(...) I want to thank the organizers of the Nuclear-Free Future Award for inviting me to have the honor of presenting the Resistance Award to Dorothy Purley who is of the Laguna Pueblo people.

Dorothy Purley is certainly a fighter on behalf of the peoples of this area, of Laguna Pueblo and all the pueblo people of all the Hano whatever race or ethnic background that they may be. She has worked directly in the industry like I did when I was younger, just out of high school I worked for Kerr-McGee in the Ambrosia Lake region, which is north of Acoma Pueblo, where many of us who were from the poor, economically poor, native and Hispanic communities, in that area we found jobs, and jobs were what was necessary in order to make it, I guess you could say as citizens, we needed food, clothes, housing and so forth. And Dorothy Purley found herself also working for the Anaconda cooperation at Jackpile Uranium Mine. Jackpile on the Laguna Pueblo homeland was the largest operating open pit uranium mine in the Western Hemisphere, if not in the world. It was where uranium ore was mined, and she was part of the employee force that brought the uranium out of the mine and have it taken or trucked to the mill site at Blue Water, and other places where the uranium ore was refined into uranium fuel.

Now we as the native people of our own homeland at Laguna and Acoma often found ourselves in that spot uncomfortable as it may be of having been part of that process that was set in motion really not through our own efforts but because of the nature of capitalism. The economic political system that creates places like Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore in California, San Dia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, White Sands missile range, a cooperate capitalism and it's mentality and it's heartlessness that does not care for the Acoma people, the Laguna people, the Tewa people of the original lands where Los Alamos is located .

Nevertheless because of the position that we have, we and people like Dorothy Purley, especially, find ourselves of having to be the leading spokespeople about the experience and about the devastation that is taking place, because the devastation has been cultural, has been community, has been economic, and we are also of course spokespeople for what we must do to reclaim ourselves -- especially our health.

Dorothy Purley's health has been affected like many other peoples health in their homeland of Acua and Owaka, because of the effects of radiation . Nevertheless it's very, very important that the words be spoken about the experience because in that experience lies the way in which we all can join and be resistors against the negative impacts that the nuclear atmosphere or the nuclear experience has faced people with. Not only has it faced people with the deadly atomic explosion like at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but here in our own homeland in the southwest .

So I am very honored to speak these words on behalf of the Laguna and Acoma communities because it's also words I think spoken of people in the American southwest who have concerns about the health of our future. So, Dorothy, I am very happy that you are receiving this Award... I want to congratulate you for this Award as I present it to you.

(Indigenous words)

Dorothy Purley's Acceptance Speech

Home | Nachrichten | 1999 Award Preisträger | 1998 Award Preisträger | eMail