| dc.description.abstract | The Hanford Site, located in Washington State, USA, was integral to the World War II Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear weapons programs. Hanford produced plutonium used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and later became a dual nuclear energy and plutonium production site. In the 1980s, as Hanford was about to be shut down, residents of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho found out they had been exposed to possibly dangerous levels of nuclear radiation via air and water pathways. Those residents included indigenous peoples. Health studies began in the late 1980s and early 1990s to determine both how much radiation people had been exposed to and what the effects might have been. American Indian leaders and representatives, having feared Hanford radiation for years, became heavily involved with those studies. This thesis looks at two avenues for American Indian involvement via citizen advisory committees: the Technical Steering Panel to the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project, and the Hanford Health Effects Subcommittee. How were American Indian tribes involved with investigations into the Hanford’s sites effects on tribal populations, and specifically in what ways did the US Department of Energy, its contractors, and citizen advisory board members develop communication with American Indian tribes? I build on anthropologist Edward Liebow’s application of forced federalism to the Hanford case, which shows that after the 1988 Tribal Self-Governance Act, tribal-federal relations began to deteriorate and be replaced by state-tribal relations that absolved the federal government of a special trust relationship to tribes. By looking at communication between tribal representatives and other actors through the lens of forced federalism, this project highlights how tribes were treated as stakeholders instead of as self-governed indigenous groups. I conclude that the sovereign status of tribes was deemphasized and even ignored by civilian stakeholders and Battelle, the contractor for the Department of Energy. As a result, tribal representatives were often frustrated by the process of the Hanford health studies, and formed their own advocacy group, the Native American Working Group – later called the Inter-Tribal Council on Hanford Health Projects – in order to more effectively express and implement their positions and needs. | eng |