while everyone's rightfully talking about oppenheimer and its flaws regarding the erasure of japanese and native american voices regarding nuclear testing and detonations, i'd like to bring up the fact that pacific islanders have also been severely impacted by nuclear testing under the pacific proving grounds, a name given by the US to a number of sites in the pacific that were designated for testing nuclear weapons after the second world war, at least 318 of which were dropped on our ancestral homes and people. i would like if more people talked about this.
important sections are bolded for ease of reading. i would appreciate this being reblogged since it's a bit alarming how few people know about this.
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in 1946, the indigenous peoples of pikinni (the bikini atoll) were forcibly relocated off of their islands so that nuclear tests could be run on the atoll. at least 23 nuclear bombs were detonated on this inhabited island chain, including 20 hydrogen bombs. many pasifika were irreversibly irradiated, all of them were starved during multiple forced relocations, and the island chain is still unsafe to live on despite multiple cleanup attempts. there are several craters visible from space that were left on the atoll from nuclear testing.
the forced relocation was to several different small and previously uninhabited islands over several decades, none of which were able to sustain traditional lifestyles which directly lead to further starvation and loss of culture and identity. there is a reason that pacific islanders choose specific islands to inhabit including access to fresh water, food, shelter, cloth and fibre, climate, etc. and obviously none of these reasons were taken into account during the displacements.
200 pikinni were eventually moved back to the atoll in the 1970s but dangerous levels of strontium-90 were found in drinking water in 1978 and the inhabitants were found to have abnormally high levels of caesium-137 in their bodies.
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i'm going to put the rest of this post under a readmore to improve the chances of this being reblogged by the general public. i would recommend you read the entirety of the post since it really isn't long and goes into detail about, say, entire islands being fully, utterly destroyed. like, wiped off of the map. without exaggeration, entire islands were disintegrated.
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as i just mentioned, ānewetak (the eniwetok atoll) was bombed so violently that an entire island, āllokļap, was permanently and completely destroyed. an entire island. it's just GONE. the world's first hydrogen bomb was tested on this island. the crater is visibly larger than any of the islands next to it, more than a mile in diameter and roughly fifteen storeys deep. the hydrogen bomb released roughly 700 times the energy released during the bombing of hiroshima. this would, of course, be later outdone by other hydrogen bombs dropped on the pacific, reaching over 1000 times the energy released.
one attempt to clean up the waste on ānewetak was the construction of a large ~380ft dome, colloquially known as the tomb, on runit island. the island has been essentially turned into a nuclear waste dump where several other islands of ānewetak have moved irradiated soil to and, due to climate change, rising seawater is beginning to seep into the dome, causing nuclear waste to leak out. along with this, if a large typhoon were to hit the dome, there would be a catastrophic failure followed by a leak of nuclear waste into the surrounding land, drinking water, and ocean. the tomb was built haphazardly and quickly to cut costs.
hey, though, there's a plus side! the water in the lagoon and the soil surrounding the tomb is far more radioactive than the currently contained radioactive waste. a typhoon wouldn't cause (much) worse irradiation than the locals and ocean already currently experience, anyway! it's already gone to shit! and who cares, right, the only ""concern"" is that it will just further poison the drinking water of the locals with radioactive materials. this can just be handwaved off as a nonissue, i guess. /s
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at least 36 bombs were detonated in the general vicinity of kiritimati (christmas island) and johnson atoll. while johnson atoll has seemingly never been inhabited by polynesians, kiritimati was used intermittently by polynesians (and later on, micronesians) for several hundred years. many islands in the pacific were inhabited seasonally and likewise many pacific islanders should be classified as nomadic but it has always been convenient for the goal of white supremacy and imperalism to claim that semi-inhabited areas are completely uninhabited, claimable pieces of terra nullius.
regardless of the current lack of inhabitants on these islands, the nuclear detonations have caused widespread ecological damage to otherwise delicate island ecosystems and have further spread nuclear fallout across the entirety of the pacific ocean.
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while the marshall islands, micronesia, and the surrounding areas of melanesia and polynesia were (and still are) by far the worst affected by these atrocities, the entirety of the pacific has been irradiated to some extent due to ocean/wind currents freely spreading nuclear fallout through the water and air. all in all, at least 318 nuclear bombs were detonated across the pacific. i say "at least" because these are just the events that have been declassified and frankly? i wouldn't be shocked to find out they didn't stop there.
please don't leave the atomic destruction of the pacific out of this conversation. we've been displaced, irradiated, murdered, poisoned, and otherwise mass exterminated by nuclear testing on purpose and we are still suffering because of it. many of us have radiation poisoning, many of us have no safe ancestral home anymore. i cannot fucking state this enough, ISLANDS WERE DISINTEGRATED INTO NONEXISTENCE.
look, this isn't blaming people for not talking about us or knowing the extent of these issues, but it's... insidiously ironic that i haven't seen a single post that even mentions pacific islanders in a conversation about indigenous voices/voices of colour being ignored when it comes to nuclear tests and the devastation they've caused.
making premature gazan babies suffocate on their own bodies is unbelievably cruel. i can't help but think of my own birth - 25 weeks, 1lb 14 oz, with underdeveloped lungs. i am alive solely by the grace of medical treatment, so for anyone without much knowledge on prematurity:
it isn't even nearly as simple as these babies needing oxygen. they need incubators. and feeding tubes. and weight checks. and vitals checks. and hats. and blankets. and their (potentially dead) parents touch/presence (literally can help keep them alive). they need 24/7 supervision. they need to be in the neonate ICU, able to immediately go for surgery or imaging. they need this and more for MONTHS; i spent the first few months of my life in an incubator, on oxygen. i was not even able to be held by my parents.
without this intensive, even long term medical care, these babies WILL die. they just will. iirc, the complications of lung issues in premature babies is the leading cause of our death, and these babies are suffocating, some undoubtedly getting brain damage from low oxygen. there is no good reason that in another 22 years (my age), these babies should not be living life, surrounded by their loved ones. they should be able to live as long, happy, healthy lives as they would get with the best medical care on the planet.
if you believe in any measure that they somehow deserve this or are "collateral damage," you have lost what it means to be human. you are genocidal, without a shadow of a doubt. palestine must be free. from the river to the sea.
At Catholic schools for white kids of colonizers, you will likely never hear of mass unmarked graves of children. You will never see a graveyard where bodies go unnamed and unclaimed. Residential schools are not like that. The priests, nuns, and teachers who helped perpetuate these institutions didn't even see the indigenous children as human enough to be sent back to their communities for proper burial. They were left unknown in graves without so much as names or dates of their deaths. It doesn't matter if it was a dozen kids, a hundred, or in the thousands. The devaluation of human life is antithetical to what Jesus taught and the fact that modern Christians, especially the white ones, will shrug their shoulders as if it's nothing is the reason why people hate Christians. It's not because you think yourself holy, it's because you perpetuate the myth of the "good Christians" came to the Americas to "educate" the indigenous by stealing their children. The white-washing, the sanitization, the absurd amount of devaluing the lives of indigenous children because it's easier for your conscience to bear to not remember the blood on our hands is incorrigible.
As a white Christian, I am sorry. There is no apology that can undo the sins of white Christians in the past or present. I can only acknowledge the deep wounds my ancestors, whether related to my specific family or by proxy through colonization, have done to black and indigenous people. I acknowledge that I live on stolen land. Indigenous communities are well within their right to protest however they see fit, including defacing church doors. Any white liberal or leftist offended by this form of protest, wtf are you doing? How delusional do you have to be to be more offended by red paint than the thousands of deaths of children stolen from their communities and left buried away from their families, nameless and forgotten? Be so fucking for real right now.
I hope that anyone who participated in these schools and in the deaths of thousands of indigenous children feel the fires of hell. There is no moral or religious justification for indigenous residential schools to have ever existed, let alone the amount of deaths they incurred. The worst part, and I repeat this sentiment from earlier, is that those who taught at these schools did not value the indigenous children enough to give them proper graves or send them back to their families and communities. They didn't even bother valuing these children when they were alive when they took them from their homes, stripped them of their languages and cultures, and killed them through the negligence or through flat-out murder. And for what? The twisted narrative that Jesus, who spoke out against religious hypocrisy, defended marginalized women, and was a victim of a kangaroo court and state-sponsored violence, would somehow approve of your actions? The only proper reparations the Catholic Church, and indeed every church should make, is a verbal apology, financial compensation, paying for the repatriation and PROPER burial of the bodies, and giving (not selling) stolen land back to indigenous communities. Anything other than that will be a pandering gesture.
Charities and Non-Profits:
Native Women's Association of Canada
Legacy of Hope Foundation
True North Aid
Community Outreach and Patient Empowerment (COPE)
Hopa Mountain
Hopi Relief
Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance
Indigenous Values Initiative
Peacekeeper Society
Sogorea Te Land Trust
National Indigenous Women's Resource Center (NIWRC)
National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
"When Robert Redford carried the casket of John “Liver-Eating” Johnston in 1974, it marked a rare moment where Hollywood legend and American folklore met face to face. Johnston, born John Garrison in 1824, was a larger-than-life frontiersman whose violent reputation earned him the chilling nickname. According to lore, after his Native American wife was killed by the Crow, Johnston waged a decades-long war of vengeance, allegedly cutting out and eating the livers of slain Crow warriors as a warning to others. Whether myth or truth, the tales made him a symbol of the brutal wilderness.
Nearly a century later, his remains were moved from a Los Angeles veterans’ cemetery to Cody, Wyoming, thanks to a campaign by students and townspeople. Redford, who had portrayed Johnston in Jeremiah Johnson (1972), served as pallbearer, bringing cinematic and historical threads together. For many, seeing Redford carry the casket felt like the mountain man himself had been escorted home.
Filming Jeremiah Johnson was itself a test of survival. Shot in the wilds of Utah and Arizona, the crew battled blizzards, rugged terrain, and remote locations. Redford recalled, “It was tough, dangerous work, but that was the point. We wanted it to feel as raw and real as the life this man lived.” The film distilled Johnston’s legend into the story of a man fleeing society for solitude in the mountains, only to discover that nature’s silence was as challenging as it was healing.
For Redford, the role was more than a performance; it reflected his own search for peace in nature, something that later defined his Sundance vision. By carrying Johnston’s casket, Redford wasn’t just honoring a character—he was paying tribute to the rugged spirit of the American frontier." -Some Celebrity Bullshit page on Facebook.
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We can start with most mountain man myths being just that, myths about the 'taming' (genocide) of the American West and its indigenous inhabitants (and the not so indigenous Spanish Colonial inhabitants if we look at the shit during the Mexican American War, but, well, we're not going down that rabbit hole right now). That's also where we'll end because I'm tired (well, I'll end, feel free to add shit onto this).
Want to read a good read on the perception of the American West in the popular imagination? Yes, you do. Check out Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation. They're a trilogy, and well worth the investment in hardcopies (mine didn't make the last move with me, but I've got the ebooks and probably some PDF scans around here).
actually extremely nauseated by the lack of awareness spreading or acknowledgement of ANY fucked-upness of today on this app. ik that not everybody lives in america but i AM seeing thanksgiving posts and they’re all silly and cute and happy and thankful.
even the wokest woker white ppl i follow, the radical communists and gender destroyers, are radio fuckin silent rn
