Uranium Cadillac:

Energy Imperialism and the Work of Indigenous Literatures

(In Progress)

Abstract

            Uranium Cadillac highlights representations of energy, thermodynamic processes, and radioactive compounds in comparative North American indigneous literatures, roughly 1915 to 1995. The book considers how various Native American literary traditions have responded to non-living compounds and energetic systems, with broad implications for environmental ethics, material histories of media and literature, and the origins of nuclear studies. In this way, Uranium Cadillac is an example of scholarship in two emerging fields: energy humanities and Indigenous studies. Both areas of inquiry transgress the disciplinary barriers that persist between humanities scholars, native knowledge pathways, and biological, physical, and materials scientists to explore points of contact across multiple discourses, histories, and practices of knowledge. The aim is to cultivate more rigorous ways of theorizing the intersections of science, art, and society and to reconsider the work of “comparative” literary languages and genres.

Summary

            Beginning with the little-told story of Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac – the seventeenth-century French explorer of North America who founded Detroit in 1701 – Uranium Cadillac opens with a meditation on the entangled histories of exploration, economy, and transportation in the colonization of the American continent. The legacy of these histories appears nearly three centuries later in Sherman Alexie’s short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), which takes place on the Spokane Indian reservation and features a character who drives a “uranium money Cadillac”: compensation for the toxic effects of mining that left her water “too radioactive to drink.” The title of the book is thus a metaphor for the literal and figurative energies of American literature and history – its labors of creativity as well as its images of work, toxicity, and entropy – set against the development of physics, nuclear energy, and materials sciences from the late nineteenth century to the twenty first.