In this podcast interview by the National Council of Elders on their show “The Nerve! Conversations with Movement Elders“, Elder Kathy Sanchez shares her experience growing up and living in San Ildefonso Pueblo, just a few miles from the Los Alamos National Lab. Since its opening during the Manhattan Project, the lab has had significant cultural, environmental, and health impacts on the nearby Pueblos and other Indigenous people who call this area home.
Los Alamos National Lab: Elder Kathy (Wan Povi) Sanchez
"I was born in 1950, so that put me in the context of the atomic age, the atomic bomb, what it was doing, right next to still continuing our traditional ways and traditions. And it was such a paradoxical situation, or it was such a questioning, you know, you question—"Why are they up there in their sacred mountains, why can't we go fishing there anymore. Why can't we collect our pottery clay there anymore?" And so the secrecy of the atomic bomb creation also kept a lot of our people and us in harm’s way, because they wouldn't tell us when the experiments were being detonated, because they didn't want people to know what they were doing. And they took a lot of our men as workers from our village to go up there to clean up their mess without no protection, without no care whatsoever. Because it's like, the first priority is to win a war, or to create a war to win a war, and we were disposable. They didn't care if we vanished.…"
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