Environmental justice and American-Indian sovereignty: Political, economic, and ethnic struggles regarding the storage of radioactive waste

This dissertation employs a case study method that examines the intricate political and ecological implications of siting a temporary storage of high-level radioactive waste facility on the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indian Reservation in Tooele County, Utah. The goals of this dissertation project are; (1) to clarify the theory and practice of environmental justice by incorporating the notion of local autonomy in analysis of locational conflicts; (2) to bridge the scholarly gap between ideas of environmental justice and political ecology; and (3) to examine tribal identity politics and struggles to retain sovereignty in the process of environmental decision-making at and across different geographical and political scales.; Four premises underlie the theoretical framework for this dissertation project: (1) The existing discourse of environmental racism oversimplifies the complexity of the political economy of environmental justice; (2) The theory of distributive justice has dominated the scholarship of environmental justice; academics need to utilize and develop a theory of procedural justice; (3) The theoretical discussion of environmental justice has to incorporate the notion of local autonomy, in relation to the politics of tribal sovereignty and identities; (4) Political ecology enhances the theoretical foundation of the study of environmental justice. This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary case study approach to explore the question of environmental justice in relation to American Indian tribal sovereignty and self-determination. I have used archival research and interviews as the two major methods for this study.; In conclusion, the contested Skull Valley geographies, which implicate assertions of localities at and across different spatial, political, and temporal scales, indicate that the scholarship of environmental justice has to specify the structural processes of capitalist political economy as well as communities' agency in pursuing self-determination. Given various political, economic, and historical issues regarding environmental justice, there exists no easy answer for resolving the Skull Valley conflict concerning the siting of high-level radioactive waste. Environmental justice scholars are encouraged to reframe their research questions to articulate the truly complex practices of political economy and historical colonialism over communities' struggles for self-determination.