Ten Thousand Things

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Healing the Most Atom-Bombed Place on Earth: Shoshone Elder CORBIN HARNEY

“We are one people. We cannot separate ourselves now. There are many good things to be done for our people and for the world. It is important to let things be good. And it is important to teach the younger generation so that things are not lost.”
– Shosone Elder & Spiritual Leader Corbin Harney, shortly before his passing, on July 10, 2007

Shoshone Elder and Global Nuclear Abolitionist and Environmentalist Leader Corbin Harney, founder of the Shundahai (Peace and Harmony with all Creation") Network, dedicated his life to fighting nuclear testing, nuclear waste transportation, and dumping on his ancestral homelands.
In his native language, Harney's ancestral homeland is called the Newe Sogobia (The Peoples land). This territory spans five states, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, California and Montana, and includes the area comprising U.S. nuclear test bombings, and highly radioactive nuclear waste dumping. With over a thousand nuclear bombs exploded at the "Nevada Test Site," the Western Shoshone homeland is the most atom-bombed place in the world (the most conventionally bombed place in the world is in Laos).

Harney has described what the bombings did to the Western Shoshone land, plant and animal life. "The food that my people survived on is not here no more on account of this nuclear weapon... The pine nuts aren't here, the chokecherries aren't here, the antelope aren't here, the deer aren't here, the groundhog aren't here, the stagehen aren't here." He saw and cared about not only his nation's people and lands, but also for all of people and the whole earth. In his 1995 book, The Way It Is: One Water...One Air...One Mother Earth Harney wrote in global visionary terms, " We, the people, are going to have to put our thoughts together to save our planet here. We only have One Water . . . One Air . . . One Mother Earth.

Because of his global vision and concern, Harney joined other global activists facing the same nuclear fallout and waste threat throughout the world. Harney helped to pioneer an ever-broadening transnational nuclear abolition and environmentalist movement that now brings together indigenous peoples with environmental groups, anti-nuclear groups, Japanese atomic bombing survivors and descendants,downwinders, atomic veterans, industrial radiation victims, and nuclear plant disaster victims and their descendants.

In 1989, with Harney's leadership, the Western Shoshone, other American activists, and Kazakhs created the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Non governmental Anti-Nuclear Movement, to support a global comprehensive test ban and to educate the public about the downwind dangers of nuclear bombing tests. The American mainstream media largely ignored this global coalition's protests involving thousands of demonstrators, at the Nevada Test Site. However, their influence on international opinion succeeded in influencing the Soviet government to stop testing in 1991, after 563 nuclear bombings in Kazakhstan. Shortly afterwards, Harney traveled to Kazakhstan in 1993, to meet with the successful Kazakh downwinder activists.

After 42 years of bombings,irreversible damage had been done: land and water had been widely poisoned; cancers and miscarriages surged, and children were being born with birth defects. Harney visited some mutated children in a hospital, and realized, that in Kazakhstan, as well as at the Four Corners of the American Southwest, where the cancer rate had also surged, Harney saw the future of the entire world, if nuclear weapons continue to proliferate.

"I didn't really understand what I was told until I went to Kazakhstan in Russia. Kazakhstan is where Russia tested nuclear bombs for many years. Over there I saw water that looks like clean water, but people can't drink it because it is contaminated with radiation," Harney described how this experience intensified his mission.

Corbin Harney went to Japan in 2001, as the keynote speaker at the Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Conference in Nagasaki, as a part of his activism in the global anti-nuclear movement. And Gensuikyo leaders, came from Japan, to the American Southwest, to partner with Harney, along with activists from around the world.

Harney was never broken or embittered by the repeated atomic bombings of his people's land. Instead, Harney became more luminous and transcendent as time passed, perhaps because his empowered approach to peace activism included deep spiritual sustenance based on prayer. In this, he is reminiscent of Nagasaki's Christian survivors, who regrouped and rebuilt their cathedral at Urakami, only a few yards from ground zero, destroyed by the world's second atom bomb, "Little Boy," while a priest was reciting mass. Trained in Shoshone shamanistic traditions, Harney worked with medicine women of Battle Mountain, Nevada, running the Sundance Ceremony and sweat lodges. He also acted to preserve and protect the sacred sites and burial grounds of his people. He believed that prayer combined with activism could heal our world, even though modern nations have nuclear bombed the earth, usually within their own territories, with "tests" thousands of times.

The U.S. has long targeted Indian lands, ostensibly their sovereign territory under treaties, according to sociologists Gregory Hooks and Chad L. Smith, authors of a 2004 study, "The Treadmill of Destruction: National Sacrifice Areas and Native Americans." A body of research has already established that Indians and other minorities are subject to environmental as well as economic inequalities, and their research, the first to systematically examine the role of the military environmental hazards, found that "this 'treadmill of destruction,' as we call it in our research, has systematically placed Native Americans in close proximity to extremely dangerous military sites:

"...The study cites historical evidence showing that the United States widely expanded its military infrastructure in the 1940s, and then reinforced that infrastructure again during the Cold War, each time using remote lands to serve as bombing ranges and weapons testing and storage sites. For the most part, the expansions occurred throughout the western United States, where by the 1930s much of the Native American population had been relocated to government reservations.

"'These lands were remote, had a low population density and could be acquired in a very short period of time because the federal government already owned them,' the researchers write of the military's expansions. 'This contingent intersection of Indian conquest and the rise of the Pentagon placed Native Americans at great risk of exposure to noxious military activities...'"

Corbin Harney's last major activist mission helped to stop "Divine Strake," a 700-ton-chemical explosives test designed to simulate the blast of a low-yield nuclear weapon in an underground bunker, schedule at the Nevada Test Site for June 2006. Earlier in 2006, Western Shoshone, downwinders, and activists, initiated a lawsuit to stop the detonation. They were supported by an international team of attorneys and scientists, who submitted affidavits. Experts testified that the blast could have spread lethal radioactive particles throughout the Nevada desert. According to experts interviewed by Brenda Norrell, an Indian Country Today staffwriter, millions, especially children, were at risk for dangerous radiation exposure. While receiving almost no press in the American mainstream or alternative media, except for anti-nuclear and Indian media, this globally supported activism was successful.

Overlapping their fight against "Divine Strake, in 2005, the Western Shoshone filed an earlier lawsuit to halt the creation of a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, a volcanic area which is a sacred place for the Western Shoshone:

"Yucca Mountain is located within the Western Shoshone Nation and has long been a place of powerful spiritual energy for the Shoshone and the Paiute. To the Western Shoshone it is Snake Mountain, a place with rock prayer rings that transmit prayers to the Great Spirit and messages back to the people. Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney tells of a traditional story that Snake Mountain will one day be awakened and split open, spewing out poison. This prophecy may predict the potential disaster of volcanic activity and nuclear waste leakage. Shoshone ancestors are buried in the mountain and the water in the area is sacred, as it is with many desert peoples. Also in Nevada are Mt. Tenabo and Horse Canyon, prominent in Shoshone creation stories and sites of burials. Today, the Western Shoshone still have ceremonies and gather medicinal plants at all of these sacred places."

Shills for nuclear industry regularly publish their biased opinion pieces for the use of Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste dump. However one out of five Americans <> and Nevada's Governor Jim Gibbons of Nevada side with the Western Shoshone, and most residents of the Four Corners who are directly affected by the dumping.

Corbin Harney did not live to see the success of the movement to stop the conversion of the sacred Yucca Mountain into a natural container for toxic nuclear waste. However, he did see the success of the Western Shosone activism against "Divine Strake." According to his fellow Western Shoshone/Northern Paiute Janice Gardipe, a grandmother of eight, Shoshone activists never stopped praying. "I just think of our future generations. We have to protect our land for them. In the past, all of our ancestors have prayed for us, and in return we pray for future generations to come.''
This is the basis of courageous and tireless activism of the Western Shoshone and Harney, whose entire life was a celebration of thanksgiving for all that is good.

To best honor Corbin Harney's life, we must remember the interconnections between the Western Shoshone, Japanese Hibakusha, and global survivors of nuclear radiation around the world, and work towards a nuclear-free world.

Similarly to Japan's indigenous faiths, and other forms of animism around the world, the Western Shoshone worldview recognizes a universal sacred life force in every natural thing and every human being. ""Everything is alive and has a spirit to it. The rocks, the mountains, streams, animals, plants, birds, oceans, and so forth."

In an audio interview, Harney repeats this message to all humanity, "It's very important for all of us that we really take care of our own power. We were given the power by the Nature to heal each other. What we should be doing today is uniting ourselves together throughout the country, throughout the world."

Harney was awarded the International Nuclear Free Futures Solution award in 2003.
The Shundahai website includes many links to Corbin Harney's powerful writings and songs (Don't miss these, at the bottom of the page) that he sang at each sunrise ceremony.

"'Each one of you has power. Each one of you is like a drop of water. If we unite ourselves together we can become a mighty wave."

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