Oscar-winning Oppenheimer fails to depict the experience of the Tewa people with the Trinity test.
Using First Peoples and the land and water they protected as sacrifice for atomic testing, just weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government poisoned the air, water, and sacred land of the Tewa—communities that for more than 10,000 years held peace as a way of life.
The genocide of Native Americans committed since the arrival of Europeans took on a new form on Pajarito Plateau, and in the uranium mining that took place for decades in New Mexico, leaving a legacy of cancer for generations to come and abandoned uranium mines—practically uncountable and nearly impossible to clean up. A land-based people, the Tewa have much greater health risks due to greater exposure to toxins from Los Alamos over longer periods of time in their practices of collecting rainwater and growing their own food, practices seen now as sustainable in other communities. Yet not even Native American maids, who unknowingly brought home contaminated lunchboxes and contaminated clothing discarded by their bosses, appear in Oppenheimer.
Peace, as the Tewa have always known, is the true deterrent to war. Nuclear weapons do not bring peace and nuclear energy is not safe, starting from the exploration of uranium, which leads to contaminated waste rock; to uranium mills, which produce contaminated tailings; processing plants with toxic waste; enrichment plants that produce depleted uranium; and nuclear power plants with spent fuel rods for which no safe storage exists.
Dolores Howard
Paso Robles
