It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, July 30, 2023
Coalition Seeks Child Welfare System Stories
BY NEELY BARDWELL
A new documentary focusing on the experience of Indigenous children in the child welfare system is being developed, and the California Tribal Families Coalition (CTFC) is seeking the stories of Tribal children, adults, and families.
The CTFC, a coalition made up of 47 different tribes, all in California, including the Bishop Paiute Tribe and the Karuk Tribe, is partnering with The James Irvine Foundation and Tre Borden / Co. to bring the experiences of California’s Native peoples in the child welfare system to light. This comes after the long battle with the U.S. Supreme Court to keep the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) upheld.
In order to ensure the documentary is being told in a culturally sensitive manner, the CTFC is prioritizing the stories of individuals with lived experiences and using the tradition of storytelling as their driving force. The documentary will be narrated by tribal actors, community leaders, and artists while using the testimonies as the driving force.
This is a grant-funded, non-commercial project that the coalition will be using for educational and training purposes. The final product will be available for free on the internet. Their education spreads across the state of California where they bring awareness to the struggles of Native families and children in the welfare system, and the history of the child welfare system.
“We highly encourage all members of Tribal communities in California to lend their voices to this project by sharing stories,” said CTFC Co-Executive Director Michelle Castagne (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa). “Your stories need to be heard, and your contributions will be a force in fostering a deeper understanding of the issues Tribal communities have been facing for decades.”
The CTFC wants to “inspire positive change, empathy and solidarity” in order to ensure that ICWA will continue to be respected and recognized in California.
Formed in 2017, the CTFC’s mission is to promote and protect the health, safety and welfare of tribal children and families, and this documentary seeks to further this mission. They have successfully secured more than $10 million in state funding for tribal youth diversion programs in 2019 and 2020.
If you or your family have experienced the child welfare system and would like to contribute to this short documentary, use the following link. They are accepting both video, audio, and written testimonies.
Updated: CTFC has extended the deadline until Aug. 31.
Federal Commission Concludes Nationwide Tour Gathering MMIP Testimony in Billings, MT
On July 26th, the Not Invisible Act Commission (NIAC) wrapped up its final stop on a seven-city nationwide tour gathering testimony from Native Americans affected by the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP) crisis.
This week’s hearing took place in Billings, Montana, where Tribal officials, Native leaders, law enforcement and government officials convened for a panel discussion and to bear witness to testimony from MMIP survivors and family members. The hearing was also live streamed.
The hearing opened with a prayer and moment of silence, followed by an invitation for those in attendance to speak the name of a missing or murdered loved one. Names were spoken aloud for ten minutes.
Among those testifying was Carrisa Heavyrunner, whose 22-year-old daughter Mika Westwolf (Blackfeet) was killed in a hit-and-run on March 31 on Highway 93 near Arlee, Montana. Despite the Montana Highway Patrol identifying the driver as Sunny K. White, no arrests have been made in Westwolf’s death.
Heavyrunner told Billings news station NonStop Local that the lack of urgency from law enforcement is slowing healing for Native American communities affected by the MMIP crisis.
“You can’t heal if you’re not able to be seen and be heard,” Heavyrunner said. “That’s why I wanted to help these women share their stories about their loved ones that they lost… We gotta keep Mika’s name and other MMIP families and victims out there because everyone tends to forget things so easily nowadays. We’ve gotta keep the momentum going.”
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Native women living on reservations are murdered at a rate ten times higher than the national average. Lack of jurisdictional clarity, lack of collaboration between law enforcement bodies, and systemic apathy have led to thousands of unsolved cases in Indian Country. While there is no comprehensive data on MMIP, the Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates there are 4,200 unsolved MMIP cases have gone unsolved. The oldest MMIP case profile on the BIA’s public MMIP database dates back to 1969.
Montana is home to twelve Tribal Nations and ranks among the states with the highest number of MMIPs in the nation, according to a report from the Urban Indian Health Institute.
The 37-person Not Invisible Act Commission was launched in 2020 by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo). The commission is tasked with developing recommendations on improving intergovernmental collaboration on violent crimes in Indian Country and providing resources for survivors and victims’ families. Information and testimony gathered at the hearings will be part of the commission’s final report to Secretary Haaland, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Congress in October.
The commission will hold a nationwide virtual hearing on Aug. 1 and 2. Registration for the hearing can be found here.
Not Invisible Act Commission to Hear Testimony on MMIP in Montana
The Not Invisible Act Commission will hold its final in a series of public hearings on July 25-26, 2023, at the Billings Hotel and Convention Center, 1223 Mullowney Lane, Billings, MT, from 9:00 – 5:00 pm MT.
Native community members who are survivors of or have been impacted by the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples (MMIP) crisis are invited to attend to share their testimony. Those who wish to attend the hearing must register at here.
Those unable to attend the hearing in person can submit written testimony, recommendations, or questions to the Not Invisible Act Commission at: NIAC@ios.doi.gov. Include the following in the subject line: “NIAC Testimony” or “NIAC Question.”
In October 2020, the Not Invisible Act of 2019 was signed into law as the first bill in history to be introduced and passed by four U.S. congressional members enrolled in their respective federally recognized tribes. The four were led by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Pueblo of Laguna) during her time in Congress.
The act was a response to the longstanding crises of MMIP and human trafficking (HT). The purpose of the act is to increase coordination in identifying and combating violent crime within Native lands and against Native Americans.
In accordance with the act, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary Haaland established the Not Invisible Act Commission. The Commission is a cross-jurisdictional advisory committee composed of both federal and non-federal members. These include law enforcement, Tribal leaders, federal partners, service providers, family members of missing and murdered individuals, and survivors.
Since April, the Commission has been holding field hearings in Tulsa, Anchorage, Flagstaff, Minneapolis, and Albuquerque, some of the communities most affected by the MMIP crisis. The Billings, MT, hearing later in July is the final hearing. Similar to earlier hearings, the Billings event will provide a forum for law enforcement, subject-matter experts, organizations, State/Tribal task forces, advocates, survivors/families, and others to offer testimony directly to the Commission. Trauma-informed mental health support will be available on-site with optional follow-up support as needed.
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco emphasized, “The Justice Department is steadfast in our pledge to work with Tribal governments in preventing and responding to the violence that has disproportionately harmed Tribal communities. And we are committed to listening and being responsive to what our partners have to say.”
In a June 8, 2023, letter to Tribal leaders, Secretary Haaland said, “Only with the collective participation of all our communities will our missing, murdered, or trafficked relatives and friends no longer be invisible.”
Carmen O’Leary (Cheyenne River Lakota) of Eagle Butte, SD, is the Executive Director of the Native Women’s Society of the Great Plains. According to O’Leary, “It is important to our community that the people have input, whether it is by contributing a personal story, offering a possible solution to address the problem, or helping to identify gaps in the (prevention/enforcement/service) system. The actions of the (Not Invisible Act) Commission will impact resources available to address MMIP issues for a long time.”
Findings from hearings and written testimony will shape the Commission’s final report to Secretary Haaland, Attorney General Garland, and Congress. This report is required by October 2023 and will include recommendations for how to improve intergovernmental coordination, bolster resources, and establish best practices for State/Tribal/Federal law enforcement to challenge the tragic epidemic of MMIP violence and human trafficking.
Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese is a member of Nambé Pueblo and senior policy advisor for Native American affairs at the White House. At the June 28 Not Invisible Commission hearing in Albuquerque, she acknowledged the victims and families present at the hearing and how critical their testimony is to create solutions to the crisis.
“These hearings are so important,” Hidalgo Reese said. “Neglect and invisibility are too often the cause or enable violence in our communities ... we need to understand this problem from every angle. We need to explore every possible solution, so we need to hear from all of you.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Native women living on reservations are murdered at a rate ten times higher than the national average. Layered jurisdiction, lack of collaboration between law enforcement bodies, and systemic apathy have led to thousands of unsolved cases in Indian Country. The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates there are 4,200 unsolved MMIP cases.
Secretary Haaland made the following statement when the schedule of hearings was announced in February 2023, “This work requires each of us to face our own trauma, to relive unimaginable pain, and visualize a future in which our loved ones are safe, and our communities have closure. We’re here for our children, grandchildren, and relatives we have yet to meet. This work is urgently needed and requires all of us to work collaboratively. I am so grateful to the Commission for the work they are doing and the lasting impact they will have.”
The Commission will hold a national, virtual field hearing in August.
Watch: Native Bidaské with Mark Charles (Diné) on Abraham Lincoln and the Narrative of White Messiahship
Native News Online welcomed historian, author, and speaker Mark Charles (Diné) to Native Bidaské last Friday to shed light on the complexities of President Abraham Lincoln’s legacy.
Through speaking engagements, authoring books, and his blog, Reflections from the Hogan,
Charles teaches history around race, culture, and Christendom to help set the nation on a path of healing and conciliation.
Charles and Native New Online Publisher Levi Rickert discussed chapters 9 and 10 of the award-winning book he co-authored with Robert Munger Professor of Evangelism Soong-Chan Rah, “Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.”
“The United States of America has never lost a war that matters,” Charles said Rickert. “We’ve never been invaded, we’ve never given up huge chunks of land, we’ve never been disarmed, we’ve never had a regime change, we’ve never bore the scorn of the global community. As a result, we have written our own history, the United States of America, for 250 years.”
Charles goes on to explain how the American public knows little about the atrocities President Abraham Lincoln committed, detailing massacres of Native American tribes that took place under the direction of Lincoln in the name of Manifest Destiny.
“Chapters nine and ten [of the book] go into the writings, the sayings, the speeches, the policies, the programs, the actions, the executive orders of Abraham Lincoln that demonstrate he was a blatant, unapologetic, self-proclaimed white supremacist,” Charles explained.
To watch the full interview, visit Native News Online’s YouTube page or watch the video below.
“Barbie” Needs a History Lesson
(Photo: APTN National News)
BY NEELY BARDWELL
This past week, the blockbuster movie Barbie was released in theaters, breaking the opening weekend record for 2023 and the first-weekend record for a film directed by a woman, with $337 million in global ticket sales as of Monday.
It surpassed movies like 2008’s Dark Knight and its release date twin Oppenheimer, both directed by Christopher Nolan.
However, in Indian Country, the movie is leaving a different impression.
The movie itself is a commentary on patriarchy and the effects it has on women and femme-presenting people in society. In “Barbie Land,” the Barbies run everything. There’s a President Barbie, a Doctor Barbie, a Pulitzer Prize Winning Barbie, and more — all Barbies that have actually been created and sold. The Barbies represented multiple identities as well, with multiple Black characters, Asian characters, characters with disabilities and various body types, but not one Native Barbie was in the movie.
Despite the lack of Indigenous representation, the movie didn’t stray away from making an off-hand one-liner about the genocide of Native people. Mid-way through the movie Ken (Ryan Gosling) comes back from the “real world” and introduces patriarchy to the Barbies, disrupting their harmonious Barbie Land. America Ferrara’s character, Gloria from the human world, compares Barbie’s lack of immunity to patriarchy to Native people and the introduction of smallpox.
Although the movie included no Indigenous representation, this does not mean that there are no Native Barbies released by Mattel, the doll’s manufacturing company. Let’s dive into the history of the Native American Barbie.
The first Native Barbie was E**imo Barbie, using a derogatory slur for the Indigenous people who reside in Alaska and the Arctic regions, released in 1981 as part of the Dolls of the World International Series. She stood alone for over a decade until “First Edition Native American Barbie” was released in 1993 as part of the company’s “Dolls of the World” Collection. She was dressed in a white “buckskin” top and skirt with white fringe and adorned with long black hair and tanned skin.
Multiple Native Barbies have been released since then, including second, third and fourth editions of the original and a Barbie line titled the “Native Spirit Collection.” The first Barbie in that collection was Spirit of the Earth Barbie. There is even a Barbie at the Smithsonian, the Northwest Coast Barbie, released in 2000.
The dolls are always accompanied by an introduction of who they are and an explanation of their clothing. Third Edition Native American Barbie (1994) is described like this:
“My dancing outfit is an updated version of a tribal princess costume. It’s a mix of traditional style with the latest colors and accessories of today! I’ll be pretty in my pink tunic and skirt with geometric patterns, white fringe, and ribbon trim. My moccasins, beaded necklace, turquoise earrings, and ring complete my modern-day powwow look!”
The Native American Barbies are described as “princesses,” fueling the “Indian Princess” stereotype that we see every year during Halloween. It reduces Indigenous women’s experience to that of a costume, effectively eliminating the spiritual, cultural, and traditional importance of regalia and the sacred nature of what we wear and why.
Barbie herself is a product of patriarchy and colonization. Barbie movie explores the sad reality of women in a patriarchal society, and the movie pulls heartstrings. It shared the experience of growing up as a woman, the experience of constantly being told what to do, what to look like, what not to do, what not to wear, and overall just living a life policed and dominated by men.
As Indigenous women, we have a unique relationship with patriarchy and colonization, as the two go hand in hand. A 2016 study by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) found that more than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime, including 56.1 percent who have experienced sexual violence–trauma that has been ongoing since colonization.
The male gaze created Barbie, and the colonized gaze continues to misrepresent the Indigenous experience in both the product line and film inspired by it.
While doing a successful job of portraying the general experience of women under patriarchy, the film fails to include the intricate and unique experience of Indigenous women within the patriarchy–and under the colonized gaze of women and men alike.
Without this, the story is incomplete.
Navajo Nation President: “Oppenheimer” Erases History of Nuclear Waste Caused to His People
Navajo Nation citizens have protested uranium mines for years. (Photo/File)
BY LEVI RICKERT
Hollywood is excited about the blockbuster $80.5 million Oppenheimer brought in during its opening weekend, as reported by Variety. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus, the movie is about the so-called “father of the atomic bomb.”
Hollywood may be gleeful about the long lines to see Oppenheimer, but Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren still thinks Hollywood comes short on reporting on the devastation uranium mining and nuclear testing caused to the country’s largest Indian reservation.
“The Navajo people cannot afford to be, yet again, erased from history,” Nygren writes in a TIME magazine op-ed on July 21, 2023.
“Hollywood has a lot of work to do, and they can start by standing with the Navajo people and urging Congress to provide just compensation for victims of radiation exposure,” Nygren writes.
Nygren, 36, is serving his first term as president of the Navajo Nation and is the youngest ever elected president of the tribal nation.
Nygren says the movie was released five days after the 44th anniversary of the Church Rock uranium mill spill when 94 million gallons of radioactive waste poured into the Puerco River spanning the northern portions of New Mexico and Arizona where the Navajo Nation is located.
“What came next—cancers, miscarriages, and mysterious illnesses—is a direct consequence of America’s race for nuclear hegemony. It’s an accomplishment built on top of the bodies of Navajo men, women, and children—the lived experience of nuclear weapons development in the United States. But, as usual, Hollywood chose to gloss over them.” Nygren writes.
In 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), but the problems on the Navajo Nation still persist.
“Despite the passage of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) in 1990, justice remains elusive for Navajo families who have suffered from the devastating and long-lasting health and environmental effects of the uranium mining industry on Navajo land,” Nygren writes.
While the Oppenheimer movie deals with history, the Navajo Nation still deals with the long-term effects of the spill and uranium mining impacting the lives of its people.
THE NAVAJO SUFFERED FROM NUCLEAR TESTING. OPPENHEIMER DOESN'T TELL OUR STORY Graffiti opposing mines on the reservation is seen in an abandoned building on Sept. 12, 2022 on the Navajo Nation west of Tuba City, Arizona. David McNew—Getty Images
Nygren is the 10th and youngest President of the Navajo Nation, the largest land-based Native American tribe in the United States
Christopher Nolan’s highly-anticipated Oppenheimer comes to the big screen five days after the 44th anniversary of the Church Rock uranium mill spill, when 94 million gallons of radioactive waste poured into the Puerco River, spanning northwestern New Mexico and northern Arizona, and across the Navajo Nation. Children played in the contaminated water, while livestock drank from radioactive aquifers. What came next—cancers, miscarriages, and mysterious illnesses—is a direct consequence of America’s race for nuclear hegemony. It’s an accomplishment built on top of the bodies of Navajo men, women, and children—the lived experience of nuclear weapons development in the United States. But, as usual, Hollywood chose to gloss over them.
The Navajo people cannot afford to be, yet again, erased from history. Hollywood has a lot of work to do, and they can start by standing with the Navajo people and urging Congress to provide just compensation for victims of radiation exposure.
As part of this effort, we must all recognize the continued suffering and sacrifice that built the atomic era. From the 1940s to the 1990s, the U.S. used the Navajo Nation to supply them with uranium for the manufacture of nuclear weapons and energy. While ownership of the mines was transferred from the federal government to private companies in 1971, the U.S. failed to enforce proper safety standards, leaving the sites unregulated until 1990 when the last mine closed. More than 500 now abandoned mines cover our land as a result. Miners and their families were kept in the dark about the heinous dangers of radiation exposure, so they went about their daily activities like any other community. Workers drank the mine’s cool spring water, while their wives washed their yellowed work clothes. Families built homes with local rocks and sediment and let their children play for hours on uranium byproducts, including mine debris piles. Despite the U.S. government’s awareness of the risks inherent in uranium mining, most Navajos did not know what radiation was—let alone the danger presented by every second of exposure.
Growing up in a community that has an abandoned uranium mine in Red Mesa, Arizona, I witnessed firsthand the heartbreaking and enduring consequences of uranium mining on my people. Despite the passage of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) in 1990, justice remains elusive for Navajo families who have suffered from the devastating and long-lasting health and environmental effects of the uranium mining industry on Navajo land.
While RECA has provided life-saving healthcare coverage for some uranium miners, the legislation’s limited scope has left many Navajo people suffering from radiation exposure without any compensation. The list of diseases covered by the law is, to start, woefully incomplete. Renal cancer, nephritis, and kidney tubal tissue injury are just some of the conditions that were initially excluded because of a lack of available scientific data connecting them to radiation exposure. RECA also excludes Navajo miners employed after 1971 from eligibility for compensation. Yet, the work they did, and the dangers they faced, remained exactly the same.
This is not a problem of the past. As of August 1, 2022, more than 53,804 claims have been filed under RECA. Of those, more than 12% identified as Navajos. Navajo miners and their families suffer a wide variety of cancers and radiation-related illnesses, with new victims regularly diagnosed. Women living near the mines have experienced stillbirths and miscarriages at abhorrent rates and their children carry the physical legacy of the Cold War through developmental delays, chromosomal aberrations, and other birth defects.
The Navajo people have suffered and sacrificed so much, while directly contributing to our country’s post-war pursuit of nuclear superiority. And while our Navajo Code Talkers are esteemed for heroically saving countless lives in the South Pacific during World War II, our uranium miners have largely been overlooked. The only thank-you for their years of patriotic service has been death, disease, and decades of advocacy to recognize their sacrifice.
Time is slipping away for Navajo uranium miners and their descendants, their hopes dangling in the balance. With each passing day, their weary bodies bear the weight of diseases inflicted by their labor; the clock ticks, mercilessly. As they wait for existing claims to be processed and for expanded eligibility through the RECA amendments, their precious time on this earth dwindles, a poignant reminder of the urgent need for justice and compassion.
The legacy of uranium mining on the Navajo is a perpetual blemish on our nation’s history with its Native people, and the disregard of our stories from media and movies like Oppenheimer can’t mean a continued erasure in U.S. policy. Acknowledging the harm done means living up to the intended purpose of RECA: to compensate all those impacted by the harms of the nuclear age. It is only then that my people can begin to heal and our beautiful and sacred land can be restored. We need the world to hear us and provide the justice that has long been denied to our people.
Here's the story not told in Nolan's Oppenheimer about those forced off their land in New Mexico
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32 Hispanos families given just 48 hours to vacate: relatives and ex-lab employee
Thomson Reuters ·
The town of Los Alamos, N.M., is seen in an undated photograph. In 1942, the U.S. army gave 32 Hispanos families on the Pajarito Plateau 48 hours to leave their homes and land, in some cases at gunpoint, so that a lab that would create the world's first atomic bombs could be built, according to relatives of those removed and a former lab employee. (U.S. Department of Energy/Reuters)
In the movie Oppenheimer, the eponymous character played by Cillian Murphy says the proposed site for a secret atomic weapons lab in northern New Mexico has only a boys' school and Native Americans performing burial rites.
But there were homesteaders living on that land.
In 1942, the U.S. army gave 32 Hispanos families on the Pajarito Plateau 48 hours to leave their homes and land, in some cases at gunpoint, to build the lab that would create the world's first atomic bombs, according to relatives of those removed and a former lab employee.
Homes were bulldozed, livestock shot or let loose, and families given little or no compensation, according to Loyda Martinez, 67, who worked as a computer scientist for 32 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory and cited accounts from evicted ranching and farming families who are her neighbours in the Espanola Valley.
A National Nuclear Security Administration spokesperson said Hispanic farmers were compensated at a significantly lower rate than white property owners, but the agency was not aware of homes being destroyed and animals killed or abandoned. The agency did not address whether homesteaders were forcefully removed.
Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. In the film, Murphy's Oppenheimer says the proposed site for a secret atomic weapons lab in northern New Mexico has only a boys' school and Native Americans performing burial rites. (Universal Pictures/The Associated Press)
Martinez has spent decades campaigning for the evicted homesteaders and the rights of Hispano, Native, women and other lab employees, and has won two class-action lawsuits relating to equal pay and treatment for them.
"These were Hispanic American homesteaders, which perhaps explains why this dark episode in American history is so ignored," she said.
Christopher Nolan's blockbuster movie Oppenheimer has stirred up northern New Mexico's conflicted relationship with "the lab," which today has more than 14,000 workers and is the region's largest employer.
For many local Hispanos — descendants of Spanish colonial settlers — its high wages have paid for homes, higher education and a chance to hang onto multigenerational property in this land-rich, cash-poor area.
The headquarter for the U.S. Atomic Energy Security Service is seen in Los Alamos in September 1947. (The Associated Press)
Marcel Torres, whose family has lived in the Penasco area since the 1700s, worked in the lab's most secret sectors for 35 years as a machinist helping build nuclear weapons — to, he said, "try and prevent a world war."
"We were so valuable to them that they didn't care who we were in race," Torres, 78, said, adding he earned about three times as much at the lab as he would have elsewhere in the area.
'Taking land for Los Alamos was not an aberration'
For others, the lab carries a legacy of death and dispossession.
Martinez lobbied the U.S. Congress for compensation for employees like her father, a lab worker who died after working with toxic chemical element beryllium.
In 2000, Congress acknowledged that radiation and other toxins had contributed to the deaths or illnesses of thousands of nuclear weapons workers.
An atomic bomb of the type that was dropped by the U.S. over Hiroshima, Japan, during the Second World War is seen in this undated photo released by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
The Department of Labour set up a compensation fund for those affected, but it took years for families to be paid, said Martinez, who served on New Mexico's state human rights commission in the early 2000s.
Myrriah Gomez, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, said her great-grandparents were evicted from their 25-hectare ranch to build the lab, and her grandfather died of colon cancer after working on the Manhattan Project.
J. Robert Oppenheimer "had no qualms about displacing people from their homelands," said Gomez, who wrote Nuclear Nuevo Mexico about the setting up of the lab.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, atomic physicist and head of the Manhattan Project, poses for a photo in 1944. (U.S. Department of Energy/Reuters)
Author Alisa Valdes, who has written a screenplay on Loyda Martinez, said scenes in Oppenheimer shot near Abiquiu, N.M., depicting the lab in an empty landscape echoed the U.S. government's line that the area was uninhabited.
Publicists for the movie did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lab was built on lands sacred to local Tewa people that were granted to Hispano settlers under Spanish colonial rule, then allotted to both Hispano and white homesteaders after the United States occupied the area following the 1846-48 Mexican-American War.
The main gate to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in February 1955 in New Mexico. (The Associated Press)
"Taking land for Los Alamos was not an aberration, it's what the United States had been doing since 1848," said State Historian of New Mexico Rob Martinez, whose great-uncle worked at the lab.
In 2004, homesteader families won a $10 million US compensation fund from the U.S. government.
Today Los Alamos County, where the lab is based, is one of the richest and best-educated in the U.S. Neighbouring Rio Arriba County, which is 91 per cent Hispanic and Native American, is among the country's poorest, with the lowest academic scores.
Researchers work inside the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1974. (U.S. Atomic Energy Commission)
"There's no economic development in our areas because it's all focused in Los Alamos," said Cristian Madrid-Estrada, director of the regional homeless shelter in Espanola, Rio Arriba's largest town.
The lab said that more than 61 per cent of employees hired since 2018 were from New Mexico, with most of its workforce living outside Los Alamos County.
"We are dedicated to the success of this region we all call home," a spokesperson said in a statement.
How Oppenheimer Proved Einstein Wrong About Black Holes
In addition to the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer also worked on many other areas of physics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer is largely known to history for his work on the Manhattan Project, the US government’s secret wartime nuclear bomb development project. That project would result in the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II, and they ushered in the Atomic Age, the Cold War, and endless iteration of post-apocalyptic fiction. There is no Mad Max without Oppenheimer.
But the Manhattan Project has largely eclipsed Oppenheimer’s previous work on a force even more powerful than nuclear bombs — black holes.
“Everyone knows his name in connection with the Manhattan Project, and that's certainly how I first learned of his name, because I grew up in Oak Ridge, one of the Manhattan Project sites.” Loyola University astrophysicist Robert McNees tells Inverse. But Oppenheimer wasn’t such a specialist in his time before his work on the bomb, working on nuclear and particle physics.
In a 1939 paper, Oppenheimer, then a particle physicist, declared that black holes were the inevitable result of the Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, contrary to the hopes of that scientist. Oppenheimer declared, like a few others before him,that black holes weren’t just a quirk of the mathematics, but likely real astrophysical objects — that a star massive enough is destined to implode, creating a trap from which what goes in cannot come back out.
“Mathematically, the work of Oppenheimer and his colleagues was really important to put these on firm theoretical footing,” Sheperd Doeleman, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of the Event Horizon Telescope, tells Inverse.
A black hole feeding on a star.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB
While Oppenheimer may have worked on black holes and atomic chain reactions, McNees says he was a bit of an intellectual nomad.
“He strikes me as one of those scientists who kind of like went from topic to topic and just had very good taste in what he worked on,” McNees says. “He would jump into an area and pinpoint an interesting problem and contribute something, and then maybe end up going on to something else.”
For example, Oppenheimer early work helped establish the concept of the positron, the antimatter equivalent of the electron. He also defined the nuclear process — the Oppenheimer-Phillipis process — involved in the transmutation of isotopes, like Carbon-12 transmuting to Carbon-13.
And then in the late 1930s, Oppenheimer stepped in to tell Einstein he was both right and wrong about the universe.
“In 1915, Einstein posits his equations of general relativity, his magnum opus. A masterpiece that elevates space-time from a stage to a participant in the drama,” University of Waterloo astrophysicist Avery Broderick tells Inverse. The Einstein field equations explained how the mass of matter curved the fabric of space-time, and how space-time in turn told matter how to move.
A year later in 1916, German Physicist Karl Schwarzschild came up with the first solution to the Einstein field equations, “which was pretty impressive, because they're difficult equations to solve,” Broderick says.
But the Schwartzchild solution implies something weird: That you could have a large mass in a single point, a singularity, which would so warp space-time that anything that came within a certain radius of that point would never be able to get out again.
“Everyone kind of chortled and said, ‘Oh, ho-ho, isn't that mathematically curious! But it will never happen,’” Doeleman says. Schwartzchild’s calculations showed that “theoretically, you could have a region of space time that was like a knot that you couldn't untie. And Einstein rebelled against that.”
Despite his crafting the theory of general relativity, Einstein, like many other physicists at the time, assumed singularities were either a mathematical phantom of Schwartchild’s solution, or, at the least, were a condition that nature could never actually enter into in practice.
“Einstein's approach or response to this was very natural, very experienced. He was like,Ah!, this can't happen. Nature will stop this, we just don't know how,” Broderick says. “You know, the universe intercedes.”
But in a 1939 paper entitled “On Continued Gravitational Contraction,” Oppenheimer and his co-author Hartland Snyder showed that a sufficiently massive star, when it exhausts its nuclear fuel, will necessarily contract forever, forming what we now know as a black hole.
“A lot of the things that kind of show up as descriptors and popular accounts of black holes, at least as far as I'm aware, originate in this paper,” McNees says.
For instance: If I were to watch you fly into a black hole from a safe distance, and you were holding up a clock I could see through a telescope, your clock would seem to slow down more and more as you approached the point of no return, known as the event horizon.
“It’s just kind of frozen,” McNees says, such that your falling into the black hole seems to take infinite time, from my perspective.
And even if you did fall in, it would be hard to see, because your light gets stretched out to longer and longer wavelengths — redshifted – to the point of obscurity.
But your experience is different. An observer falling past the event horizon doesn’t notice anything change, McNees says. Their clock runs as normal, and “for them, it happens in a finite amount of time.”
This is an effect of time dilation, which Christopher Nolan incidentally depicted in his early film, Interstellar, when a crew of astronauts spend time much closer to a black hole than their colleagues.
Einstein and Oppenheimer sit down together in 1947.UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES
REDISCOVERING THE BLACK HOLE
These weird findings wound up getting buried for years, thanks to the advent of World War II and the subsequent Manhattan Project, which closed out Oppenheimer’s work in astrophysics.. It would take the work of John Wheeler in the 1950s, and then Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking in the 1960s and 70s, to pick back up on the work Oppenheimer started and fill in the understanding of black holes we have today.
“It was the 60s and 70s, where people began to see cosmic objects that looked like they might be black holes, and that started a huge observational push to see these things,” Doeleman says.
X-ray and other observations would continue to find evidence gesturing at black holes, but it wasn’t until 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration released the first image of a black hole, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, that we could actually image the event horizon.
The next step in the EHT project is to move from still images to movies, getting a dynamic picture of how matter swirls into the maw of supermassive black holes, and looking for clues that might give to what lies behind the event horizon, according to Doeleman. It could help solve the biggest mystery in physics, how Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum mechanics, the rules that govern the other forces of the universe, fit together.
“At the center of the black hole at the singularity, that is where quantum physics and gravitational physics, which have never been shown to be consistent with each other, they have to combine,” Doeleman says. “We know that they have to merge. And we have no idea how that happens.” LEGACIES
All of that research and the discoveries yet to be uncovered comes to us in part because of the work Oppenheimer did, and for which he is barely known.
Doeleman questions how Oppenheimer himself would see his legacy today, knowing what became of his work on both nuclear weapons and black holes.
”Would he have thought the Manhattan Project was the most important thing? Or maybe he would think, ‘this black hole stuff is pretty amazing. And I'm glad to have been a part of something that went far beyond the Earth, was less terrestrial and more cosmic,” Doeleman says. “We won’t know that, but we can wonder.”
