CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/10/2022

Honoring Indigenous Peoples' Day with a powerful book on Native Art and Political Ecology

Featured spreads are from Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology, back in stock from Radius Books and IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. With a particular focus on the impact of nuclear testing, accidents and uranium mining on Native peoples and the environment, this volume is edited by MoCNA Chief Curator Manuela Well-Off-Man. She writes: "The artists included in Exposure offer critical, experiential, and emotional analyses of the nuclear story and reveal the absence of Indigenous voices in the official narrative, which has been dominated by settler colonialism. Too often, governments, outsider mining companies and the military initiated uranium extraction and nuclear weapons testing on Indigenous lands without any permission from the tribes. As a result, toxic radiation can still be found in the environment and in the bodies of Indigenous people even decades after exposure. As the artworks in this exhibition reveal, the reasons for uranium mining and nuclear arms testing are rooted in the same ideologies that gave rise to colonialism. Many Indigenous cultures have stories that teach about the importance of leaving uranium in the ground to avoid harm. We need to return to a culture of respect and listen to these stories. Because the half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years and the half-life of U235 is 703.8 million years, it is crucial that artists keep exposing the threats of toxic radiation and nuclear catastrophes for present and future generations."