Nuclear Power on Ancestral Homeland: The Idaho National Laboratory and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL), established in 1949 by the United States Atomic Energy Commission as the National Reactor Testing Station and renowned as the birthplace of atomic electricity and the U.S. nuclear Navy, is located on the ancestral lands of the Shoshone and Bannock peoples. Although the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868 had relocated them to the Fort Hall Reservation about forty miles from the nuclear facility, the Tribes—or Sho-Bans—have continued to practice hunting, fishing, gathering, and ceremonial traditions across eastern Idaho, including on lands now occupied by the nuclear site. This article retraces key moments in the relationship between INL and the Sho-Bans—from invisibility, to agency and dialogue through empowering protests in the 1990s—in order to examine how these interactions reflect both divergence and occasional convergence in perceptions of and approaches to land use, land cultures, and environmental value. As in many other locales across the nuclear West, the spatial and cartographic history of southeastern Idaho is one of overlapping layers, routes, and habitats: the product of ongoing mapping and countermapping.