Resource Exploitation in Native North America

This wide-ranging survey of the environmental damage to Native American lands and peoples in North America—in recent times as well as previous decades—documents the continuing impact on the health, wellness, land, and communities of indigenous peoples.

Beginning in the early 1950s, Native peoples were recruited to mine "yellow dust"—uranium—and then, over decades, died in large numbers of torturous cancers. Uranium-induced cancers have become the deadliest plague unleashed upon Native peoples of North America—one with grave consequences impacting generations of American Indian families. Today, resource-driven projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline continue to put the health and safety of American Indians at risk.

Authored by an expert with 40 years of experience in the subject, this book documents the environmental provocations afflicting Native American peoples in the United States: from the toll of uranium mining on the Navajos to the devastation wrought by dioxin, PCBs, and other pollutants on the agricultural economy of the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation in northernmost New York. The detailed personal stories of human suffering will enable readers to grasp the seriousness of the injustices levied against Native peoples as a result of corporations' and governments' greed for natural resources.