In 1989, Colorado-based Waste Tech Incorporated, a subsidiary of Amoco, approached Dilkon, an isolated Arizona Navajo community with a 72 percent unemployment rate. Waste Tech proposed taking over 100 acres of Navajo land to build an incinerator for burning hazardous waste and a landfill for burying its toxic ash. In exchange, the company promised 175 jobs, a new hospital and a $100,000 signing bonus.
In 1991, the O& G Corporation of Torrington, Connecticut approached the Rosebud Lakota in South Dakota with a proposal to build the largest U.S. landfill on their reservation. The 5,000 acre dump would hold solid waste, incinerator ash and sewage sludge ash.
These types of offers are becoming increasingly common. Since 1990, toxic waste disposal companies have approached more than 50 U.S. indigenous groups, offering millions of dollars in exchange for the right to dump U.S. trash on Native American grounds. The waste companies seek to avoid state, county, municipal and many federal waste-facility operating standards, which do not apply to Native American reservations because of their sovereign status. The corporations also prey on the economic vulnerability of indigenous communities, touting their disposal plans as unique opportunities for "economic development" and increased employment on impoverished Native American reservation - but not mentioning the serious health threats posed by the incineration and storage of hazardous and other wastes.
Instead of working to halt the waste industry's exploitation of Native American communities, the federal government, which has "trustee" responsibility to protect Native American lands, has promoted waste disposal on the reservations. In 1990, for example, the U.S. Department of Commerce awarded a $248,000 minority business grant to a promoter who arranged for a company to bring hazardous waste to an Oklahoma Kaw reservation.
Most disturbing is the federal government's efforts to push nuclear waste on to Native American reservations. The Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator, established by the Department of Energy (DOE) in 1987, has solicited every Native Nation in the United States to become an "interim" or permanent recipient of highly radioactive used fuel from nuclear power plants. One of the federal government's many proposed nuclear waste projects for indigenous lands is the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste repository, which is being planned for the Western Shoshone reservation in Nevada, located about 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The DOE has allotted $32.5 billion for carving Yucca Mountain into a receptacle for 70,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste.
Native Americans are not passively accepting the onslaught against their lands and people, however. Indigenous people throughout the United States have rejected offers from waste companies and ignored overtures from the Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator. The Paiutes in northern Arizona, the Kaws in Oklahoma, the Choctaws in Mississippi and Los Coyotes in California have invalidated initial agreements made by tribal officials to accept hazardous waste or garbage. Reservation-wide organizing and education among the Rosebud Lakota led to the rejection of the O& G South Dakota landfill proposal.
The Navajo community group Citizens Against Ruining our Environment (CARE) successfully fought back and forced the cancellation of the Waste Tech toxic waste proposal that had been approved by Dilkon officials in Arizona. CARE continues to work with Native American communities throughout the United States to defend reservations against waste companies and to establish recycling centers.
Non-native U.S. citizens can begin to support indigenous people's rights to self- determination and a clean environment by demanding that their tax dollars no longer be used to peddle nuclear and other toxic waste to Native Americans and by supporting Native American calls for grassroots economic and community development plans. More generally, government, industry and citizens must sharply limit the waste they produce in the first place, and recycle a far greater percentage of what they do create.
As the dangers of waste storage, disposal and incineration are further exposed, indigenous resistance to corporate and government waste facility schemes will continue to build. In the meantime, each incinerator, landfill or toxic storage facility that is built on a reservation poisons thousands of Native Americans and their lands.n