Narrating Nuclear Colonialism: Indigenous Women’s Testimony Against the Nuclear Fuel Chain
by Mary Martin
I. Introduction
As the international system continues to rely on and expand nuclear technologies, whether for civilian or security purposes, it is essential to ask who bears the costs of this expansion and whose voices are left out in policymaking. This paper will examine how people facing intersectional disadvantages such as Indigenous status, gender, geographic marginalization, poverty, and political exclusion experience the nuclear fuel chain and how these experiences shape the forms of their resistance. In the following pages, I focus on Indigenous women because they frequently face the sharpest edge of nuclear harm while also playing a leading role in local anti-nuclear movements that challenge traditional security narratives that pose harmful radioactive, extractive, and discriminatory risks to certain populations.
I argue that the nuclear fuel cycle systematically exploits indigenous women’s bodies, land, and political status. This exploitation is not incidental but constitutive, as nuclear production denies indigenous sovereignty and undermines women’s self-determination within and beyond their communities. Rather than seeking inclusion in existing political structures, which are inherently designed to co-opt them, Indigenous women respond to this marginalization by creating alternative methods of resistance through cultural and creative practices that simultaneously assert collective and individual sovereignty. These practices do more than represent suffering; they also assert autonomous power, preserve memory against silencing and denial, and challenge what counts as “legitimate” political action in canonical IR.
The paper proceeds in three parts. First, I outline a theoretical framework based on nuclear colonialism as gendered, intersectional violence by defining key terms such as “radioactive racism,” coined by Indigenous activist Winona LaDuke and activist Ward Churchill. Additionally, I will trace the nuclear fuel chain, which includes uranium mining, mineral enrichment and production, technology testing, and waste accumulation and disposal, and uncover how it distributes harm along lines of race, gender, and geographical location. Next, I will explore one case study with two testimonials. For the case study, I will examine Pacific Islander women’s anti-nuclear testimony as a form of resistance that makes nuclear harm visible, contests the portrayal of the Pacific region as an empty, free-for-all testing ground, and mobilizes alternative claims for justice See Appendix A. To these testimonials, I will examine the testimony using the frame of colonialism as gendered intersectional violence. Then I will study how these women have sought to contest "radioactive racism" and demonstrate the power of their efforts. Finally, I will use the case study to show how Indigenous resistance operates unconventionally as political praxis. Additionally, I will conclude by discussing what the case study implies for anti-nuclear policies moving forward, as a call for intersectional inclusion in broader political forums.
II. Theoretical framework: nuclear colonialism as gendered intersectional violence
Nuclear colonialism
The key theoretical framework of this paper is Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke’s “nuclear colonialism.” [1] In Danielle Endress’s The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision, she defines “nuclear colonialism” as a system of domination in which nuclear-equipped states and industries sustain the nuclear fuel chain by repeatedly targeting Indigenous lands and bodies as sites for uranium extraction, technology production, weapons testing, and radioactive waste storage and disposal.[2] To ground this framework, I want to first clarify what I mean by the nuclear fuel chain. As defined by the World Nuclear Association, “the nuclear fuel cycle is the series of industrial processes which involve the production of electricity from uranium in nuclear power reactors.”[3] Furthermore, the cycle “starts with the mining of uranium and ends with the disposal of nuclear waste.”[4] What this “cradle-to-grave” framing makes visible is that harm is not confined to moments of detonation or accident; rather, it is built into the routine practices of extraction, contamination, and disposal that produce radioactive legacies that last across generations.[5]
Nuclear colonialism is both material and political.[6] It is material because it entails concrete, embodied harms including the seizure and contamination of land and water, displacement from homelands, long-term illness linked to exposure, reproductive harms, and intergenerational risk that persists due to radioactive waste and fallout that remains dangerous over horizons of time.[7] It is political because these harms are enabled through methods of governance. In the Indigenous context, nuclear projects repeatedly depend on the denial or deflection of Indigenous sovereignty, the recasting of Indigenous nations as mere “stakeholders,” rather than sovereigns, and the technocratic procedures that narrow what counts as legitimate evidence, participation, or security concerns.[8] In this sense, nuclear colonialism is reproduced not only through physical exposure but through institutional and rhetorical practices that render Indigenous claims easy to overlook and override.
Within this framework, “radioactive racism” names the racialized logic that renders certain places and peoples disposable. This framing justifies the concentration of nuclear risk on lands that are deemed “remote,” “empty,” or “worthless,” while the strategic and economic benefits of nuclear security and infrastructure accrue elsewhere See Appendix A.[9] In her work Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Feminist, Queer, and Indigenous Knowledge for Ending Nuclear Weapons, Ray Acheson’s feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial approach sharpens this point by arguing that nuclear weapons are not simply tools of deterrence, but the apex of a broader world order structure by patriarchal, militaristic, hierarchical, colonialist, and capitalist externalizations of harm.[10] Therefore, abolition cannot be reduced to a technical arms-control issue, as it involves an interactive combination of challenging norms, institutions, and common-sense assumptions that argue for the rationality and necessity of nuclear weapons.[11] Overall, this framework rejects an episodic understanding of nuclear harm and instead reveals that nuclear violence is structurally embedded and ongoing. Written into the entire fuel chain and sustained through unequal power relations are norms that determine whose lands are sacrificed and whose voices are upheld as worth hearing.
Another idea worth noting that Danielle Endres develops in The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision is the related logic of “sacrifice zones.”[12] Endres emphasizes that each link in the nuclear fuel chain generates radioactive exposure and political conflict over land. In the United States, Endres shows how federal nuclear policy has repeatedly positioned territory in Nevada and the Yucca Mountain repository, land that was originally claimed by the Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute, as regions where nuclear risk can be concentrated for the benefit of the “broader nation.”[13] But, I ask, which broader nation? Nuclear governance repeatedly constructs these areas as acceptable sacrifice zones because technocratic and security-centered discourses allow decision-makers to treat contamination as an abstract “management” problem rather than as lived, embodied harm experienced by communities who rely on local land and agriculture.[14] Endres goes further to argue that sacrifice-zone designation depends on rhetorical practices that frame targeted lands as empty, marginal, and of low value. For example, federal officials described the Yucca Mountain region as a “wasteland,” asserting that “no one lives there,” and that it lacks “commercially valuable” resources.[15] This rhetoric reduces land to terms of what it can yield economically, while erasing Indigenous relationships to a land grounded in sacred, collective meaning. The result of “sacrifice zones” is that what the state deems to benefit the “national interest” or “security” systematically creates insecurity for those positioned outside the core of power and on the periphery.[16]
Intersectionality
Another key idea to understanding the implications of nuclearization on Indigenous women from a nuclear colonial lens is the theory of intersectionality. In this context, an intersectional framework shows that nuclear violence compounds across social locations rather than operating through a singular axis of harm, thus making Indigenous women especially vulnerable to layered exposure and exclusion. Intersectionality encourages examining a “broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality, and religion, in addition to sexuality,” and understanding the multiple dimensions of identity and how they affect people's lives.[17] As Indigenous peoples, communities experience systematic denial of sovereignty. As women, nuclear harm is intensified through gendered health outcomes, reproductive harms, and social stigmas. The gendered social context frequently causes women to be blamed for infertility, genetic harm, or reproductive “failure” after radiation exposure, perpetuating gendered discrimination and condemnation.[18] Intersectionality is important in avoiding a “one-size-fits-all” approach to resisting the damage caused at each stage of the nuclear fuel cycle. Nichols and Olsen synthesize in a UNIDR report on Gender and Ionizing Radiation that the same amount of radiation exposure can produce greater long-term cancerous and non-cancerous harms in women than in men.[19] Additionally, when factoring in the identity of age, girls ages 0 to 5 appear the most at-risk post-birth group for lifetime harms from ionizing radiation, which underscores how lifecycle stage shapes vulnerability in ways policy often ignores.[20] Geographically marginalized, Indigenous communities are often viewed as peripheral and elsewhere, which enables the state to keep contamination out of urban view and political urgency, while still extracting value from the land.[21] Finally, as politically excluded actors, Indigenous women’s testimony is often discounted through credibility frames that label them as emotional, irrational, or backwards, especially when they center bodies, grief, and sacred relations to the land.[22]
Inclusive and exclusive rhetoric
Nuclear colonialism is sustained through public policy discourse that selectively excludes Indigenous sovereignty claims, even when those claims are central to the conflict. In the Yucca Mountain case, Endres shows how naming practices fold Indigenous nations into “the public” rather than treating them as sovereign counterparts that are entitled to government consultation.[23] This matters because once Indigenous nations are positioned as members of “the public,” their treaty rights and sacred-land claims can be rhetorically framed as ordinary objects rather than jurisdictional claims that restrain and challenge the state’s authority to proceed.[24] Endres also argues that the burden of proof is placed on Indigenous communities, meaning the state need not justify why Indigenous land should bear the risk of waste storage as a moral or political question.[25] Instead, opponents are forced to prove that the project is unacceptable within a technical framework that privileges scientific expertise over state-defined safety criteria. In practice, this makes resistance structurally harder because communities must disprove highly technical assurances while their legal and spiritual arguments are treated as secondary rather than foundational for decision-making.[26] Finally, Endres shows how strategic silence functions as rhetorical exclusion when official documents omit Indigenous claims, which erases the most destabilizing critiques while maintaining the appearance of democratic consideration.[27]
Building on the logic of inclusion and exclusion, Acheson warns that simply “adding women” to nuclear policy spaces can fail to transform nuclear politics if inclusion is defined as assimilation into existing norms rather than a change to the institutions and discourses that produce nuclear authority.[28] In other words, women were welcomed insofar as they adopted the field's masculine language and strategic realism, so that representation increased without altering what was considered credible knowledge or acceptable policy goals (an ode to Marco and Vivienne’s papers). Acheson argues that institutions can then use women’s presence as evidence of progress or legitimacy, even as they continue to reproduce the same hierarchies. She captures this dynamic by noting that equality itself can be militarized.[29] This critique aligns with Endres’s argument that institutions often treat participation as a managerial process or a way to collect input and to continue dissent, rather than as a system of shared authority that would allow marginalized communities to set agendas or exercise meaningful resistance.[30] The implication for this paper is that Indigenous women often have strong structural reasons to pursue resistance that is less vulnerable to institutional absorption by using forms of political action that do not depend on permission from pre-existing nuclear powers or recognition within elitist hierarchies. I develop what those alternative forms look like in the following case studies.
Alternative forms of resistance
Because conventional policy arenas are structured to neutralize or delegitimize Indigenous women’s claims, resistance often shifts toward strategies that reconfigure the terms on which nuclear politics can be debated at all. Acheson describes this as a project of deconstructing what is treated as “rational,” “realistic,” and “serious” in nuclear discourse, because those standards are not neutral descriptions of reality but socially erected boundaries that police what can be said and who can be heard.[31] Drawing on Judith Butler’s queer feminist scholarship, Acheson emphasizes that “naturalized knowledge of gender operates as a preemptive and violent circumscription of reality,” meaning that the dominant common sense of nuclear deterrence narrows the political imagination before the debate even begins.[32] In this view, resistance must challenge nuclear policy outcomes and the rules of knowledge that determine which kinds of evidence count as “credible.”[33] In practice, human health and justice-based arguments are often dismissed as irrational rather than recognized as politically viable.
Acheson organizes this kind of resistance through three linked strategies. These strategies include changing the conversation, changing the location, and changing participation.[34] First, in changing the conversation, Acheson, drawing on Butler “suggests we need not just to critique the effects of institutions, practices and discourses that the powerful create–we need to ask what possibilities emerge when we challenge the assertions of what is normative, and challenge what is taken in mainstream understandings to be common ground or absolute reality.”[35] Furthermore, she proposes that “no political revolution is possible without a radical shift in one’s notion of the possible and the real.”[36] This reframes disarmament as a struggle over what kinds of violence are normalized and whose lives are treated as disposable. It exposes deterrence as a culturally produced framework that protects some populations by rendering others expendable.
Second, changing the location means refusing the assumption that elite-controlled forums are the only legitimate sites of nuclear politics. Acheson states that “Indigenous activists and scholars recognise that systems set up by the heteropatriarchal settler colonial state are not systems in which those seeking protection from the violence inherent to those systems will receive it.”[37] Furthermore, “within these parameters and spaces, the settler colonial state will always dominate interactions with Indigenous populations.”[38] Acheson argues that nuclear-armed states often reproduce this dynamic in traditional nuclear governance spaces, where procedures and credibility norms are structured to protect the authority of nuclear possessors rather than to redistribute power or uplift affected communities.[39] By contrast, she highlights the value of moving discussions to alternative venues, such as the UN General Assembly pathway that enables the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and the smaller diplomatic and civil society spaces where “radical” ideas could be discussed before entering formal institutions.[40] This strategy created room for non-normative arguments that otherwise would have been dismissed immediately. In Acheson’s words, such strategies “allow marginal positions on nuclear weapons to inform progressive change by queering the process. These alternative spaces [permit] a political agenda that seeks to change values, definitions, and laws which make these institutions and relationships oppressive.”[41]
Third, changing participation means shifting authority away from privileged experts. These experts’ roles are often occupied by men who “directly benefit from the production of theories and perspectives that justify the possession and continued development and modernisation of nuclear arsenals.”[42] These experts tend to overlook the perspectives of those, like Indigenous women, who suffer firsthand from the harms of this cycle. Acheson’s discussion of participation also clarifies why representation alone is not sufficient: simply meaning a quota for women in nuclear institutions does not guarantee that the underlying assumptions of hierarchy are being challenged.[43] At the same time, Acheson’s examples show that when marginalized perspectives are treated as knowledge rather than as “identity,” they can reveal the racialized assumptions of nuclear policy.[44] As one woman of color argues, “whether it’s criminal justice policy or national security policy, when we talk about who is a valuable life, black and brown people are the last in the line of that list.”[45] This explicitly links nuclear decision-making to racial hierarchies in terms of whose lives are valued, pointing to a broader necropolitical orientation in which Indigenous lives become easier to sacrifice for the sake of state security. What matters, then, is not who is present in the room, but how the room’s rules of credibility and legitimacy are being reshaped.
In this framework, Pacific Islander nuclear-testimony and Anishinaabe women’s water walking can be read as alternative sites of resistance that challenge credibility rules of technocratic policymaking rather than simply seeking recognition within them. These modes enact sovereignty, unite community, and transmit memory across generations precisely because they operate in ethical, cultural, and sacred spaces that cannot be fully absorbed into state-managed cost-benefit reasoning.
III. Case Study 1: Pacific Islander women’s anti-nuclear testimony (1970s-1990s)
On Kili Island
The tides were underestimated
patients sleeping in a clinic with
a nuclear history threaded
into their bloodlines woke
to a wild water world
a rushing rapid of salt
- Jetn̄il-Kijiner, 2017
Nuclear testing in Oceania
The Pacific became a central site of nuclear experimentation because colonial powers treated the region as geopolitically useful and socially disposable, converting Oceana into what activists have described as a “nuclear playground.”[46] US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, including the Bikini Atoll program, illustrates Acheson’s concept of “radioactive racism” in practice because US officials repeatedly treated the Marshallese atolls as controllable strategic lands that could be cleared through displacement, framed as scientifically manageable after contamination, and used to externalize nuclear risk away from US political centers.[47] This allowed the US to preserve the prestige of its security apparatus at the risk of Indigenous communities. British nuclear testing in Kiribati similarly extended this colonial geography of testing by locating high-risk experimentation in Pacific territories rather than European metropolitan spaces, reinforcing the pattern in which security projects were materially secured through the sacrifice of colonized environments and bodies.[48] French nuclear testing in Mā’ohi Nui (French Polynesia), specifically at Moruroa and Fangataufa, formed part of a late Cold War testing regime that persisted into the 1990s and helped catalyze renewed regional organizing and transnational feminist solidarity.[49] The Treaty of Rarotonga (1985) institutionalized the “nuclear-free Pacific” ideal, yet its formal diplomacy was symbolically gendered, as it was signed exclusively by male heads of state, despite women’s leadership in grassroots anti-nuclear organizations.[50] As a result, the Pacific anti-nuclear politics emerged in a regional landscape where nuclear violence was not a hypothetical future scenario but an everyday and intergenerational condition shaped by colonial governance, displacement, and the management of who is allowed to speak authoritatively about harm. In the following paragraphs, I will discuss two different examples of Pacific Islander Indigenous women utilizing testimonial literature as forms of resistance. I will provide one example from the Marshall Islands on nuclear testing and one from Australia on uranium mining.
Lijon Eknilang’s “learning from Rongelap’s pain”
In the publication, Pacific Women Speak Out: For Independence and Denuclearization, compiled by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Aotearoa), the Disarmament and Security Center (Aotearoa), and Pacific Connections (Australia), Indigenous women from the Pacific shared their stories to expose their radioactive realities. Lijon Eknilang’s testimonial piece functions as anti-nuclear resistance by converting lived experience into political evidence that directly challenges the nuclear state’s dominant frames, which assert that tests are necessary for security and deterrence. Additionally, Eknilang challenges the state’s assumptions that test environments are safe enough and carry acceptable levels of risk, assumptions that reinforced the idea that certain populations can be sacrificed as a tolerable cost of nuclear advancement. Stated in her personal introduction, “Eknilang was born on Rongelap and played in the radioactive fallout that followed the ‘Bravo’ detonation in 1954.”[51] Eknilang, eight years old at the time of the detonation, described “a huge, brilliant light that consumed the sky… a big loud noise, just like a big thunder… then it began to snow.”[52] The fallout lingered for hours, and the kids played in it like snow, unaware of the danger posed by the radioactive material. However, after a few hours, everyone felt sick—the radiation was in the air, on their skin, in their water, and in their food. Eknilang muses that “the serious internal and external exposure [they] received caused long-term health problems that affected [her] parents’ generation, [her] generation, and the generation of [her] children.”[53] This account tracks harm as cumulative and intergenerational rather than isolated, showing how nuclear violence persists long after the blast itself through bodies, food systems, and contaminated ecologies.
The people of Rongelap were evacuated by the US to the American base on Kwajalein Atoll, but were later moved to Majuro and remained there until 1957, displaced from their homes, belongings, and lives as they knew them. When they returned to Rongelap in the summer of 1957, Eknilang remembers significant changes in ecological life, and food that “gave [them] blisters on their lips… and mouths and [they] suffered terrible stomach problems and nausea.”[54] She notes that prior to the “Bravo” test, their local food never made her people sick, as it does now. Both the people who lived on Rongelap during the “Bravo” test and those who moved there the summer of 1957 began to experience the same thyroid, liver, stomach and reproductive problems; thus, “foreign doctors and other officials called these people the “control group”, and [they] were told the sickness of that group proved [their] illnesses were common to all Marshallese.”[55] Eknilang states that they “did not believe that, and [they] learned only recently that the “control group” had come from areas that had also been contaminated by radioactivity from the weapons tests.”[56] This “control group” reveals how scientific methods can be mobilized rhetorically to dilute accountability, a strategy structured in this case to manage what counted as evidence, thereby stabilizing the state’s preferred conclusion that the community’s suffering was not uniquely caused by US testing. Additionally, Eknilang explains that the women of Rongelap must “suffer in silence” when it comes to the reproductive effects of radiation because of their culture and religion that “teaches… reproductive abnormalities are a sign that women have been unfaithful to their husbands.”[57] Her testimony, therefore, shows a double bind: women are socially disciplined into silence through stigma, while they are also politically silenced by institutional narratives that dismiss radiation symptoms.
As more members of the community began to suffer from leukemia and other serious conditions, they were sent to US hospitals on the mainland and in Guam for treatment. Eknilang notes that during these hospital visits, they “had surgery and treatments, which we knew little about because [we] did not speak English, and, in most cases, there were no translators.”[58] This is another form of power imbalance operating through language and expertise. When medical authority is mediated through English communication, Marshallese patients are positioned as objects of intervention rather than informed agents, rendering consent procedural rather than meaningful. The same structure that justifies nuclear “expert” authority also controls vocabulary through which affected communities can name harm, ask questions, and contest decisions. Despite false reassurances from the US Department of Energy that “everything was okay,” the people of Rongelap self-evacuated after being denied assistance from the US and Marshallese governments, and now live on Mejato Island.[59] This exile and displacement present new vulnerabilities for the people, such as food scarcity, delayed supply delivery, and precarious living conditions. In the last paragraph, Eknilang leaves the reader with a powerful statement:
“It wasn’t easy to leave Rongelap. We had to give up everything. Many people don’t think that our tiny island of Rongelap is very important to us. But it is our home. We are meant to be there. Our land is everything, our medicine, our food, our houses, our everyday supply. Our land is our memory of those people we’ve lost, their spirit is in the land.”[60]
By framing land as medicine, sustenance, memory, and spirit, Eknilang makes clear that radioactive contamination is not only a public-health crisis but also a project of cultural and spiritual dispossession that threatens the collective identity of a people. Eknilang ends her testimony by hoping the Marshallese experience will spread awareness of the horrors that result from nuclear testing and radioactive fallout, and function as a method of universal indictment of nuclear weapons and the demand for nonproliferation.
Jacqui Katona’s “‘no uranium mining on Mirrar land’”
Jacqui Katona, who is part of the Gundgehmi Aboriginal Association, which represents the Mirrar Gundgehmi people in Kakadu, in Australia’s Northern Territory, also provided testimony in Pacific Women Speak Out. Katona writes about Kakadu not as scenery or a resource frontier but as a living homeland that sustains collective survival across generations. She explains that it is “a place where [we instead of they here and throughout?] educate [their] children. It’s a place where [they] live, where [they’re] born, where [they] die. It’s a place which [their] people have nurtured and a place that has nurtured the survival of [their] people.”[61] From the outset, this framing makes it clear that the nuclear fuel chain threatens more than the environment in the narrow sense; it threatens a sacred relationship to a country that underpins culture and identity. Katona then situates uranium mining within the political history of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in the Northern Territory, arguing that the Act became contested precisely “when large amounts of uranium were discovered in Kakadu.”[62] In her account, state recognition of Aboriginal rights proves conditional: once uranium is at stake, the mining lobby pressures the government to override Aboriginal veto power in the name of development and national gain. This reveals how economic priorities restructure the meaning of Indigenous rights.
Katona also refuses the state’s attempt to treat uranium as a local economic issue detached from global violence. She insists that Mirrar opposition is grounded in Aboriginal law and an ethical refusal to feed the nuclear fuel chain. She emphasizes that her people didn’t “want uranium from [their] country to be used to hurt other people.”[63] Yet, rather than treating this as decisive, the Fox Inquiry, which sought to open four uranium mines within an 80 kilometer radius of each other, while dismissing the denunciation of the Aboriginal people, became a mechanism for managing and neutralizing that refusal.[64] Katona highlights the Inquiry’s logic: it acknowledged that Aboriginal people “had a clear and unquestionable right” to claim the land and that they were “absolutely opposed” to mining, but still concluded “that the opposition of Aboriginal people should not prevail; that, instead, Kakadu National Park should be created.”[65] Here she displays the trade-off: conservation safeguards in exchange for the extinguishment of veto rights, explicitly showing the operation of a nuclear colonialist system.
Katona argues that the rhetoric of “national interest” repeatedly works to extinguish Aboriginal concerns about uranium mining’s long-term impacts while presenting mining as an “economic benefit” for the country.[66] She emphasizes, however, that this “benefit” is not experienced by the people who bear the risks. As mining agreements progressed, she describes the Jabiluka agreement, which vetoed the development of a uranium mine on Northern Australian Aboriginal land, as having been executed under duress, in which the Mirrar “had no option but to agree” and were explicitly told that their right to say no could be removed in the national interest.[67] She also exposes the gap between media narratives and lived conditions, explaining that Aboriginal people were framed as “beneficiaries” even as their communities lived with extreme socio-economic disadvantage. The clearest indictment is her comparison between monetary compensation and physical harm. The community received $2,000 a year, while absorbing toxic costs, and watching their “people die in the shadow of industrial gain.”[68] Katona further underscores that harm is not only economic, but also physical. The people live with ongoing uncertainty about whether water and food are safe, with no reliable, accountable system to communicate long-term effects to those who depend on the land for daily life.
At the same time, Katona emphasizes Mirrar resilience and strategic creativity in resistance. She describes an iconic banner created by her community, marked by a black hand on a red-and-yellow radiation sign that reads “Stop Jabiluka, Stop uranium mining, Reclaim the future,” a direct public assertion and refusal of authority.[69] Hauling the banner to a highly visible place where tourists could not ignore it shifts the political terrain. If formal approvals lock traditional owners out, the Mirrar re-enter the struggle through visibility, narrative disruption, and direct public confrontation. This resistance also signals collective commitment, showing how communities without institutional power still generate political pressure by mobilizing place-based action and public attention against state–corporate decisions. Katona ends by demanding accountability beyond bureaucratic channels, arguing that decisions cannot be left to “politicians and petty bureaucrats” and that the government must be exposed and held responsible for destructive choices.[70] Her conclusion rejects the commodification that treats sacred land and culture as exchangeable for compensation, and it frames “no” as an act of sovereignty and an Indigenous-led decolonial project aimed at a future without industrial domination and coercive governance.
Why testimony?
Drawing on the theoretical framework developed earlier, Indigenous testimony in Pacific Women Speak Out aligns closely with Acheson’s argument that effective anti-nuclear resistance must change the conversation, change the location, and change participation in nuclear politics. First, testimony serves as a deliberate strategy to change the conversation by replacing what states frame as strategy, security, and acceptable risk with embodied evidence of what nuclear policy actually produces in lived experience.[71] In Eknilang’s account, descriptions of immediate bodily injury and intergenerational illness reframe nuclear harm as an ongoing condition that moves through families, food systems, and time, rather than a closed historical event or a tolerable externality. In Katona’s account, the state’s claims of “national interest” and “economic benefit” are exposed as rhetorical cover for coerced extraction, where uranium is treated as an ordinary or necessary source of mineral wealth while the significance and well-being of Indigenous law, territory, and future generations is rendered negotiable. Read together, the testimonies contest the nuclear state’s preferred language of strategy and safety by showing that what is being protected is often not human life or ecological continuity, but state prestige, corporate profit, and the political mobility of nuclear projects across Indigenous lands.
Second, testimony changes the location of nuclear politics by relocating authority away from elite-controlled institutions and into Indigenous narrative and ethical spaces where land, kinship, memory, and obligation are the central political units.[72] Eknilang’s testimony is anchored in Rongelap as homeland, which makes the “forum” the island and the community’s experience of evacuation, exile, and damaged subsistence rather than the technical sites and political forums where radiation is measured and managed. Katona’s testimony similarly treats Kakadu as home and as law, locating nuclear politics in everyday responsibilities to educate children, uphold cultural survival, and protect land, rather than in state-managed procedures designed to contain opposition. In Acheson’s terms, these testimonies reject the assumption that legitimacy can be produced only within forums structured by nuclear states.[73] Instead, they model how resistance gains force by shifting debate into spaces where colonial power cannot as easily discipline meaning through procedural rules.
Finally, testimony changes participation by challenging who counts as a credible knowledge bearer in nuclear governance. Rather than positioning affected communities as passive “stakeholders” offering personal stories while experts deliver the “real” evidence, testimony asserts survivors and traditional owners as knowledgeable individuals whose accounts expose both material harm and the politics of how harm is interpreted.[74] Eknilang challenges expert authority by showing how medical-scientific practices can be used to manage perception. For example, through the deployment of a “control group” and the dismissal of community knowledge about contaminated food and water, the US obscured responsibility and normalized continued local exposure. Katona exposes participation as coercively managed through techniques such as media silencing, threats to land rights, and agreements reached under duress, revealing “consultation” as a mechanism of control rather than shared authority. This is precisely why Acheson’s warning about inclusion matters: it is not enough to add marginalized people into existing structures if those structures set the standards of credibility in ways that pre-empt Indigenous sovereignty claims and lived evidence.[75] In this sense, testimony functions as resistance because it insists that consent is political rather than merely procedural, that land is sacred and relational rather than disposable space, and that nuclear harm is simultaneously bodily and territorial dispossession.[76] Together, Eknilang and Katona enact Acheson’s three shifts at once by rewriting the topic (from abstract security to lived harm), relocating the arena (from elite procedure to Indigenous worlds of meaning), and reassigning authority (from privileged experts to affected communities).
IV. Synthesis and Conclusion
Throughout this paper, I have argued that the nuclear fuel chain is not simply a technological sequence of mining, production, testing, and radioactive waste management, but a political infrastructure that distributes risk along preexisting hierarchies of race, gender, geography, and sovereignty. When the nuclear fuel chain is examined through the lens of nuclear colonialism and intersectionality, it becomes clear that the chain is made possible by rendering certain Indigenous lands available for sacrifice and treating certain Indigenous lives as politically negotiable rather than fully protected. The concept of “radioactive racism” clarifies that this pattern is not coincidental; nuclear risk is routinely concentrated on people and places framed as disposable, while the benefits of technological capacity, state security, and economic gain accumulate elsewhere.[77] The case study of Indigenous testimonial literature shows why Indigenous women often turn to culturally grounded practices of narration and witness rather than relying solely on traditional policy channels that are often exclusive and hierarchical.
Following Acheson, testimony functions as resistance because it shifts the conversation from abstract claims about strategy, safety, and acceptable risk to embodied accounts of contamination, displacement, and intergenerational harm, forcing nuclear politics to confront the human and ecological realities that political language tries to erase from the agenda. Additionally, testimony changes the location of nuclear politics by grounding authority in Indigenous worlds of meaning that encompass land, collective identity, memory, and responsibility for future generations, rather than accepting elite nuclear forums as the only legitimate sites where security can be defined. Furthermore, testimony changes participation by repositioning survivors and traditional land inhabitants as knowledge producers whose accounts carry analytical and empirical weight, rather than as passive subjects who merely absorb the consequences of decisions made elsewhere. Together, these dynamics demonstrate intersectionality in practice: nuclear harm is not experienced as a single ailment that can be healed with a single remedy, but as a layered structural violence where contamination interacts with displacement, poverty, public health, political exclusion, and gendered stigma.
Indigenous women’s testimony clarifies how nuclear colonialism operates simultaneously through bodies in the form of illness, reproduction, and grief, and through territory in the form of food systems, water safety, and cultural survival. This reveals why nuclear harm cannot be separated from sovereignty: the destruction of ecology and the narrowing of political agency are linked to forms of dispossession. The analysis also challenges what counts as “legitimate” knowledge in canonical IR and established nuclear policy. When nuclear governance treats technological expertise as the only credible form of truth, it narrows the field of evidence and makes Indigenous sovereignty and lived experience easier to dismiss. Indigenous testimony exposes that hierarchy of knowledge as political, because it functions as an exclusionary structure that protects the nuclear status quo by deciding whose suffering counts as evidence and whose reality is treated as background noise. At the same time, this paper underscores Acheson’s warning that inclusion alone is not transformation: “adding women” to nuclear institutions does not automatically change nuclear policy when institutions still reward conformity, preserve gatekeeping norms, and treat Indigenous critiques as unserious.[78]
Rather than asking only how to manage nuclear risks more efficiently, Indigenous feminist approaches ask who is made vulnerable by nuclear systems, whose territories are rendered disposable, what forms of life are being traded away for deterrence and profit, and what it would mean to define security as relational care for land, water, and future generations. This shift matters because it moves anti-nuclear politics from a narrow agenda of risk management toward a broader project of nuclear justice that confronts colonial and gendered power as constitutive features of the nuclear enterprise itself. The broader implication for anti-nuclear policy is that durable change requires both formal and grassroots strategies rather than treating them as competing tracks. Grassroots resistance, especially testimony, cultural practice, and community-led advocacy, expands what can be said, what can be proven, and what can be demanded; it keeps harms visible, preserves memory against denial, and mobilizes communities across borders. The most effective anti-nuclear movements, therefore, treat Indigenous testimony not as an add-on to traditional policymaking, but as a source of political knowledge that should guide what inclusive policy looks like and whom it must answer to. As nuclear technologies continue to expand, the central task is not only to prevent catastrophe, but to refuse a system that repeatedly asks the same communities to absorb the human and ecological costs of everyone else’s “protection.”
Appendices
Appendix A: Terra Nullius
I want to briefly note a concept my research advisor, Jennifer Taw, brought to my attention: terra nullius. The term terra (“land”) and nullius (“no one/nobody”) and refers to a European legal–political idea that land inhabited by Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples could nevertheless be treated as effectively “empty” for the purposes of colonial claim-making [79]. In practice, terra nullius was closely tied to the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which granted European Christian powers the asserted right to claim lands deemed “vacant” or “unoccupied” by their standards [80]. Under this logic, land could be classified as terra nullius if it had not been claimed by European Christians, although Indigenous communities lived on, governed, and sustained those territories. The doctrine further justified dispossession by arguing that Indigenous peoples might “occupy” land but did not “own” it according to European definitions of property and sovereignty [81].
This concept helps clarify the deeper historical logic underlying the framework of “radioactive racism” used in this paper. Just as terra nullius rendered Indigenous presence politically invisible to legitimate colonial seizure, nuclear powers have repeatedly framed Indigenous and Aboriginal lands in the Pacific as remote, empty, and strategically expendable, thereby treating them as acceptable sites for nuclear testing and other stages of the nuclear fuel chain. Reading nuclear colonialism alongside terra nullius makes visible how the “sacrifice zone” is not merely a political outcome, but a colonial inheritance and a way of authorizing extreme harm by first redefining Indigenous land as land that does not count.
Notes
[1] Endres, Danielle. 2009. “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6 (1): 39–60. doi:10.1080/14791420802632103.
[2] Ibid
[3] “Nuclear Fuel Cycle Overview.” World Nuclear Association, September 23, 2025. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/introduction/nuclear-fuel-cycle-overview.
[4] Ibid
[5] Endres, Danielle. 2009. “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision.”
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Acheson, Ray. “Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Feminist, Queer, and Indigenous Knowledge for Ending Nuclear Weapons.” Essay. In Feminist Solutions for Ending War, 105–20. London, UK: Pluto Press, 2021.
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] Endres, Danielle. 2009. “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision.”
[13] Ibid
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid
[16] Ibid
[17] Acheson, Ray. “Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Feminist, Queer, and Indigenous Knowledge for Ending Nuclear Weapons.”
[18] Ibid
[19] Nichols, Amanda M, and Mary Olson. “Gender and Ionizing Radiation: Towards a New Research Agenda Addressing Disproportionate Harm.” UNIDIR, November 20, 2024. https://unidir.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Gender_and_ionizing_radiation_web.pdf.
[20] Ibid
[21] Acheson, Ray. “Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Feminist, Queer, and Indigenous Knowledge for Ending Nuclear Weapons.”
[22] Ibid
[23] Endres, Danielle. 2009. “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision.”
[24] Ibid
[25] Ibid
[26] Ibid
[27] Ibid
[28] Acheson, Ray. “Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Feminist, Queer, and Indigenous Knowledge for Ending Nuclear Weapons.”
[29] Ibid
[30] Endres, Danielle. 2009. “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision.”
[31] Acheson, Ray. “Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Feminist, Queer, and Indigenous Knowledge for Ending Nuclear Weapons.”
[32] Ibid
[33] Ibid
[34] Ibid
[35] Ibid
[36] Ibid
[37] Ibid
[38] Ibid
[39] Ibid
[40] Ibid
[41] Ibid
[42] Ibid
[43] Ibid
[44] Ibid
[45] Ibid
[46] Hogue, Rebecca H, and Anaïs Maurer. “Pacific Women’s Anti-Nuclear Poetry: Centring Indigenous Knowledges.” International Affairs 98, no. 4 (July 4, 2022): 1267–88. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiac120.
[47] Ibid
[48] Ibid
[49] Ibid
[50] Ibid
[51] Dé Ishtar, Zohl, ed. Pacific women speak out for independence and denuclearisation. Christchurch, Aotearoa, New Zealand: Disarmament and Security Centre, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1998.
[52] Ibid
[53] Ibid
[54] Ibid
[55] Ibid
[56] Ibid
[57] Ibid
[58] Ibid
[59] Ibid
[60] Ibid
[61] Ibid
[62] Ibid
[63] Ibid
[64] Ibid
[65] Ibid
[66] Ibid
[67] Ibid
[68] Ibid
[69] Ibid
[70] Ibid
[71] Acheson, Ray. “Abolish Nuclear Weapons: Feminist, Queer, and Indigenous Knowledge for Ending Nuclear Weapons.”
[72] Ibid
[73] Ibid
[74] Ibid
[75] Ibid
[76] Ibid
[77] Ibid
[78] Ibid
[79] Shah, Shreya. “The Doctrine of Discovery and Terra Nullius.” The Indigenous Foundation, October 26, 2021. https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/the-doctrine-of-discovery-and-terra-nullius.
[80] Ibid
[81] Ibid