New Technologies. Old Stories: The Forgotten Voices of Uranium Mining in Rural Wyoming

This paper presents the oral histories of those individuals lost in the aggrandized narratives surrounding uranium mining and early nuclear weapon development in the United States. Analysis of these interviews yielded two overarching tropes: (1) the romanticism of mining; and (2) greed or a production at all costs mentality. A critical anthropological lens propagates conflict, human rights abuses, and scholarly engagement as key areas to address when researching such mining issues. The tropes in this paper focus on these issues while identifying an additional area of study: colonialist tendencies promulgated by extractive industries. This paper, in particular, provides evidence of nuclear colonization on rural non-indigenous Wyoming lands. These findings are significant as they broaden the scope for future anthropological mining research while unearthing additional areas of the American West impacted by nuclear colonization.