Part 4 of 4 Parts (Please read Parts 1,2 and 3 first)  
     The Washington state Department of Ecology helps oversee the Hanford cleanup. Its staff meet with the Yakama Nation at least once a month. They describe their relationship with the tribal Nation as a bit of “push and pull”.
     Laura Watson is the director of the Washington state Department of Ecology. She said, “We are the regulators, and sometimes Yakama Nation would like us to push a little harder than they perceive us doing. And so there’s a little bit of that push and pull. And that’s fine, that’s actually important as a regulator to have folks pushing.”
     A fully rehabilitated Hanford site likely will not happen within the lifetime of Yakama Nation’s elders, or even the generation that follows. However, they are working diligently to bring younger tribal members to the effort.
     Samantha Redheart coordinates Stem programs for ER/WM. In recent years, she has held coloring contests, a mass mailing of postcards and visited local schools. The ER/WM has offered college scholarships for students studying such subjects as engineering and sciences. The STEM outreach program hopes that those who receive scholarships may one day bring that knowledge back to the community. Redheart said, “We always share that Hanford is a multi-generational cleanup site. Yakama Nation leaders and management are always looking into not just the cleanup today, but for our future generations and of our children that are not yet born.”
      Twenty-two high school students were allowed to visit Hanford in 2016. This was a rare opportunity, according to Redheart, because those under sixteen are usually not allowed on most of the site. She said that they took the students to series of culturally significant sites, pointing out the traditional cultural artifacts and salmon spawning grounds. The experience was thoroughly regimented. It involved DoE staff, hasmat guides and strict timelines.
     If Sohappy got her wish, sharing her knowledge of Hanford before it was a nuclear site with the next generation would involve something like a trip back in time. She would take them on wagons and horses to each of the important sites. She would make sure to point out where the strawberry fields and old town once stood. It is difficult to know whether that will ever be a reality. Personally, she has not been to the Hanford site for over a decade. She said, “It angers me that I can’t go where my dad used to wander around. There’s nothing there that’s pleasurable. Not anymore anyway. It’s all torn up.”
(Editor’s note: I had just started my consulting business in the early 1980s when I got a call from a friend of mine. He had been consulting with the Yakama Nation on economic development. Russell Jim was just getting his new program going. The tribe needed a nuclear laboratory that they could contract to monitor the Hanford cleanup but finding one was not easy. I contacted Jim and told him that I would be glad to help. After a lot of research, I was able to find an RFP from the Washington state Department of Ecology for nuclear laboratories. I used it as a guide to craft a new RFP for the Yakama Nation which was accepted and used by the tribe to find their own nuclear consultant.)

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Ambient office = 109 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 73 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 72 nanosieverts per hour

Blueberry from Central Market = 101 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 84 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 68 nanosieverts per hour

Part 3 of 4 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)  
     Chemicals including mercury which can cause damage to the brain, kidneys and heart as well as PCBs, which can cause cancer, have been found in the Columbia River. These dangerous substances could be ingested by eating fish from the river. An advisory warning fishermen was released in 2017. The Hanford Reach is a one-hundred-and-fifty-mile section of the river that runs through Hanford. The advisory suggests limiting consuming some fish from the Columbia four or fewer times a month.
     In the past ten years, it has been discovered that hundreds of gallons of highly radioactive waste have been leaking from two Hanford tanks, threatening the Columbia River.
     McClure Tosch is a Natural Resource Injury Assessment lead for ER/WM. He recently said that the Yakama Nation has played a key role in the developing a plan for the EPA to monitor the Columbia basin, including fish tissue.
     ER/WM has also been advocating for the federal government to test the water wells at Hanford near the Columbia River for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) which are long-lasting chemicals that can be found in an array of commercial and industrial products. If the tests do reveal PFAS pollution, that could be a huge concern for the local drinking water. The Washington Department of Energy said, “Information-gathering about the occurrence and use of PFAS at DoE sites is ongoing”.
     The Yakama Nation has also focused on preserving culturally significant plants. Recently, Sherwood has been supervising the protection of a bright yellow plant known as Umtanum desert buckwheat. This plant has long been known as a medicinal plant among the local Indigenous people. Today, Hanford is the only place in the world it is documented as growing.
     Despite the fact that the federal government is slow to act, the Yakama Nation has scored some important winds.
      Recently, the ER/WM succeeded in amending a cleanup proposal for an area next to the Columbia Rivcer that contains nuclear reactors. Their work is ensuring it will include a review of the impact of the pollution on aquatic insects. In the coming months, Tosch says that the Yakama Nation will work with the federal government to assess the effectiveness of a polyphosphate injection to sequester uranium found in Hanford’s ground water. The tribe has questioned the wisdom of this approach.
     ER/WM staff have also pushed back against a federal change in how high-level radioactive waste is classified. This could downgrade some of Hanford’s waste which would prevent it from being removed from the site as is currently expected. The DoE said they do not plan to proceed with this new interpretation without first consulting with the local Indigenous Nations.
     For their part, both the DoE and EPA said that their representatives meet with Yakama Nation regularly about Hanford. They have benefited from the tribe and other local Indigenous Nations’ expertise and input.
     Brian Stickney is the DoE deputy manager for the Hanford site said in a statement that while the Yakama Nation wants to see their lands returned to a pre-nuclear state, the DoE is focused on regulatory requirements and protecting treaty rights.
Please read Part 4 next

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Ambient office = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 79 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 86 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 62 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 4 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     Yakama Nation history at the Hanford site dates back to pre-colonization by Europeans. The Indigenous people fished for sturgeon, salmon and lamprey in the Columbia River. They gathered and traded with other families. In 1855, the Nation ceded more than eleven million acres of land to the U.S. including the Hanford area. They signed a treaty that relegated them to a reservation while allowing them the right to continue fishing, hunting and gathering roots and berries at “all usual and accustomed places” which included the Hanford Reservation.
     In the 1940’s the situation shifted significantly when the Hanford site was clear out to make room for the construction of nuclear reactors.
      LaRena Sohappy is the vice-chairwoman for Yakama Nation General Council. Her father was a well-known, medicine man. She grew up in Wapato which is about forty miles from Hanford. She remembers the strawberry fields that lined the Hanford site. Her family gathered Skolkol which is a daily food for the Yakama. They traveled to the Hanford site for ceremonies. Her cousin’s family lived close to Hanford. They were awakened in the middle of the night and forced to leave Hanford to make way for the nuclear site. She said “They didn’t have time to pack up anything. They just had to leave, and they were never told why and how long they were going to be gone.”
     The effort to give Indigenous people a voice in the fate of Hanford was driven in part by Russell Jim who was a member of the Yakama Nation’s council. His efforts have been credited with helping to keep Hanford from becoming a permanent “deep geologic repository” which would be a place where high-level nuclear waste from this site and others across the country would be stored. Russell Jim passed away in 2018. He said in a statement to the U.S. Senate in 1980, “From time immemorial we have known a special relationship with Mother Earth. We have a religious and moral duty to help protect Mother Earth from acts which may be a detriment to generations of all mankind.”
     The ER/WM program was founded in the early 1980’s headed by Jim. Today, it includes staff such as a biologist, ecologist and archeologist. The program is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) which operates the Hanford site and leads the cleanup process under an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Washington State Department of Ecology.
     The Yakama Nation’s program is focused on accelerating a thorough cleanup of the site with the goal of protecting culturally significant resources and assessing the threats to wildlife and water.
      The area around Hanford is considered to the last free-flowing section of the Columbia River. There is a major spawning site for the Chinook salmon and sturgeon live all year long along this section of the river. Phil Rigdon is Yakama Nation acting Tribal Administrative Director. He said, “Our people, we’re fish people, we’re salmon people in the Columbia River … So for us, that was a priority”.
Please read Part 3 next

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Ambient office = 109 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Watermelon from Central Market = 106 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 91 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 82 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 4 Parts
     The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in south central Washington state is considered to be one of the most radioactively contaminated places in the world. It sits on the ancestral lands of the Yakama Nation and other Indigenous peoples in Washington. In this area, precious wildlife, vision quest sites and burial grounds sit side by side with signs reading “warning hazardous area” and towering nuclear reactors, some of which date back to the second World War.
     Trina Sherwood is a cultural specialist for the Yakama Nation’s Environmental Restoration/Waste Management (ER/WM) program. She points to Gable Mountain in the Hanford area where young Indian men would fast and pray. There is Locke Island which was once the site of an Indigenous village. Native peoples collected white paint from the towering White Bluffs. There are also outcroppings of tules which were used to weave mats for ceremonies, as well as yarrow root which was used to treats burns.
     The Hanford Reservation was established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan project. Over the next four decades, about two-thirds of the plutonium used in U.S. nuclear weapons was produced at Hanford, including the plutonium used in the bomb that demolished Nagasaki, Japan at the end of World War II. 
     During the operational lifetime of weapons development at Hanford, billions of gallons of liquid waste were dumped in underground storage tanks or just poured straight into trenches dug in the ground. The nine nuclear reactors at Hanford were shut down in 1987. Following that, about fifty-six million gallons of radioactive waste were left behind in one hundred and seventy-seven big underground storage tanks. Currently, at least two of these tanks are leaking radioactive materials into the soil.
     In the decades since the end of weapons development, the Yakama Nation has been one of four local Indigenous communities dedicated to the cleanup of this historic landscape. With respect to the Yakama Nation, there has been continuous oversight, advocacy and outreach with hope that one day the site will be restored to its natural state which could open the doors to a long-awaited unencumbered homecoming. (Editor’s note: Back in the 80s, I personally contracted with the Yakama Nation to write a Request for Proposals for a nuclear consultant to monitor the U.S. cleanup of the Hanford site.)
     Today, the work of the Yakama Nation has accelerated. There are few Yakama elders still alive who remember the Hanford area before its corruption. Unfortunately, there are likely to be decades to go before the cleanup is completed. Yakama elders are racing to pass the history of the Hanford site to the next generation, in the hope that they can one day take over.
      Laurene Contreras is the administrator for ER/WM, the program responsible for the Yakama Nation’s Hanford work. “Our elders are leaving that have that historical knowledge; people that actually lived there during that time and can tell you stories about the area. That’s why it’s so important for us to make sure that we’re carrying that message forward.”
Please read Part 2 next