It is a lament that many Australian readers will recognise: an Indigenous narrator is telling the story of colonial dispossession, from the time of white settlement to the rampant mining activity of today, expressing his helplessness in the face of an implacable force that reinscribes the very landscape it has taken over, mapped and mined. ‘We got sacred peaks in every direction, and stories that tell us where we are,’ the narrator remarks. ‘You know, them stories that tell us how to live here. Sacred geography my granddaughter calls it… But now the white people got their own maps and different stories.’¹

Yet this passage is not about Australia at all, but comes from the crime novel Bone Game (1994), by the Native American novelist and academic Louis Owens. A Navajo elder is relating the narrative of the nuclear colonisation of New Mexico, to a couple of travellers driving west across the state on Interstate 40. It is a story both state and federal governments don’t like being told. From the atomic laboratories in Los Alamos in the north, which produced most of the components of the sausage-shaped bomb codenamed ‘Little Boy’ that obliterated Hiroshima, to the White Sands missile range in the south and to the uranium mines to the west, the native homelands of New Mexico have been made over into a factory for designing, making, testing and fuelling nuclear weapons.