My First Rodeo - Summer 2022

If you guessed somewhere in the American South, you guessed wrong. Sally’s story may seem familiar to you as the practice of chattel enslavement in the late nineteenth century was common in the southern United States. However, Sally did not live in the south and was not African American. She was an enslaved Paiute woman who lived in the home of Brigham Young, the leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

In the twenty-first century, the history of enslavement is at the center of many public debates over the nation’s legacy from the past. Many people understandably would assume that this history took place in the American South, but it is a story set in the interior West, a region that must be included in the current national reckoning.

The Old Spanish Trail crossed New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California. Today the trail is recognized through a national park, various historical markers, and portions of the infamous Route 66. The Old Spanish Trail was the local for both an Indigenous slave trade and a route of travel for chattel enslaved people. Utah claims a central place in the discussion of enslavement in the North American West. It was within Utah that both chattel and Indigenous enslavement was legal. In 1852, the Utah Territorial Legislature passed An Act in Relation to Service, which legalized chattel slavery, and An Act in Relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners, which legalized Indigenous captivity. The first law controlled slave owners and the second controlled the enslaved people. 

The first law had nine sections. Each section of the law limited the power of chattel slaveowners toward their enslaved persons. In southern chattel slavery, the children of slaves were automatically the property of the mother’s owner. In contrast, An Act in Relation to Service states that “no contract shall bind the heirs of the servant or servants to service.” Southern slave owners increased their “property value” through the birth of slave children. Slave owners in Utah would gain no additional “property” through the birth of children.

The second law contained four sections and dealt with the forced assimilation of Indigenous captives. The Utah Territorial Legislature viewed the assimilation of Indigenous captives as “the duty of all humane and Christian people to extend unto this degraded and downtrodden race.”  Captives were automatically placed into Anglo-American homes, clothes, and schools for at least twenty years, with no regard for their Indigenous languages and customs. 

An Act in Relation to Service and An Act for the Further Relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners made slavery in Utah legal. Both are nearly forgotten. Nonetheless, these laws should be within the discussion of enslavement within the United States. This is a reminder that all enslaved persons- rather chattel, Indigenous, or people caught in captivity today- matter. We need to see the legacy of enslavement in the United States. The role of the Old Spanish Trail and the enslaved persons that traveled it, hold a place within the wider narrative of enslavement. 

            “Where are our leaders?” D. says this with his arms spread wide, almost touching the walls. We are recording an oral history in the staff trailer at an SOS site in a church parking lot. SOS stands for Safe Outdoor Spaces, sanctioned campsites established for 6-month terms across the city of Denver. Tents are fixed on wooden pallets, and the sites are enclosed with privacy walls. Services arrive on weekly schedules: laundry trucks, shower trucks, laptops, donated food on a meal train. 

Last summer, a colleague and I recorded oral histories with 12 SOS residents and staff. We hoped that oral history’s guiding principle of “shared authority” would benefit a community so rarely invited to contribute what they know.

D. asks me to pause the recording. He is tearing up. Getting a spot at an SOS site means that for the first time in a long time, he is thinking about something other than the next meal, shower, or camping spot. He has a lot to say and he takes his time with how to say it.

These narratives record only a sliver of what this community knows, but that sliver is a crack of light from under the door. Isaac knows that when organizations passed around hand sanitizer during the pandemic, campers used it to build fires, more concerned about the cold than a virus. He knows how to wake up in the rain to find that his shoes have been stolen from his feet. He knows that when you walk through a city without shoes on, people will not ask  "do you need help?" and no one will say "hang in there.” He knows that people will offer only “dirty looks.” 

Dan knows that when people living in houses and apartments get nervous about campers in their neighborhood, a conversation would do wonders. “If you come to us with a problem,” he says, “most of us can help you . . . fix it.”

Helena knows that we can’t give up on each other. “When I was on the streets,” she says, “and I was struggling with addiction . . . all I wanted was for somebody to care. All I wanted was for somebody who understands what I'm going through to help me. And I know I can't be the only person who feels that way.”

Later in D.’s narrative, he turns toward the tents outside. His eyes are dry when he says, “We don't want to believe that our system, the best system in the world, created problems for people who may never come out of it. . . .we have to decide as a country, as a nation, what's acceptable and what isn't.”

As the paperwork of homelessness piles up in filing cabinets and databases, we might try to listen to what people behind the data know. If records leave us with the what of numbers, oral histories might leave us with the so what of stories and knowledge.

Click here to access the SOS Oral History project. 

But when we factor in issues like immigration, land rights, and diplomacy, we find more similarities than differences. Therefore, looking at the historical entanglements between the American empire in California and Britain’s Pacific Empire better equips us in the present day to address issues of xenophobia, access to natural resources, and ongoing demands for decolonization. 

It was my drive to better understand the evolution of these issues that brought me some 5,437 miles (or 8,750 kilometers—see? Those pesky cultural differences arise again!) from California to London to consult British government records. 

And here I beg for an indulgent pause to reflect on “the historical profession.” As historians, our job is to go into archives, research, and from that research tell stories that both illuminate our past and shed light on our present moment. We’re taught to be objective, logical. From the outside, it seems a rather neat and tidy experiment (though in reality it never is.) But nowhere in graduate school are you taught what to do when you find something unexpected, something that so wholly disturbs the peace and tranquility of the reading room. 

So, one very normal morning, I turned the page in one of the many folios and came across a shipping report, and the following note on one table sent chills across my body:

“Many of the Chinese jumped overboard.” 

Image 1. Ledger detailing the deaths and illness of Chinese emigrants. The remarks point to the unhygienic and inhumane conditions aboard many sailing vessels. Letter from Clinton Murdoch, 19 June 1958. The British Library, Carnarvon Papers, Add MS 60782. 

This was the last line in a ledger documenting the suicide of Chinese laborers aboard British and American (as well as Spanish, French, Portuguese…) sailing vessels who were sent, many through force or coercion, to Cuba in the mid-19^th century. This “coolie trade” began in the 1840s, consisting mostly of men from China (as well as South Asia) who were often kidnapped or frauded by agents into so-called indentured servitude in the Caribbean, a very colonial labor solution to the end of the African slave trade. 

And I sat as tears welled up and spilt over, soaking into my face mask. I couldn’t shake those six words that, for most, are probably the only earthly record remaining of their lives: “Many of the Chinese jumped overboard.” Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the furtive glances of one archivist, certainly equally parts confused about my emotional state and concerned that my tears might land on these priceless papers. I struggled to regain my composure, thinking about the hundreds of people who sooner sought what dignity that could in choosing death far from home, than suffer under slavery. It reminded me of the stories of Middle Passage—of the horrific conditions that enslaved Africans faced upon the perilous voyage across the Atlantic. Many of them, too, sought solace in the sea. 

At first I felt self-conscious and ashamed of my reaction; as professionals were expected to train the emotion out of ourselves—especially us women—in order to be taken seriously. But then I realized there is strength in emotion, and the “ideal” of the unfeeling scholar is an affront to the humanity we so often claim to seek. Empathy is empowering, and I fervently encourage any reading this to embrace emotion, for it’s a universal tool that allows us to connect to other humans, past and present. After all, aren’t historians conduits between the living and the dead? 

Sundown towns are remembered mostly as being towns that mandated the exclusion of Black, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American people. Located mostly in the Midwest and the West, they were enacted as a response to the growing number of Black people fleeing racial violence in the South and coincided with the growing labor market in the West. Targeting a particular group was dependent on the ethnic makeup of particular regions.

Established in 1906, Minden, NV is situated in the Carson Valley which is home to the Pa Wa Lu or “People of the Valley” band of the Wašíw. Federally recognized as the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, the Wašíw maintain that we have been of this land since time immemorial. The relationship between the Wašíw and settlers has been contentious since settlers first flooded our area in search of mining prospects and rich farmlands. These competing worldviews clashed and served as a staging ground for conflict.  

Restricting the presence of Wašíw people in particular places was seen as a policy that would help to eliminate friction between the groups. This of course would only serve to empower settlers with the jurisprudence to enact violence. 

The restriction was policed by not only law enforcement, but many white citizens also took it upon themselves to determine and carry out penalties. Wašíw elders have shared horror stories of the treatment they suffered. Many acts of violence occurred on a wide spectrum from being verbally assaulted with racial slurs like “Go back to the Rez DIGGER!” and “You squaws better get home if you know what’s best for you!” to physical and sexual assault. Several Wašíw men were beaten and their braids were cut off. Many Wašíw women were beaten and raped. These acts of violence would go unpunished as the Wašiw people did not hold confidence in law enforcement as law enforcement officials were co-perpetrators. 

The uncompromising position of the Wašíw to silence the siren has been recognized by the Nevada state legislature. On February 2, 2021, Assembly Bill 88 was signed by Governor Steve Sisolak and mandated a statewide ban on sundown sirens. This prompted action from Minden and on June 30, 2021, an unsanctioned agreement was struck between the Washoe Tribe Chairman Serell Smokey and Minden Town Manager J.D. Frisby. Minden’s website stated, “The 5:00 p.m. siren will serve to acknowledge the volunteer firefighters and first responders who have been historically dispatched by the town siren. Deleting the 6:00 p.m. siren will honor those hurt by archaic sundowner mandates of prior eras.”

Many residents of Dresslerville, NV – a Wašíw community connected to the town met the day following at a Dresslerville Community Council meeting to deliberate the issue. Following a dialogue that reflects the unwavering position of the Washoe to completely silence the siren, a collective sentiment arose, “Nothing has happened in those meetings (referring to the agreement between Smokey and Frisby)! Except we’ve lost an hour in town!” 

Perhaps the unforeseeable future is an adequate unit of measurement for gauging when the Wašíw and the town of Minden might achieve a mutual agreement.  

*Missing why white people argue to keep siren 

Angelika Joseph Recent studies in American history seem to support the same conclusion: America has been awful. The country was founded on the belief that “All men were created equal,” as well as dispossession and enslavement. In the centuries that followed, group after group experienced the awfulness of America. And, few scholars would argue that we even manage to live up to our stated ideals of liberty and justice for all, today.

How are we supposed to live with this? How are we supposed to live in a country that has a history as violent as America’s?

It seems like we, as a country, have some ideas. There’s affirmative action, and “land acknowledgments.” We’ve tried taking down some statues and putting up other statues. Some have argued for dutifully teaching what is usually referred to as “the real history of the United States of America,” and others have dubbed this “Critical Race Theory” and have rallied to ban these histories from classrooms.

These moves seem to focus either on addressing an awful American history or moving on from it. They don’t tell us how to live with an awful American history, day in and day out, everywhere we go.

So far, nothing has so fundamentally changed my understanding of “living with history” as a clip of archival video footage taken at Wounded Knee, South Dakota on March 10th, 1973. In the video, a bunch of young Native American activists stand in front of the Catholic Church. This is the same location from which the US massacred Lakota men, women, and children on December 29th, 1890. The activists are holding riffles, and standing around some makeshift bunkers. Across the valley, the Federal Forces in Armored Personel Carriers point some of the most sophisticated military technology available in their direction.

Standing around the bunkers, one activist says “Aim your guns at us” and laughter drowns out the rest of the sentence. Another replies “look militant.” In response, one activist lifts his gun over himself, lowers it, and then lifts his closed fist, as if he is trying to figure out which militant look looks best on him. Everyone laughs. Someone says “no autographs please,” which is followed by even more laughter.

In his 1969 book, “Custer Died for your sins: An Indian Manifesto,” Vine Deloria Jr writes “Humor, all Indians will agree, is the cement by which the coming Indian movement is held together. When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others and hold all aspects of life together without letting anybody drive them to extremes, then it seems to me that that people can survive.” Deloria was right, of course.

Somehow, Native American activists laughing on the site of a massacre, with guns pointed at them, seems like the clearest parable I can offer on the art of living with American history.

But how did that shift occur? The United States is driven by imagination. From the revolution to the War on Terrorism, the American government has determined its next moves by imagining thefork in the road, where the results of action diverge from the consequences of inaction.  The history of immigration hinges on imagining the outcomes of those choices.

But immigrants also have imaginations. They imagine a better life, an open, welcoming new home. American citizens imagine, too, that the United States is the Land of Opportunity, a melting pot where the American Dream is there for anyone to achieve. But these acts ofimagination have been poisoned. 

Since 1882 and the Chinese Exclusion Act. American politicians have imagined the border to be a place with overwhelming violence, drug cartels, contraband, and immigrants crossing illegally almost at will in numbers too large to guess, stealing jobs from Americans, all of which are,generously, gross exaggerations. 

Hence, my preoccupation with imagination!

Much of immigration history, especially along the border with Mexico, is based on events that never actually occurred: Chinese hordes never materialized; Mexican laborers never came into the United States to steal jobs from Americans; most undocumented immigrants did not arrive by sneaking across the border, etc. In many ways, I am writing the history of what never happened.But those acts of imagination were far from harmless. They led to and created real acts of violence that affected the lives of many of the immigrants whose imaginations allowed them to push through incredibly difficult times in their lives. Then they were destroyed by the imaginations of others.

So how do we stop the constant poisoning of the American immigration imagination? How do we remove the poison before it kills the American Dream? By listening to the past. In the late 19th century, xenophobes like South Carolina Senator Wade Hampton III screamed that the Chinese would “inaugurate a carnival of corruption, of vice, and of crime, at which the world would stand aghast.” History, though, whispers, “there were only 75,000 Chinese people in California out of a population of 1.2 million in 1890. There were 34 Chinese people in South Carolina.” In 2006, white supremacy enthusiast Glenn Beck bellowed “[Mexico] has been overtaken by lawbreakers…. And now, what you’re protesting for is to have lawbreakers come here.” History calmly responds, “El Paso, Texas is right on the border with Mexico and has700,000 residents, eighty percent of whom are Hispanic, with a large percentage of undocumented immigrants. Statistically, El Paso is one of the safest cities in the country.” Solisten to what the past has to say. Hampton and Beck were both victims of their own feverish imaginations. Take a lesson from them. When reading about history, ignore your imagination.  Focus on the evidence, the words, the actions of the past. That is the past speaking to you, not your imagination. 

The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Sahnish (also known as the Arikara) share the Fort Berthold Reservation in present-day North Dakota. In written documents, they are often abbreviated with their initials, MHA. MHA women have always welcomed soldiers home and celebrated the protection of their communities. In June 2021, I met with Susan Hall, a Hidatsa-Sahnish leader of both the United Church of Christ and the broader Fort Berthold society. The night before, I saw Susan dancing with the members of the Ladies Auxiliary at the Four Bears Powwow. Hall’s dad and brothers were in the service, so her aunts were part of the auxiliaries. Fort Berthold has a long history of honoring soldiers serving in and alongside the US military beginning with the Sahnish scouts who fought alongside the US calvary against the Lakota. Today, many MHA women and men serve in the arm forces. The auxiliary honors their relatives, maintain memorials and fundraise for the post. These women perform essential roles in society through their service.

On Fort Berthold, the Ladies Auxiliaries are related to the Hidatsa Enemy Women’s Societyaccording to Bernadine Young Bird, a professor at Nueta, Hidatsa, Sahnish College. Young Bird’s mother was a society member and taught her Hidatsa women in The Enemy Women’s Society supported warriors performing Victory Dances upon their return. However, in the early 20th century, the United States government’s obsession with “Americanizing” and controllingIndigenous nations led to a widespread ban on Indigenous ceremonies. However, women continued to practice their ceremonies and honor soldiers secretly holding them at approved gatherings like Fourth of July celebrations. These gatherings are the precursor to today’s powwow. Enemy Women’s Society continued until the 1960s, and its social and sacred roles continue in the Auxiliaries, which have songs, and dances, and fulfill the society’s practices. Today, Young Bird is a member of the 9061 auxiliary and continues to honor soldiers and support her community just like her mother and grandmothers.

​ When Hall, Young Bear, and the other Auxiliary members dawn their yellow shawls for Grand Entry, their ancestors dance beside them. They are connected to generations of women who honor soldiers and the defense of their communities and demonstrate the cultural continuity and adaptation of Indigenous nations like the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Sahnish. Women Indigenized the auxiliaries through cultural adaptation and continuity which shape their future.

When Juvenal’s body arrived in San Bernardino, staff at Mountain View Cemetery denied him burial. The ugly exclusion of segregation extended even into the graveyards.

Only two months later, employees at the Perris Hill Park used the same pretext to deny Mike Valles, Gonzalo and Jovita’s thirteen-year-old son, admission into the municipal swimming pool. In response, Mexican Americans organized an extensive effort to defend their community from the city’s discriminatory policies. Gonzalo spearheaded a desegregation campaign by forming the Mexican American Defense Committee, a coalition that included Catholic priest José Núñez and Spanish-language newspaper editors Ignacio López and Eugenio Nogueras.

Their efforts yielded results when they successfully integrated the Mountain View Cemetery and buried Juvenal Valles. They also initiated one of earliest class action lawsuits to succeed ininvoking the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to desegregate public facilities. In the resulting case, filed as Lopez v. Seccombe (1944), the Defense Committee sued mayor William Seccombe, along with the city council, city attorney, park superintendent, and police chief for their roles in denying Mexicans access to the municipal pool. 

David C. Marcus, a Los Angeles-based Jewish attorney, stepped up as an important ally in the Mexican American struggle for civil rights. He represented the San Bernardino petitioners in their case to desegregate the swimming pool and news of the successful lawsuit spread to other Southern California barrios.

This prompted Mexican Americans in Orange County to recruit Marcus to represent them in their effort to desegregate local schools. Mexican Americans once again made their case and won the lawsuit. The eventual ruling in this case, Mendez v. Westminster (1947), directly cited the Lopez lawsuit as legal precedent. positioned California as the first state to desegregate public schools and set an important legal precedent referenced in the landmark Supreme Court decision in brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Though the Orange County case has received considerable attention from historians for its connections to Brown, even receiving acknowledgement through postal stamps and the naming of schools in honor of the Mendez family; this story is still largely unknown in the annals of American history. Familiarity of San Bernardino’s Mexican community and their efforts toward civil rights is even more obscured in this story despite the importance in helping us understand the history of civil rights.

The reasons for this historical negligence can be attributed to the city’s obsession with a pioneer past that celebrates white settlers in the making of San Bernardino and reduces the role of Mexican Americans in this history as non-existent. Academic historians, even those within my own field of Latino history, share the blame for this oversight by over-emphasizing urban centers like Los Angeles and scarcely acknowledging less populated regions like the Inland Empire.

The assumption that historical significance is unevenly distributed---dense in core areas and sparse in marginal areas, sometimes called hinterlands---has a deep root system. The power of this assumption has, paradoxically, made national self-understanding unnecessarily shallow. 

But San Bernardino and the Inland Empire serve as important examples in challenging this misleading allocation of significance. Therefore, amplifying the long-marginalized voices of the diverse residents of San Bernardino, in my case the Mexican American population, corrects this troubling assumption and replaces it with a far more productive and realistic way of thinking about the past.

In the U.S. courts of the 1970s, judicial authorities reached a similar conclusion. In a 1974 case involving a Spanish speaker, the Supreme Court of Arizona ruled that defendants of limited English proficiency have a fundamental right to interpreters. In their words: 

“It is axiomatic that an indigent defendant who is unable to speak and understand the English language should be afforded the right to have the trial proceedings translated into his native language in order to participate effectively in his own defense…. A defendant's inability to spontaneously understand testimony being given … would be as though [he] were forced to observe the proceedings from a soundproof booth … being able to observe but not comprehend the criminal processes whereby the state had put his freedom in jeopardy.”

Since the 1970s, authorities around the nation have worked hard to train and certify the ability ofcourt interpreters and to standardize interpretation practices. In Oklahoma, where I work as an interpreter, authorities have done much in the past decade. The main challenge now is to persuade judges and attorneys to let us do our job. 

In courtrooms around central Oklahoma, I sometimes run into attorneys who say they do not need interpreters because they already speak Spanish. They may, indeed. But I have yet to hear an attorney interpret in a way that would pass the certification exams. Knowing neither the technique nor the vocabulary, lawyers who brush off interpreters seldom know words such as DA, arraignment, enter a plea, waive, deposition, stipulation, call docket. In criminal proceedings, these terms are ubiquitous—and lawyer-interpreters regularly omit them. 

On one occasion, I heard a defense attorney change the crime of “burglary and assault” to “robbery and assault” because he did not know the term for burglary. Imagine how confused the defendant must have felt. After all, he may have broken into a building, but no one else in the courtroom had even insinuated that he had stolen something.

The goal of court interpreters is to ensure that defendants with limited English understand everything that native English speakers would understand in their position. To achieve this goal, we learn simultaneous and consecutive interpretation, as well as sight translation (reading English documents aloud in Spanish), and we use each mode throughout criminal proceedings. 

If the history of the professionalization of interpreters since the 1970s teaches us anything, it is that these skills do not just appear when someone learns a little Spanish or when they have a Hispanic name. Why, then, do judges regularly believe attorneys who say they can do the interpreter’s job? Would they ever allow an interpreter to do the attorney’s job? 

Until judges and attorneys embrace the irreplaceable role of certified interpreters, Spanish-speaking defendants and victims will not have full access to the U.S. legal system. If court authorities want to ensure fairness for non-English speakers, they will remember the vision of the Arizona Supreme Court in the 1970s and allow interpreters to make it a reality. 

Borders divide, and borders unite, a contradiction that poses a lasting vexation to those who prefer clarity.

Take Chicagoland, where Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan seem to meet.

Every day, thousands of people commute from surrounding areas into Chicago. The city has an influence that does not stop at the city’s borders. As proof, consider the number of Bears, Cubs, and Sox memorabilia that inundates my Valparaiso neighborhood.

Given the nonstop flow of people, goods, services, and even sports teams’ allegiances across state lines, I have been surprised by the tension created by these boundaries. When I flew into Chicago to visit Valparaiso University for the first time, a hotel concierge cautioned me, a Tennessean, that I was “headed to the South” on my drive to Indiana. Giving as good as they got, numerous Valparaiso residents constantly warn me about the supposed political instability and dangerous violence of Illinois.

Apparently, people care about these borders even as they cross them all the time.

This present-day irony of boundaries and boundary-crossing has a long history. Residents of Lake Michigan’s southern coast crossed borders long before Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan ever existed, and these historical boundaries have never vanished from the landscape.Drivers in Porter County, Indiana, cross Indian Boundary Road while heading north on State Road 49 to Indiana Dunes National Park. This local street follows an 1826 border between the United States and the Potawatomi Nation, the Native American people whose homelands include much of the Chicagoland area. Chicago’s Indian Boundary Park is another relic of a past border, one made in 1816 to separate Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Odawa land from U.S. territory.

In the early 1800s, these borders mattered. Clear borders offered a way for Indigenous peoples to resist Americans’ illegal expansion onto their lands. Moreover, boundaries determined whether a traveler would be under the jurisdiction of the United States or Native nations, an arrangement that still makes the prosecution of crimes difficult in many locales.

Nevertheless, nineteenth-century inhabitants of Lake Michigan’s south shore transcended and transgressed these borders. Indigenous people and African and European newcomers traded with one another; they married and had children with one another; and they befriended one another. In fact, trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, lionized for being Chicago’s first non-Indigenous inhabitant, survived with the help of his Potawatomi wife Kitihawa. Such interpersonal ties came into being and persisted, even as U.S. expansion provoked horrific episodes of brutality and violence.

At this very moment, inhabitants of Chicagoland seem headed for an increased hardening of border lines. The U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe is the most recent source of this ongoingdivision. With growing anti-abortion movements in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan legislatures, Illinois is the only state in Chicagoland where women’s access to abortion is secure. In seeking such services in Illinois, women from surrounding states will continue a border-crossing practice long in the making.

Longtime Chicagoland residents have reasons to emphasize the borders that divide the region. As a recent arrival in the area, I encourage my new neighbors to recognize that we also cross these lines constantly. History tells us that it is possible to create community that transcends the most hardened political borders. Inhabitants of Lake Michigan’s south shore have been doing so for three hundred years.

​I deployed to Afghanistan in 2013. By then interpreters were worked into the military process as smoothly as a notoriously wasteful institution as the U.S. military would be capable of. In the weeks following the September 11th attacks, a small cohort of Americans deployed to the anti-Taliban stronghold of the Panjshir Valley. Jawbreaker, as the group was called, contained two Americans capable of speaking the native languages of Pashto and Dari (and Farsi, amutually intelligible Iranian dialect). As Jawbreaker’s operations rapidly scaled from intelligence collection to combat operations, interpreters were needed to fill capability gaps. In 2008, then-President Obama ordered a massive troop surge to secure the countryside and win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. Interpreters walked down roads laced with IEDs alongside Marines in Helmand and took cover from incoming fire with soldiers from the 101st Airborne in the high peaks of the Hindu Kush.

​Interpreters facilitate cross-cultural dialogues, and the more different the two cultures are,the more effort they must put into their work. Early in Hernan Cortez conquest of Mexico, an enslaved indigenous woman widely known to history as La Malinche assisted the Spanish duringnegotiations with native communities. Oftentimes communicating in a chain of at least three languages, she proved indispensable by translating spoken words and transmitting the world views of two deeply religious societies. Malinche won the respect of at least some of the Spanish, as she was reverently called Doña Marina in a Spanish veteran’s memoirs.

​It is important to remember that, at least in the beginning, Malinche was a slave. Many Afghan interpreters, while not enslaved, lived in a country which had seen 40 years of uninterrupted conflict. Every Afghan, not just interpreters, had to somehow survive in the economic, political, and psychological ramifications. In Vice’s 2013 documentary, “This Is What Winning Looks Like,” U.S. Marines bemoan the unprofessionalism of their Afghan allies, who were oftentimes intoxicated on opiates or lax during patrols and guard duty. Many Americans will doubtlessly blame this behavior for the failure of the war effort. Many of these same Americans will, at some other point in time, decry the suicide epidemic and drug addition suffered by American veterans without understanding the irony.

​Many human beings do not require an interpreter to tell when they are being held in contempt by their friends or allies. For many Afghans, surrender was inevitable. A foreign occupying power made promises with the one hand, and with the other ignored long held cultural norms, desires of communities, and inevitably individual dignity. The United States may have communicated verbally with the Afghan people, but they could never win the locals over with mere lip service. Actions speak louder than words, and the languishing of our Afghan interpreters and partners at the hands of is deafening.

If the Godzilla franchise’s staying power is any indication—its most recent installment hit theaters in 2021—public interest in the imagined consequences of radioactivity has persisted to the present. There’s just something about the old formula: other-than-human creature plus radiation equals darned scary monster. 

Ironically, although humans have manufactured technologies capable of destroying most life on earth, we tend to project our fears of nuclear apocalypse onto bodies dissimilar to our own. Like the atomic bomb, our radioactive monsters are bigger than life. 

Yet despite their cinematic charisma, gigantic insects and reptiles have yet to pose any tangible threat. The same is not true of all nuclear animals.

Prior to 1989, when Colorado’s Rocky Flats was still making triggers for nuclear bombs, workers noticed something strange: mysterious hot spots. As one employee recalled, “You’d come up with hot booties... You’d call the... monitors to check. And they’d find these little... prints.” Another worker explained the cause: “We had mice!” The rodents would drink irradiated water from pea drains. Then, they’d track “little hot footprints all over the place.”

Mice aren’t only not-so-charismatic mini-fauna to have threatened “the nuclear state.” During the 1990s, a series of clam and mussel infestations mucked up the cooling systems at two different U.S. nuclear power plants. 

And other-than-human threats to nuclear security have persisted long since the so-called “end of the Cold War.” In 2017, environmental activists protested the planed relocation of two-hundred prairie dogs to Rocky Flats—now a wildlife refuge. Despite the fact that the prolific burrowers were a keystone species, whose numbers Rocky Flats’ wildlife managers wanted to boost, critics worried that the transplants might unearth radioactive materials from the site’s landfills.

As these historical snapshots show, when “we humans” have sought to control and surveil nuclear space, other-than-human beings—not colossal monsters, but rodents and mollusks—have frequently undermined our best-laid schemes. 

We might find a cautionary tale in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). The novel ends with the revelation that one character’s pet mice were, in fact, pan-dimensional beings, who commissioned Earth as a supercomputer to generate “the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything.” 

I’m not suggesting that mice are covertly pulling all the strings in our nuclear saga. Indeed, their role may be a small one. But it is a role nonetheless and one that we humans have, in our hubris, long overlooked. 

There is an allegory here. So focused are we on the unimaginable power of atomic fission, that we often fail to think about the invisible menace of nuclear fallout. Our greatest peril just might be farthest from our minds.

Mid-twentieth century filmmakers understood something important. The leviathans they depicted were often ordinary creatures made formidable by their encounters with radiation. Atomic technologies, moviemakers understood, had blurred the line between the malignant and the mundane. Was anything in this world safe?

As we humans move forward in this storyline, we ought to recognize that seemingly innocuous things can spell danger. 

Where might we imagine ourselves on the spectrum that links the benign to the monstrous?