THE GREAT BASIN REGION: COLONIALISM, THE NUCLEAR ERA, AND A CHAIN OF EXPLOITATION 1850-1992

Abstract

The United States (U.S.) has had a continuing interest in the Great Basin region. This has been to the detriment of the tribes that live in the region. U.S. colonisation of the region began in the earnest in the mid-19th Century, after the discovery of precious metals within the region, sparking a mining boom. Prospectors, miners, and other settlers flooded into the region during this period, displacing the Great Basin's tribes from their ancestral lands. The Great Basin tribes attempted to resist these colonisation efforts but were defeated by the settlers and placed in reservations. Their land was eventually subsumed under the states of Nevada and Utah's. In the 1930s, at the end of the mining boom, the U.S.'s armed forces took interest in the region. Shortly the region was used for nuclear weapons testing. Weapons testing contaminated the region, with the Great Basin tribe's suffering heavily as their reservations were close to the test site. Finally, in 1987, part of the region was selected for the construction of nuclear waste repository. This project was opposed by both the government of Nevada and the Great Basin tribes and ultimately dropped. I analyse these developments, from 19th Century settler colonialism to nuclear weapons testing and its impact to the proposed nuclear waste repository as being closely interconnected. I argue that these events should not be studied in isolation but must be understood as a continual chain of exploitation whose effects are long-term. Through the historicization of the exploitation of the communities like the Great Basin tribes, we can understand how such communities are marginalised and then continually exploited, with exploitation taking wildly different forms and being perpetuated by different parties over the years.