Radiation, Indigenous Peoples, and Expertise in the Far North

In January 1978, a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite plunged from orbit. Radioactive fragments of the spacecraft landed in a region of the Canadian Arctic known as “the Barrens.” Canadian state officials and journalists alike expressed relief that the accident had occurred in a place seemingly devoid of life, human or otherwise. However, Dene and Inuit communities that depended on local subsistence faced very real danger of exposure. The Cosmos 954 incident marked only one of several nuclear accidents to take place in the North American Arctic, threatening Northern Indigenous communities whose experiences were in turn largely erased from contemporary and historical accounts.
Conflict between settler experts and Indigenous knowledge were complicated by problems of linguistic and cultural translation. As the joint Canadian-American cleanup team descended upon the Barrens, the threat of radioactive contamination forced Indigenous communities in which the very vocabulary of the Space Age did not exist to participate in novel debates over space governance—and to contribute to liability negotiations between the Canadian and Soviet governments. Meanwhile, claims of “natural” radiation in the region allowed nuclear experts attempting to identify and quantify traces of the satellite within a broadening vertical and circumpolar nuclear continuum to dismiss Indigenous concerns about exposure to the satellite’s remains. Outsider expertise subsumed the embodied experiences of individuals living in proximity to the radionuclides in question—whether in the form of natural uranium ore, in the cells of lichens and tissues of caribou, or falling from the sky.

In May 1993, a group of scientific experts and public officials from circumpolar nations gathered in Anchorage to assess the human and environmental legacies of the Cold War in the Far North. Senator Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) opened the meeting by calling for action on the part of the participants to combat widespread radioactive contamination in the Arctic. With the end of the Cold War had come the potential for new collaborative initiatives in the circumpolar north, and Murkowski hoped to use this moment of possibility to establish an international commitment to combat contamination and repair environmental damage. However, he was also acting in response to the grievances of Alaska Native peoples, who had expressed their growing concerns surrounding the potential health impacts of recently-disclosed Cold War activities, including the dumping of radioactive waste in Arctic regions, nuclear weapons testing in the Russian Far East, and biomedical experimentation involving radiation in northern Alaska.  

Alaskan political officials, federal government scientists and biomedical ethicists, and Alaska Native leaders and activists found themselves involved in a series of contestations over how and if these concerns could be addressed. Alaska Native communities would be left asking: Who gets to decide when an issue is resolved? How are different versions of the past made legitimate? And, what kinds of imagined futures inform scientific policy decisions? This paper, then, centers scientific temporalities of the Cold War as both a tool of American settler colonialism, and as a potential avenue for Alaska Native self-determination.

In 1908 a huge blast occurred over the Siberian taiga in a land inhabited primarily by indigenous Evenki. When Soviet scientists first investigated the event two decades later, they assumed it had been caused by a meteorite. Yet traces were never found. This inconclusiveness eventually led to wide-ranging speculations, including the idea that the explosion was caused by an accident of a nuclear-powered alien spaceship. Though initially limited to the realm of science fiction, this nuclear hypothesis inspired generations of amateur researchers to undertake expeditions to the Tunguska site, where, among other things, they searched for evidence of an atomic explosion. 
This paper will look at these efforts to determine possible radioactive contamination in the Tunguska site. Working during the peak days of fallout from nuclear testing, these researchers were intrigued when their radiometers buzzed in certain spots. They eventually turned to trying to acquire all sorts of indirect evidence that the blast was nuclear, including from the health records and testimony of the Evenki who had been in the region. This research reflected a view of radioactivity as something that migrated through interstellar space into the bodies and memories of the indigenous peoples who had been most affected by the explosion. The ethnographic and medical orientation of these researchers can be seen as a method of bolstering their expertise within a scientific community that was sometimes dismissive of their amateur status. In this way radioactive indigeneity served in debates about what counted as legitimate Soviet science.