Report: Indians still threatened

The last major campaigns by the U.S. Army against Indian tribes took place in the late 1800s. But the military is still dangerous to Indians in the West today, a new report found.

The study contends the dramatic expansion of U.S. military bases during the 20th century was largely concentrated in the same remote, arid places where Indian reservations were located.

That means Indians could be disproportionately exposed to toxic chemicals and unexploded bombs, compared to non-Indians, according to the report by Gregory Hooks of Washington State University and a former graduate student, Chad Smith, now of Texas State University-San Marcos.

Two world wars and the Cold War “pushed the United States to produce, test and deploy weapons of unprecedented toxicity,” the study said. “Native Americans have been left exposed to the dangers of this toxic legacy.”

The study, just published in American Sociological Review, is based on geography, not on actual data showing whether Indians are more often injured by unexploded bombs, Hooks said. Such studies remain to be conducted, he said.

Using Defense Department data on closed military bases in the lower 48 states – including bombing ranges, weapons testing and storage sites – researchers discovered the locations deemed most hazardous “lay within close proximity to Indian reservations,” the report said.

Numerous past studies have shown that minority groups often face so-called “environmental racism” from dangerous factories and other commercial facilities because poverty limits the places where they can afford to live.

But in Indian country, Indians typically did not choose the sites of their reservations, and the toxic wastes were created not by private industry but by the military.

This study is the first to show that Indian tribes in remote areas have faced the same sort of environmental discrimination as people in urban areas, Hooks said.

The study only considered closed military bases because security concerns make it impossible to learn of environmental hazards at functioning military bases, Hooks said.

As a result, military facilities like the Yakima Training Center, Whidbey Island Naval Air Station and Fort Lewis, Wash., all of which are located near Indian reservations, were not considered in the study, Hooks said.

That raises the possibility that dangers to Indians are even greater than what was found in the report, he said.

The study noted the U.S. military expanded dramatically into Indian country for much of the 20th century. That’s because they were looking for areas that were remote, unpopulated and already owned by the federal government.

Many Indian reservations are also located on some of the most undesirable land in the West, the study found.

The Department of Defense has acknowledged the problems, the report said, quoting a 2001 department report that said Indian lands have “hazardous materials, unexploded ordnance (UXO), abandoned equipment, unsafe buildings, and debris.”

The government estimates that unexploded ordnance, which can include mines, nerve gases and explosive shells, probably contaminates 20 million to 50 million acres of land in the United States and would take centuries to clean up at current rates.

The Army Corps of Engineers has a branch specifically dedicated to dealing with such dangers at closed bases.

Jerry Vincent, who oversees cleanup of formerly used military sites in California for the Army Corps in Sacramento, said most of the bombing ranges in his region are littered with dummy bombs that do not contain high explosives.

But he agreed that remote military sites that might be near Indian reservations get a low priority for limited cleanup funds because of the low population.

“We focus on areas with the greatest risk for the largest population,” Vincent said, naming sites near Los Angeles, San Diego and Palm Springs.

The counties of Imperial, Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego in California and Chaves and Luna in New Mexico were singled out in the new report for having large amounts of unexploded ordnance.

The report found that those six counties averaged 10.5 dangerous sites each, compared with 0.12 dangerous sites for each of the other 3,130 counties in the lower 48 states.

Jonathan Maas of the Army Corps in Seattle said they have been searching for a cache of chemical weapons that might have been stored at a facility on the Tulalip Reservation near Marysville in the 1940s, but have not found the weapons.

The report by Hooks and Smith found that in 1916, the U.S. Army owned about 1.5 million acres of land, and expanded dramatically during World War I. By 1940, the Army owned about 2 million acres of land.

The huge buildup to World War II saw the Army acquire another 8 million acres. Most of those lands were in the vicinity or contiguous to Indian reservations, the report said.

Conventional weapons in World War II were far more lethal than weapons from previous wars, and the United States has led the world in the production of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, the report said.

For instance, the huge Nellis Range near Las Vegas was absorbed into the nuclear weapons complex. The Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah saw tests of chemical warfare weapons, the report said.

The military also seized about 342,000 acres of land on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota for a bombing range to train pilots. That left many unexploded bombs on the landscape, the report said.