by Jennifer Graber, Department of Religious Studies and Affiliate Faculty in Native American & Indigenous Studies, University of Texas at Austin
This piece by Jennifer Graber is a part of the WPS Special Series on "Disarming Toxic Empire." All contributions to this Special Series were originally delivered as talks at the Rapoport Center's Disarming Toxic Empire conference in Spring 2024. A commentary responding to this paper was written by WPS editor Nancy Blanco. It can be found here.
Through "Disarming Toxic Empire," the Rapoport Center and its partners and co-sponsors fostered an interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and international approach to nuclear weapons, waste, extraction, and energy. Conference participants—scholars, artists, advocates, and activists—considered and contested the unjust, imperial histories and geographies of nuclear testing, production, storage, and weaponry through channels of intergenerational memory and action. Through this Special Series of the Rapoport Center's Working Paper Series, participants in the conference were invited to publish their remarks or papers based on their remarks, with short responses by graduate students part of the Rapoport Center's Working Paper Series editorial committee. These exceptional pieces capture the critical insight and clarity that were a common feature of contributions to the conference. Considering sites ranging from the Navajo Nation and the Pacific Islands to Japan, North Africa, and Ghana, their exciting interventions showcase the breadth and depth of work considering "toxic empire" that is taking place at the University of Texas at Austin and around the world. To watch the conference presentations, visit the "Disarming Toxic Empire" playlist on YouTube.
In 1997, Mr. Maurice Eben testified on behalf of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe before the Nevada Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He addressed the C ommission’s plan to transport spent nuclear fuel, essentially nuclear waste, through tribal lands. Eben said the tribe had not been consulted properly, a violation of the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act. His people did not have the opportunity to voice their objections, which were multifold. Nuclear waste, Eben insisted, was simply “not part of our Indian society.”[1]
He then provided a primer on that society. He told the commissioners where he came from, including what Paiute bands his parents belonged to and what territories in the Great Basin he lived in and visited. He explained how his parents “were forced” to enroll in boarding school and how later, he and his family left the reservation to find work. Then he went back further into the Paiute past. He told of the establishment of Pyramid Lake Reservation in 1874. Then he went still further. Oral histories and scientific evidence, namely petroglyphs, showed that Numic peoples had lived in the basin at least 15,000 years. Paiute ancestors, Eben claimed, were buried in valleys and rock crevices throughout the landscape. The graves, he said, “were prepared with loving care with place mats made of tule reeds. Food was stored in willow woven baskets, blankets made of rabbit hide were made to keep the body warm. Clothing was made for the journey home.” It was this land and these graves through which nuclear materials would be moved. Eben objected to it.[2]
Eben then referenced a particular episode in Paiute history that informed his relationship with the landscape and the ancestors: the Ghost Dance and its first leader, Wodziwub. In 1869, a man named Wodziwub had a vision in which he learned that the dead would soon return. He taught his people a dance and songs to accompany it. He promised that dancing would not only accelerate the arrival of the ancestors, but also “shake off the sicknesses” and “bring water in its many forms and cleanse and bless us.” The Ghost Dance, according to Eben’s telling, healed and resurrected humans, as well as replenished the landscape’s waterways, which had been devastated by settler irrigation projects and mining practices.[3]
And Eben wasn’t finished. That’s because the Ghost Dance wasn’t finished. In 1980, he said, the movement had been reprised, as the “prophecy” had promised. Stanley Smart, a member of the nearby Fort McDermitt Paiute Tribe, brought it to Pyramid Lake. Smart told Eben and others that Wodziwub’s movement, the first Ghost Dance, was “only a piece of the total prophecy.” Now was the time to gather, dance, and “make the sound the Creator is waiting for us to make.”[4]
Rethinking the Ghost Dance
This characterization of the Ghost Dance, as reprised in the 1980s and invoked in nuclear regulatory commission meetings, does not appear in standard accounts of what is usually described as a nineteenth-century Native revitalization or prophetic movement. And if you’ll bear with me a moment as I consider the Ghost Dance and popular and scholarly interpretations of it, I’ll get to why this matters for understanding Native anti-nuclear and other forms of environmental activism.
In brief, for decades, anthropologists and historians described the Ghost Dance as one example of universal, religious revitalization consisting of ecstatic behaviors and apocalyptic visions brought on by deprivations caused by colonial invasion.[5] These scholars bemoaned how Americans responded to the Ghost Dance, including the 1890 massacre of more than 300 Lakota Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee. As such, the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee have become symbols, for many, of the last gasp of Native resistance to colonial invasion. This approach is exemplified in Niehardt’s best-selling Black Elk Speaks in the 1930s and has been replicated by historians for decades.[6]
Until it wasn’t. Changes in scholarly approaches, including what’s been called the “New Indian History” prompted new Ghost Dance interpretations. Scholars began attending more to Native perspectives. They started to consider Native traditions and prerogatives. Even so, problems remain. Take, for example, Louis Warren’s Bancroft prize- winning 2017 book, God’s Red Son, in which he argues the Ghost Dance was actually a “forward-looking, pragmatic religion” “engag[ed] with the modern, industrial Gilded Age.” Warren’s evidence for this argument? The movement leader’s advice to followers to work for cash wages. The Ghost Dance, according to Warren, asked its participants to adjust to conquest as a kind of pragmatic survival strategy.[7]
This seems odd to me, or at least at odds with references to the movement that have been made by Native activists like Eben, as well as tribal historians and Indigenous artists.
For example, consider American Indian Movement leader Russell Means’ evocation of the Ghost Dance as he reflected on the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Or Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 novel that ends with a hemispheric Ghost Dance reprised in an Arizona convention center. Or a special exhibit of Indigenous artists in Toronto in 2013 that connected the Ghost Dance with ongoing Native activism. I could name so many more examples, including activists at the No DAPL protests at Standing Rock just a few years ago.[8]
When I look at these examples, I don’t see a pragmatic adjustment to conquest. So, I’d like to think about Eben’s statement before the NNRC as one among many ways Native activists invoke spiritual traditions in the face of ongoing existential and environmental challenges.
One way to do that is to use historian Paul Rosier’s work on Native environmental activism that started mid-century and blossomed in the 1970s. Rosier quotes Kiowa writer M. Scott Momaday on “emerging Indian” voices in relation to environmental destruction. According to Rosier, these emerging voices highlighted environmental issues of concern within and beyond Native communities. They then did two particular, if not unique, things. They connected these issues to Native sovereignty and they invoked particular cultural traditions, including spiritual and religious practices, to recommend paths forward for all.[9] Rosier details folks who fought dams and reservoirs, and who resisted hunting and fishing regulations, as well as extractive industries. Rosier provides an extended analysis of Navajo and Hopi protests against the Black Mesa mine.
I think Rosier’s analysis helps for understanding Eben’s resistance to the transport of nuclear waste and provides an opportunity for a more robust understanding of how “emerging Indian” voices invoke spiritual and religious traditions to do so. I want to briefly explore it, relying on public and archival records, as well as my 2022 interview with Paiute elder, Ms. Billie Jean Guerrero, who worked in activist circles alongside both Eben and Smart in the 1970s and 80s. She currently directs the tribal museum at Pyramid Lake.
According to census data, Stanley Smart was born in Paiute country around 1931. He was married by 1950 and worked on a ranch. He appeared briefly in a 1950 short film about Paiute farm laborers. According to some sources, he and his wife had nine children.[10]
Later, Mr. Smart appeared in a rush of newspaper articles. He had gotten in some legal trouble. In 1968, he was arrested for breaking hunting laws. According to some sources, Smart said in his court appearances that he had been laid off from his job at a mercury mine. He was hunting to feed his family. And he rejected the state of Nevada’s authority to limit Paiute hunting for food in their own homelands.[11] Of course, Smart’s actions and words reflect events in broader Native activism, which included fish-ins in the Pacific Northwest and other hunting protests in Wisconsin and Oklahoma.[12]
Given the year – 1968 – it shouldn’t surprise us that his story was picked up in Native newspapers with activist leanings, including Akwesasne Notes in October 1969.[13] But to Rosier’s point about the way Native environmental activism overlapped with the broader environmental movement, his story appeared in a number of alternative newspapers, including the Berkeley Barb, Ann Arbor Sun, East Village Other, and San Francisco Express Times, among others.[14]
Simultaneously, some of the most prominent protests, including the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island by Indians of All Tribes (IAT), included statements about environmental protection and its connection to Native sovereignty. Indeed, shortly after Alcatraz, IAT caravanned to Pyramid Lake to assist Paiutes protecting their water rights.[15]
We know that Smart’s activism continued after 1968 even though the paper trail drops off for a bit. In an interview, Ms. Guerrero discussed working in activist circles with Smart and Eben throughout the 1970s. She talked about their participation in segments of AIM’s 1978 Longest Walk.[16]
This activism coincided with Paiute cultivation of memories and stories about the Ghost Dance. 1973 brought the celebration of Wovoka Days at a local high school.[17] That same year, Paiutes in Yerington began efforts to raise a Wovoka statute.[18] In 1976, Walker River’s tribal historian published an article on Wovoka in Nevada’s pan-Indian newspaper.[19]
In this period of pan-Indian activism (which included concerns about the environment) and a renewed Paiute engagement with Ghost Dance history, Stanley Smart arrived and claimed that the prophecy was still unfolding. He said the time to dance had returned. He told listeners the dance could bless landscapes and heal people.[20] Smart and Eben carried with them all of these experiences by the time Congress designated the nuclear test at Yucca Mountain in the early 1980s. They were ready when officials proposed shipping nuclear waste across Paiute lands.[21]
This backdrop helps us make sense of Eben’s 1997 statements. In his testimony, we see Rosier (and Momaday’s) “emerging Indian” voice. Eben identified an environmental issue of concern relevant to Native people, but with implications for non-Natives as well. He connected that issue to sovereignty, insisting that the federal government consult with tribes as required by law, as well as elders who held the land’s stories. Then he turned to particular Paiute traditions, including the Ghost Dance. He explained how the movement’s early leaders taught them something about the land and the ancestors held within it. He also insisted that the prophecy introduced in the original Ghost Dance was still in the process of realization, that it spoke to the environmental controversies of the present.
My research is primary concerned with interpretations of the Ghost Dance, but Eben’s experience of a renewed Ghost Dance movement also has something to tell us about Native anti-nuclear activism specifically and Native environmental activism more broadly. Consider the end of Eben’s testimony. “Since time immemorial, we Indian People have had a respect for the land that we walk upon. At no time has that caretaking responsibility changed. Indian People are still the rightful caretaker [sic] of this land … . We remind you of this responsibility and stand by the prayer and sincerity to our Creator in allowing us to continue that responsibility.”[22]
As one scholar has observed, invoking spiritual traditions in cases related to repatriation of ancestral or human remains has a “tremendous moral gravity,” a kind of “moral certainty” with which opponents must grapple.[23] As with repatriation disputes, I see these invocations as a vital part of Native anti-nuclear activism.
[1] “Statement by the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe Before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” May 15, 1997.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] For a review of this revitalization literature, see Jennifer Graber, “Beyond Prophecy: Native Visionaries in American Religious Studies,” American Religion 2, no. 1 (2020): 65-76.
[6] James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee, reprint edition (New York: Dover Publications, 1973);
John G. Niehardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, revised edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, thirtieth anniversary edition (New York: Henry Holt, 2001).
[7] Louis S. Warren, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 7-8.
[8] On Means, see John William Sayer, Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, 7. For other examples, see Leslie Marmon-Silko, Almanac of the Dead (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991; “Ghost Dance: Activism. Resistance. Art.” The Image Center, Toronto, Canada, 2013. On No-DAPL, see Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso, 2019), 16-17.
[9] Paul C. Rosier, “‘Modern America Desperately Needs to Listen’: The Emerging Indian in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” The Journal of American History 100, no. 3 (2013): 711–35.
[10] Year: 1940; Census Place: McDermitt, Humboldt, Nevada; Roll: m-t0627-02278; Page: 3A; Enumeration District: 7-4, Ancestry.com. 1940 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012. National Archives at Washington, DC; Washington, D.C.; Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950; Year: 1950; Census Place: McDermitt, Humboldt, Nevada; Roll: 3483; Page: 10; Enumeration District: 7-3, Ancestry.com. 1950 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2022; Haying Season, directed by Dan Miller (c. 1950) video recording, Paradise Valley Folklife Project Collection (AFC 1991/021), Library of Congress, Washington DC.
[11] G. P. Ceicsery, “Paiute Indians’ Fight for Ancient Ways,” Berkeley Barb 8:19 (May 9-15, 1969): 4.
[12] Rosier, “‘Modern America Desperately Needs to Listen.’ 717.
[13] G. P. Ceicsery, “Paiute Indians’ Fight for Ancient Ways,” Akwesasne Notes 1:9 (October 1969): 12. Reprinted from Berkeley Barb.
[14] G. P. Ceicsery, “Paiute Indians’ Fight for Ancient Ways,” Berkeley Barb, 8:19 (May 9-15, 1969): 4; “Up Against the Wall & Off the Reservation, Motherfucker,” Ann Arbor Sun (November 20, 1968); “Earth Read Out,” East Village Other 4:27 (June 4, 1969): 6; “Rolling Thunder Speaks Out on Native American Activism,” San Francisco Express Times (November 13, 1968).
[15] Rosier, “‘Modern America Desperately Needs to Listen,’” 722.
[16] Billie Jean Guerrero (Director, Pyramid Lake Tribe Museum and Visitors Center) in discussion with the author, September 2022.
[17] “Wovoka Days” Native Nevadan (May 1973).
[18] “Wovoka To Be Memorialized,” Wassaja (October 1975); “Paiutes to Honor Wovoka,” Wassaja (December 1975).
[19] Edward C. Johnson, “Nevada Indian History and the Ghost Dance Prophets,” Native Nevadan (August 6, 1976): 9.
[20] If we go back to Smart’s 1968 arrest, we can see that he was already talking like the original Ghost Dance leaders. See G. P. Ceicsery, “Paiute Indians’ Fight for Ancient Ways,” Akwesasne Notes 1:9 (October 1969): 12. Reprinted from Berkeley Barb.
[21] Richard W. Stoffle, John E. Olmstead, and Michael J. Evans, Yucca Mountain Project: Literature Review and Ethnohistory of Native American Occupancy and Use of the Yucca Mountain Region: Interim Report, January 1990 (Las Vegas, NV: Science Applications International Corp, 1990); John Karl Gross, “Nuclear Native America: Nuclear Waste and Liability on the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation,” Boston University Journal of Science & Technology Law 7, no. 1 (2001): 9.
[22] “Statement by the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe Before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” May 15, 1997.
[23] Gregory B. Johnson, “Facing Down the Representation of an Impossibility: Indigenous Responses to a ‘Universal’ Problem in the Repatriation Context,” Culture and Religion 6, no. 1 (March 2005): 64, 69.