The Nevada movement: trans-Indigenous antinuclear solidarity at the end of the Cold War

Beginning with the Zheltkosan (December) events of 1986, a confluence of factors set the Kazakhs and the Western Shoshone on a collision course that converged in a trans-Indigenous antinuclear alliance against their nuclear colonial oppressors. By August 1991, this alliance had successfully closed the Semipalatinsk Test Site–the Soviet equivalent of the Nevada Test Site, and by December, the U.S.S.R. disbanded. Without a credible Soviet threat or antagonism, activists in the US pressed Congress to end nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site. Following the closure of Semipalatinsk, the year before, the United States halted its own nuclear weapons testing program in 1992, effectively bringing an end to the nuclear Cold War. Soviet officials have repeatedly credited the Nevada movement in their decision to halt the U.S.S.R.’s nuclear weapons testing program, yet, few outside of Kazakhstan know of this movement’s existence, let alone the Western Shoshone’s role within it.

Through a trans-Indigenous examination of archival material documenting the cultural knowledge and rituals exchanged between Western Shoshone and Kazakh activists, I delineate the origins of this historic trans-Indigenous activism, as well as the joint strategies, tactics, and discourses employed by both, to end nuclear weapons testing in their respective homelands. I argue that nuclearism is an imperial/colonial construct that cannot be separated from the colonial or imperial apparatuses that reinforce it. The trans-Indigenous methods used in this study uniquely foreground the colonial dimensions of nuclearism that lie at the heart of nuclear colonialism—dimensions, which I argue, are obscured in non-Indigenous studies of the antinuclear movement. Furthermore, this study of transnational antinuclear activism enables us to see how Indigenous peoples have organized across vast distances and cultural divides to resist settler colonialism.