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Grafitti reading "no mines."

The Navajo Suffered From Nuclear Testing. 'Oppenheimer' Doesn't Tell Our Story

We must recognize the continued suffering and sacrifice of the Navajo that built the atomic era.
Justice Clarence Thomas.

Clarence Thomas Wants to Demolish Indian Law

The conservative justice is on course for an originalist fight with Neil Gorsuch.

How to Make a Deadly Pandemic in Indian Country

From the 1918 Spanish flu to Covid-19, broken treaties have been the foundation of health crises among Native people.
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One of the 19th Century’s Most Important Documents Was Recently Discovered

How a rare copy of the U.S.-Navajo Treaty, once thought lost, was found in a New England attic.
Picture of William B. Shockley (1910-1989)

Indigenous Circuits

While researching the history of racism in Silicon Valley, Lisa Nakamura is surprised to discover the Navajo Nation's role in the creation of the tech industry.
‘Fifty Shades of White’ by Jaune Quick-To-See Smith.

Remembering the Future

Climate change, colonization, and the Navajo Nation.
A few people are gathered at the Atoms For Peace bus, a mobile exhibit about nuclear power operated for a time by the Atomic Energy Commission. c. 1947.
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‘Atoms for Peace’ Was Never All That Peaceful—And the World Is Still Living With the Consequences

The U.S. sought to rebrand nuclear power as a source of peace, but this message helped mask a violent history.
Painting of Yosemite Valley

How Place Names Impact The Way We See Landscape

Western landscapes and their names are stratified with personal memories, ancestral teachings, mythic events and colonial disturbances.
A vista in Utah.

Walking Into New Worlds

Native traditions and novel discoveries tell the migration story of the ancestors of the Navajo and Apache.

Americans Need to Know the Hard Truth About Union Monuments in the West

During the Civil War, Union soldiers in the West weren’t fighting to end slavery, but to annihilate and remove Native Americans.

Annotating the First Page of the Navajo-English Dictionary

“It is one thing to play dress-up, to imitate pronunciations and understanding; it is another thing to think or dream or live in a language not your own.”
Painting of the Sand Creek Massacre by Robert Lindneux, c. 1935.

Happy Native American Heritage Month From the Army That Brought You the Trail of Tears

After 170 years of armed attacks, forced relocations, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of Native Americans, the U.S. military wants to celebrate.
Benjamin Hawkins and the Creek Indians.

“Weapons of Health Destruction…” How Colonialism Created the Modern Native American Diet

On the impact of systematic oppression on indigenous cuisine in the United States.
A river surrounded by trees and mountains

From the Reservation to the River: On the Complexities of Writing About a Native Childhood

Remembering the river helps me forget, at least for a moment, the challenges, fears, and feelings of inadequacy I experienced in my childhood.
A photograph of the Arizona desert at sunset with cacti in the foreground.

I Want Settlers To Be Dislodged From the Comfort of Guilt

My ancestors were the good whites, or at least that’s what I’ve always wanted to believe.
Chaco Canyon ruins.

A Scientist Said Her Research Could Help With Repatriation. Instead, It Destroyed Native Remains.

Federal agencies awarded millions of dollars to scientific studies on Native American human remains, undermining the goals of tribes fighting for repatriation.
People watching uranium mill waste blow in the wind.

The Cold War Legacy Lurking in U.S. Groundwater

A catalog of cleanup efforts at the 50-plus sites where uranium was processed for nuclear weapons, where polluted water and sickness were often left behind.
Colorado River.

On Its 100th Birthday, the Colorado River Compact Shows Its Age

The foundational document was flawed from the start.
Comedian Charlie Hill on stage with a microphone.

‘Part of Why We Survived’

Is there something in particular about coming from a Native background that makes a person want to write and perform comedy?
An illustration of broken and bloody pieces representing awareness of Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls.

Traumatic Monologues

On the therapeutic turn in Indigenous politics.
Miners with pick axes sit on rocks.

How Yellowcake Shaped The West

The ghosts of the uranium boom continue to haunt the land, water and people.
Chemical plant worker

Where Would We Be Without the New Deal?

A new history charts the forgotten ways the social politics of the Roosevelt years transformed the United States.
A mannequin family in a house at Operation Doorstep in Nevada, 7,500 feet from the blast.

Blackness and the Bomb

Seventy years after the civil preparedness film Duck and Cover, it's long past time to reckon with the way white supremacy shaped U.S. nuclear defense efforts.

America’s Conflicted Landscapes

A nation that identifies itself with nature begins to fall apart when it can no longer agree on what nature is.
Nurse Harriet Curley takes the pulse of a patient at Sage Memorial Hospital on the Navajo Indian reservation in 1949. (AP)

How Native Americans Were Vaccinated Against Smallpox, Then Pushed Off Their Land

Nearly two centuries later, many tribes remain suspicious of the drive to get them vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Statue of Kit Carson

The Removal of Monuments: What about Kit Carson?

The West and the nation need worthier, more honest memorials.

The Empire of All Maladies

Indigenous scholars have long contested the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis. Today, it is clear that the disease thesis simply doesn’t hold up.
Book cover of the Three Cornered War, featuring a southwestern desert landscape.

A Different Civil War in the Southwest

A riveting new book shows how the Civil War in the West was both strategically important and lacking in the moral contours of the broader war.

Disease Has Never Been Just Disease for Native Americans

Native communities’ vulnerability to epidemics is not a historical accident, but a direct result of oppressive policies and ongoing colonialism.
People wave from a Sons of Confederate Veterans parade float.
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The Latest Battle Over the Confederate Flag Isn’t Happening Where You’d Expect

How the forgotten fight for the West exposes the meaning of the Confederate flag.

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