Personal Connection 

As a young Native girl growing up I loved being outside with my siblings or relatives. I love exploring and just going for walks in nature. Or going down to creeks, the river to go play or fishing. Getting older I started to get involved in the study of the land and just last year I was brought more Into my topic. Attending a water chemistry field trip we looked at how our waters overall heath was and it was bad. So much has been done to our land and waters It made me question the people so close to It other than natives. Which Involved looking back Into history and how they took care of chemical contamination and chemical pollution. I pin pointed LANL for my shp topic because I live close to them and they have a long history of not doing their job in a safe way or doing their job at all. I want to address the problem In my SHP because LANL has caused endless sickness and deaths to many people for not taking responsibility and If Its gonna be a consistent cycle I am a individual who will put myself out there for the love of my people. I am tired of the lies that they will take care of their issues when they still repeat to this day. 

 ¨Sharing One Skin¨, by Jeanette Armstrong 

Reading the Armstrong Article ¨One Skin¨ really made me want to connect more with my culture. It really emphasizes the importance of knowing our native identity. As well as allowing ourselves to be open to opening oneself to exhale and inhale capacities of one's self to be acknowledged. Such as taking the categories of the physical, emotional, thinking-intellectual, and spiritual self into perspective. This is all in the way of finding and knowing one's real self, or even finding oneself, that makes us who we are.

Nuclear Colonialism 

With the reading of this chapter Nuclear Colonialism it talks about the begging of the Manhattan Project and the start of nuclear colonialism affecting the people and land. The Pajarito Plateau was home to many Native Americans an NuevoMexicanos, but home was no longer home when the Manhattan project entered in 1942. As European-Americans and Texans started coming in, fences of land started going up on the plateau. Ultimately the Homestead Act benefited the Nuevomexicanos in Los Alamos. The Act allowed them to legally reclaim land that they had formally used or were using atop the platue. However with the crucial need to complete the project the eviction of over thirty families and farms took place. Leaving Home with no place to go. 

EPA says Los Alamos County Contributing  to LANL's polluted run off

Streets, rooftops, parking lots, and hard sufacesare carrying containments of runoff stormwater which contain mercury, copper, nickel, cyanide, radiation, and polychlorinated biphenyls, cancer causing chemicals known as PCB's. These toxins are seeping into canyons, arroyos, and our Rio Grande River, which is used for drinking water and irrigation. The lab claimed some of its runoff exceeds pollution standards because the towns contaminated stormwater is flowing onto its sites. Gov Michelle Lujan Grisham has voiced support for regulating a polluted runoff coming off the Pajarito Plateau. However the EPA stated in the court decision that some canyons aren't federally protected, and they are funneling the stormwater to the Rio Grande, which qualifies for safe guards. A solution to the problem which was suggested was building retention  ponds which can catch and store the contaminated runoff water and It can be afforded due to Los Alamos being financially inclined.

Protect Caja del Rio

The Caja del Rio Plateau is more than 106,000 acres of stunning landscape managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the United States Forest Service.Centuries of human existence show their cultural imprint. From time immemorial Indigenous peoples have lived within this large area leaving behind petroglyphs, former pueblos, understated shrines, and oral memories. The Caja del Rio Plateau is a place we are in danger of losing.Along with its cultural importance to the Pueblo people surrounding the Caja, people from traditional Hispano communities remain connected to the land and rely on its many resources to sustain traditional ways of life.It has no protection from development and falls under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.Los Alamos National Labs is proposing a transmission line and a system of highways that would decimate a landscape that is critical to sacred sites and all wildlife present in the Caja del Rio.

Endless fallout: The pacific idyll still facing nuclear blight 77 years on

The legacy of Americans' nuclear testing on indigenous communities both on the US Mainland and its territories has come under renewed scrutiny. A 2012 United Nations report said the effects of radiation on the Marshall Islands are long-lasting and have caused near irreversible Environmental contamination. The people of the Island will not leave because the land is their home and they have nowhere to go and they have to endure exposing themselves on a daily basis. The health impacts on the Marshallese people has never been investigated, have never received a apology let alone compensated for there island being tested on or the concrete tomb that stores nuclear contamination on their water and island.