Uranium mining is a colonial tool which allows corporate domination over Native reservations, simultaneously destroying native environments.

<Uranium mining is inextricably linked with indigenous peoples. According to LaDuke, ‘‘some 70 percent of the world’s uranium originates from Native Communities.’’5 Within the US, approximately 66 percent of the known uranium deposits are on reservation land, as much as 80 percent are on treaty-guaranteed land, and up to 90 percent of uranium mining and milling occurs on or adjacent to American Indian land.6 To support the federal government’s desire for nuclear weapons and power production, the Bureau of Indians Affairs (BIA) has worked in collusion with the Atomic Energy Commission and corporations such as Kerr-McGee and United Nuclear to negotiate leases with Navajo, Lakota and other nations for uranium mining and milling on their land between the 1950s to the present.7 BIA negotiated leases are supported by the complex body of Indian Law, which I will demonstrate enables federal intrusion into American Indian lands and governmental affairs. These leases are heavily tilted in favor of the corporations so that American Indian nations received only about 3.4 percent of the market value of the uranium and low paid jobs.8 Uranium mining has also resulted in severe health and environmental legacies for affected American Indian people and their lands. From uranium mining on Navajo land, there have been at least 450 reported cancer deaths among Navajo mining employees.9 Even now, the legacy of over 1000 abandoned mines and uranium tailing piles is radioactive dust that continues to put people living near tailing piles at a high risk for lung cancer.10>