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Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country By Traci Brynne Voyles University of Minnesota Press (2015) 304 pages
Review by Doug Brugge
This book, based on extensive reading of secondary sources, is framed from an anticolonial-feminist perspective that is somewhat polemical and ideological. The author posits that U.S. industrial capitalism requires, or at least desires, to designate Native American lands as wasteland in order to devalue the people and land and render them exploitable for extraction of natural resources. Voyles is at her best when deconstructing media and popular narratives of how White people saw the Navajos in relation to the "uranium boom" on the Colorado Plateau. Her understanding and presentation of health science is less firm-footed.
A high point of the book is the thorough demolishing of the obviously fictionalized media stories of Paddy Martinez, the...