This workshop brings together Native scholars, activists and leaders from across Indian Country’s nuclear landscapes with academics and students at Princeton to better understand past, present and future nuclear harms to which tribal nations and their lands are subject. The goal is to explore the connections and contradictions between nuclear weapons, militarism, and institutionalized violence and current democratic structures and practices, to build relationships and solidarity, and to explore, create and strengthen resources for collective action and policy engagement.

Day 1 – May 2, 2024: Radioactive Landscapes and People

Wallace Hall | Room 300

8:30 AM Breakfast and coffee

9:00 AM Welcome remarks (Jessica Lambert, Ryo Morimoto, Sébastien Philippe)

9:10 AM Workshop introduction (Zia Mian)

Session 1: Uranium mining and nuclear weapon material production

9:30 AM Framing presentations (Tommy Rock, Kathleen Tsosie)

10:00 AM Group discussion on mining

10:45 AM 25-minute coffee break

11:10 AM Framing presentations (Frank von Hippel, Raven Witherspoon)

11:30 AM Group discussion on weapon material production

12:15 PM Lunch

Session 2 - Nuclear weapons testing and deployment

1:15 PM Framing presentations (Leona Morgan, Sébastien Philippe)

1:25 PM Group discussion on testing

2:10 PM 20-minute coffee break

2:30 PM Framing presentation (Ella Weber, Zia Mian)

2:50 PM Group discussion on deployment and storage

3:45 PM Day 1 wrap up

4:00 PM Campus walk and tour (Zia Mian)

5:30 PM Dinner (Rockefeller Dining Room, Madison Hall)

7:30 PM Film screening, Demon Mineral (2023), Robertson Bowl 002

Day 2 – May 3, 2024 Community and Resources of Hope

Science and Global Security, 221 Nassau St | Conference Room

We will discuss the nature and limits of current Indigenous politics and practices of contention and compromise regarding nuclear activities on Tribal lands, and the scope for new frames and advocacy to support the mobilization of resistance. The goal will be to map the needs for the production and dissemination of knowledge, narratives and evidence by scientists, lawyers, journalists, public health officials and others, and explore opportunities for collaboration.

8:30 AM Breakfast

Session 3 - Advancing advocacy and collaboration

9:00 AM Introduction (Jessica Lambert, Ryo Morimoto, Sébastien Philippe)

9:20 AM Framing presentations (June Lorenzo, John Higgins)

9:40 AM Group discussion

10:40 AM 30-minute coffee break

11:10 AM Group discussion

12:00 PM Workshop wrap-up

12:30 PM Lunch

2:00 PM Departures and travel home

Jessica Lambert, Choctaw Nation

Jessica Lambert graduated from Princeton in 2022 where her academic work focused on environmental contamination in Indian Country and its impacts on public and environmental health, tribal policy, and relationships with the land. Jessica has been a team member of Nuclear Princeton since 2020. She currently lives in Washington, DC,where she works in environmental policy.

Zia Mian

Zia Mian is a physicist and co-director of Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security, where he has worked since 1997. Mian serves as co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Group of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and has served on the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. He is co-author of Unmaking the Bomb.

Ryo Morimoto

Ryo Morimoto is a first-generation college graduate and scholar from Japan and an assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton University. His scholarly work addresses the planetary impacts of our past and present engagements with nuclear things. He is the author of Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima’s Gray Zone. Ryo is a facilitator of the Native undergraduate student-led project Nuclear Princeton.

Sébastien Philippe

Sébastien Philippe is a scientist and research scholar with Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security, where he leads work on nuclear weapons and environmental justice issues. His recent projects include modeling the fallout from all US atmospheric nuclear tests, beginning with Trinity, and investigating the human and environmental risks associated with the deployment of land-based nuclear missiles in the US.

Ella Weber, Three Affiliated Tribes

Ella Weber is a junior at Princeton where she studies public policy. Her advocacy centers around the 15 nuclear missile silos housed on her tribe’s reservation. Ella authored an investigative podcast series “The Missiles on Our Rez” with Scientific American. She also works for Nuclear Princeton and Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security.

Yolanda Badback, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe

Yolanda Badback is a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. She has been battling against an active uranium mill — the Energy Fuels Resource White Mesa Mill — five miles north of her reservation and leads the community advocacy group, White Mesa Concerned Community.

Nina Berman

Nina Berman is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, journalist and educator. Her work explores American politics, militarism, environmental issues and post violence trauma. She is a professor of journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she directs the photojournalism/documentary photography program.

Antonio Cly, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe

Antonio Cly is a community advocate. He runs the online and social media posts for White Mesa Concerned Community, an advocacy organization focused on contesting the Energy Fuels Resource White Mesa Mill, an active uranium mill in their community.

Anferny Cly, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe

Anferny Cly is a fourth-generation activist. As an advocate with the White Mesa Concerned Community, he travels with his mother, Yolanda, across the country to spread the word and gain support for their efforts to stop an active uranium mill in their community.

Logan Davis, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians

Logan J. Davis is a tribal elder and native journalist, and has worked as a forester, a broadcast journalist, newspaper editor and written on environmental issues. He is a U.S. Army veteran where he served as a member of the Nuclear Defense Task Force. His priority as a tribal elder is to teach his children and the younger generations the need to come together to protect the natural world.

Sabrina Fields

Sabrina Fields is a second-year Ph.D. student advised by Alex Glaser in the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy Program at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. Her research focuses on how the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle can be made more equitable, particularly looking at the consent-based siting program in the United States.

John Higgins

John Higgins is professor of geosciences at Princeton University. His primary research interest is the evolution of the carbon cycle and the global climate system over Earth history. His laboratory supports the analysis of water contamination, including in communities impacted by uranium mining.

Frank von Hippel

Frank von Hippel is a senior research physicist and professor of public and international affairs emeritus with Princeton’s Program on Science & Global Security which he co- founded. He has worked on nuclear arms control, fissile materials and nuclear safety issues since the 1970s.

June Lorenzo, Laguna Pueblo, Navajo

June L. Lorenzo, Laguna Pueblo and Navajo (Diné) has practiced law in tribal, state and federal courts, and as a judge for six native nations in New Mexico. She has served as attorney for Navajo Nation and Laguna Pueblo, the U.S. Senate, House of Representative committees, and Department of Justice. She has worked in human rights advocacy for Indigenous peoples before the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and on uranium mining legacy issues and protection of sacred areas.

Leona Morgan, Navajo Nation

Leona Morgan (Diné, she/her) is an Indigenous organizer and co-founder of Haul No!, an initiative to stop Energy Fuels' Pinyon Plain uranium mine near the Grand Canyon and related transport between the mine and the White Mesa uranium mill. Leona works with communities in the Southwest, nationally, and internationally on issues across the uranium fuel chain. Leona is pursuing a Master of Community and Regional Planning, focusing on Indigenous Planning, at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Christina Morris, Navajo Nation

Christina (Diné) from northwest New Mexico. She is a health promotion dpecialist for the New Mexico Department Health/Public Health Division. Christina works with community- driven initiatives/projects by applying practices and approaches between the intersections of health and racial equity, social justice, and health determinants.

Angela Parker, Three Affiliated Tribes, Cree

Angela Parker (Mandan, Hidatsa, Cree) is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, and participates at her father’s reservation, the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation in Montana. She is an assistant professor of history at the University of Denver working on 20th century Native American and U.S. history.

Ruth Plenty Sweetgrass-She Kills, Three Affiliated Tribes

Ruth Plenty Sweetgrass-She Kills is an enrolled citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation and is a member of the Maxoxadi Clan. Currently, she serves as the food sovereignty director at her home tribal college, Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College, where she shares some of this knowledge and experience.

Keith Richotte Jr, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians

Keith Richotte, Jr. is an associate professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He has served has the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians associate justice on its Court of Appeals and as chief justice of the Spirit Lake Appellate Court. In fall 2024, he will become director of the Indigenous Peoples and Policy Program and professor of law at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona.

Tommy Rock, Navajo Nation

Tommy is a Navajo researcher who incorporates traditional ecological knowledge into his research. He is an assistant research professor in the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University. Tommy does research on uranium exposure (water, soil, and plants), in addition, he is doing research on oil and gas fields looking at the ambient gases and adverse health impact.

Kathleen Tsosie, Navajo Nation

Kathleen Tsosie is from Cove, Arizona. She currently lives in Farmington, New Mexico. Kathleen, a “Down Winder,” advocates for cancer victims and survivors in Washington, DC. She is a board member of Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims and Down Wind Committee. With the committee, Kathleen has been working on the expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) for years.

Jenipher Weber, Three Affiliated Tribes

Jenipher Weber lives in Crookston MN. She is a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes on the Fort Berthold Indian reservation. She is interested to understand why and how nuclear missiles are deployed on the tribe’s reservation.

Raven Witherspoon

Raven Witherspoon is a pre-doctoral fellow in the Princeton Program on Science and Global Security, where she investigates environmental risks associated with renewed nuclear weapons production in the United States. She holds an undergraduate degree in physics with minors in mathematics, political science, and international social justice studies from Virginia Commonwealth University, and a master’s degree in global affairs from Tsinghua.