Dr. Silver Presents at History Conference in New Mexico

Ken Silver, Associate Professor of Environmental Health, gave an invited presentation on October 15 at “Querencia Interrupted: Hispano and Native American Experiences of the Manhattan Project”, a conference in Espaola, New Mexico.  The conference featured diverse perspectives on nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, whose establishment in a “secret city” in 1943 brought profound changes to the region’s traditional Hispanic and Pueblo Indian communities. 

Silver spoke on “Los Alamos Health Issues through Three Frames of Reference:  Industrial America, the Atomic Complex, and Indigenous Communities.”  “Over the years, I’ve heard widely disparate perspectives on the impacts of Los Alamos on worker and environmental health,” Silver said.  “’Frame of reference’ is just a fancy way of saying ‘where you stand depends on where you sit,’” he said. 

“If the economic rewards from a facility are unevenly distributed, that can influence the perception of risks of radiation exposures,” he argued.   Indigenous communities with a multigenerational perspective quickly grasp that environmental standards tend to get more stringent over time.  Yet from the vantage point of other DOE facilities, Los Alamos “looks pretty good” in part because it seldom had a role in producing large quantities of weapons grade materials.  “While if you sit in a private sector company anywhere else in America,” Silver added, “Los Alamos may look like a laggard historically in complying with government regulations for chemical hazards,” he added.  

The Spanish word “querencia” in the title of the conference “is a spiritual concept of metaphysical proportions,” said Dr. Ana X Gutierrez Sisneros, Assistant Professor of Nursing at Northern New Mexico College, where the conference was held.  “For us it comes from ‘querer’, to love, to want -- one knowing where they are from, how one is tied to the land, the water, the air, the people of that place.”  Since the Manhattan Project of World War II, “we are keenly aware of how Los Alamos interrupted our land-based cultures,” she added. 

The conference was co-sponsored by the Northern Rio Grande Heritage Area.  Other speakers addressed topics ranging from oral histories of Los Alamos workers, to life in the region prior to Los Alamos, to concerns of residents near the Trinity Site in southern New Mexico where the first nuclear explosion took place in secret in the summer of 1945.  

A workshop on high explosives accidents that killed seven workers in the 1950’s incorporated voices from the Hispanic community, including surviving family members.  “I was deeply moved,” said Silver, whose doctoral dissertation had a major focus on Los Alamos worker issues.  “It was good to see Los Alamos staff scientists engaged in a long-term process of working with the families, even weaving their stories into today’s safety training programs. 

“It’s about time.” 

Ken Silver’s recent work on DOE facilities has also taken him to: 

• Safety Fest in Oak Ridge, TN for a joint presentation on the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (September 11);
• National Day of Remembrance for Cold War era workers held in Oliver Springs, TN for brief remarks (October 26); and
• a meeting of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Advisory Board on Toxic Substances and Worker Health held in Santa Fe, NM (week of November 13).