Atomic Histories and Elemental Futures across Indigenous Waters

Abstract

Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna’s 2018 collaborative video poem Rise is a trans-Indigenous call to action. Set along the watery edges of the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the stark ice sheets of Greenland, the images that accompany their words train our eyes on water: a common, critical element of life as it shape-shifts across the globe. As climate change threatens the homeland of each poet through rapidly increasing glacial melt, the poem articulates how the Western world’s willful denial of irreversible damage performs a colonial violence with deep roots. This article contextualizes Rise by exploring nuclear histories of dispossession used to make way for the extension of normative American domestic life onto and into Indigenous territories cleared for Cold War projects. In doing so, I consider how Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna offer a particularly salient response to the militarized infrastructures so violently imposed upon their territories in order to trouble the spatial and conceptual cleaving of anthropogenic precarity between “remote” places and a culpable Western world.

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