We’ve been talking to people this week and are beginning to set up interviews to weave in voices other than our own into the video installation, but that is likely to be a longer term project, as well. More soon.

Until 1991 Grace Thorpe, the daughter of legendary Olympic athlete Jim
Thorpe, enjoyed a pleasant, low-key retirement, doing what she calls
“typical grandmother stuff.”

Then she read as alarming newspaper story. It explained that 17
American Indian tribes - including her own, Oklahoma’s Sac and Fox
nation - had applied for $100,000 grants from the Department of Energy
to consider their reservations as sites for nuclear-waste storage.

Sac and Fox leaders told her that their tribes “could use the money.”
But Thorpe, a longtime activist on behalf of Native Americans, feared
exploitation. Radioactive waste, she explains, “is the most lethal
poison known in the history of man.” The prospect of a “monitored
retrievable storage” (MRS) facility on what little remains of her
ancestral land seemed unthinkable.

After going door to door with petitions, she and other tribal members
brought the issue to a vote. Members defeated the plan, even though it
could bring millions of dollars a year to any reservation chosen as an
MRS site.

When other groups heard about her tribe’s withdrawal from
consideration as an MRS site, she quickly became a sought-after
speaker and tireless activist.

“Environmentalist racism” has become a term to describe an egregious
form of exploitation - the placement of everything from garbage and
sludge to high-level and low-level toxic waste in the backyards of
people who are perceived as too poor, too weak, or too passive to
protest and resist. The attempt to use Indian reservations as MRS
sites has also been called “radioactive colonialism” and “economic
blackmail.” Thorpe adds another phrase to the lexicon of
discrimination: “environmental injustice.”

By her example she refutes the typical excuses - such as a lack of
money, resources, or knowledge - that often keep ordinary citizens
from supporting (or opposing) a particular cause. She lives modestly
on Social security, sharing a house with her daughter. Her office
equipment was donated. And until she began researching nuclear issues
she knew nothing about the subject.

Her knowledge in now considerable. Her goal for radioactive waste is
three-pronged: “Leave it where it is. Secure it. Stop producing it. It
doesn’t make sense to produce something you can’t safely dispose of.”
Instead, she proposes putting money in alternative energy sources -
hydroelectricity, solar power, and wind power.

Calling herself a catalyst, Thorpe says, Unless tribes had someone
like me out there to organize against MRS, they might have gone
through with it. Fortunately, in cases like this, there is some old
Indian lady like me who’s pretty tough.

At a time when Americans reportedly feel angry at government and
helpless about seemingly insoluble national problems, people like
Grace Thorpe illustrate the ability of a single individual to effect
change. Her brand of grass-roots lobbying points up the need for more
“big windy women” (and men) of all ages who are willing to be “pretty
tough” in giving voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless.
They can make a difference.
-The Christian Science Monitor

http://www.nuclear-free.com/english/res.htm
http://www.turtle-island.com/docu.html