Trinity," the world's first atom bomb explosion, at Alamogordo, NM -- the Manhattan Project "test" for Nagasaki to follow three weeks later. And it's 36 years since one of the worst (and least known) radioactivity disasters in U.S. history, the massive uranium tailings dam release at Church Rock, NM. Ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes, spilled into the Rio Puerco River, vital source of drinking and livestock grazing water for Navajo communities downstream.

But resistance to nuclear weapons and nuclear power remains strong in the "Land of Enchantment," despite decades of ongoing radioactive abuses. For example, Diné No Nukes of New Mexico will join with S.A.N.S. and Nuclear Energy Information Service to celebrate a successful fundraiser for their collaborative "Radiation Monitoring Project," purchasing detectors to be used in Navajo country, still contaminated from decades of uranium mining and milling.

And Downwinders and nuclear weapons watchdog groups, including Beyond Nuclear's Alliance for Nuclear Accountability coalition partners Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Southwest Research Information Center are not only commemorating "Trinity." They continue their decades-long efforts, such as watchdogging the "Birthplace of the Bomb," Los Alamos National Lab; resisting nuclear weaponeers' attempt to keep their omnicidal trade going for decades to come, at unthinkable expense; opposing threatened in situ uranium mining; and outing the truth about the 2014 radioactivity leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, NM, to name but a few of their ongoing campaigns.