Mormons Get the Finger from the Goshute Nation Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit The Whitest of Whites Get the Finger from the Ute Nation [The "fuck you" that a sovereign people can accomplish sans reparations is really quite something. Since the settlers of the US never did manage to write history in a way that pretended the Native Americans got here *after* the Europeans did, they were forced to give them land. Initially, it was even okay land. Then the whites decided they wanted the okay land, and many Native American peoples got forced into incredibly shitty areas farther and farther from the lands they were originally connected to. One group which was given a god-forsaken sliver of a god-forsaken state has decided to really and truly say 'fuck you' to the purportedly patriotic and god-fearing residents of that state. The land they have is worthless -- but it's only fifty miles from Salt Lake City. Turns out there's a lot of nuclear waste that needs storing right now. Even if we (yep, we, my computer plugs into the wall, and if you're reading this, so does yours!) stopped using nukes to make power *now,* there'd be a long-term waste storage problem just with what's on hand. Greenpeace had one of the better proposals years back: keep it stored above ground, in casks, at the plants that made it. Have guard teams and monitor teams on duty to keep an eye on it; it simply isn't stuff that an "out of sight, out of mind" solution works reliably for. Common sense aside, the US believes as an article of faith that anything called waste means "you can now throw it away and stop worrying about it," and also that the people who've benefitted from the nukes they built shouldn't also have to have the waste around. So now all of our eggs will soon be in one basket - but until formal legal consensus is hammered down around Yucca Mountain, a lot of utilities want a place to store this shit. Enter the Goshute nation, now with a reservation in Utah. They're sovereign and can agree to do with their land as they choose. And apparently quite soon they're going to be storing a whole lot of the most dangerous radwaste ever made just outside Salt Lake City. Could not not be a better location; more people in Utah are already prepared to deal with contaminated food and water supplies than in most other states, and treatment of the various Ute peoples by the early Mormon settlers was brutal. Mormon racial theology, in which nonwhites get to go to special heavens where they become white before moving on up to the regular whites-only heaven... Well, let's just say I think it's good that man is getting ready to give the Almighty a helping of brimstone close to hand so that if the Latter Day Saints continue talking that trash, He doesn't even have to bestir much of Himself to paint their holiest of holies with eight-legged babies and death unto the seventh generation. --PB] The Guardian - May 30, 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,724309,00.html Alarm as tribe offers land for nuclear dump Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles The bleak, barren land in Utah that was given to the Goshute Indians as their reservation in the 19th century could now turn the tribe's few remaining members into millionaires by becoming a nuclear waste dump - to the fury of the rest of the state. The 70 members of the Goshutes have offered their inhospitable land in Skull Valley, Utah, to utility companies looking for a place to store 40,000 tonnes of highly radioactive nuclear waste in advance of the construction of a permanent site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. It is believed that the companies would pay about $48m (£33m) to the tribe over 40 years for the use of the land, which is about 50 miles from Salt Lake City. An agreement has already been reached between the tribe and the eight relevant utilities companies. Now it needs only approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to become a reality. An NRC staff report has already been completed and concluded that the site meets all requirements. The storage facility could open by 2005. "We were given the land to use and this is how we want to use it," Leon Bear, a former security guard who is now the Goshute Indian tribal chairman, told the Los Angeles Times. He said that the tribe needed money for health care, housing and other social programmes. He points out that the military already uses land near the reservation for incinerating chemical weapon stockpiles and as a bombing range. The rest of the state views the plan with alarm. "I have one focus these days: to stop the storage facility from being licensed," said Utah's governor, Mike Leavitt. "We don't produce nuclear waste and we refuse to store it for those who do." The state has filed lawsuits to stop the site being built. The reservations were given to Indian tribes as sovereign territory in the 19th century as a permanent settlement of land disputes with the federal government. In general, the tribes were given the most unfertile and least desirable land. Over the past decade, many tribes have found that casinos - which are illegal in most of the US - can provide the revenue they could never obtain from farming the land. But few imagined that a tribe might one day make its money from nuclear dumping and some members of the tribe are unhappy with the plan. "We're here to defend the land not destroy it," said Sammy Blackbear, a tribal member. Most Utah residents are also alarmed. Polls show that more than 80% are opposed to the reservation being used as a dump. The Yucca Mountain site also faces opposition - mostly from tribes in Nevada who claim the site would be built on their traditional lands. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytenv-05.30.02-09:05:25-16018