we are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning reverend harriet walden reverend harriet walden is founder and national director of mothers for police accountability founder and director of the family empowerment institute and how we're silent when we home one another and and it's about how do we wake up a community when we've had so many acts of violence not only in seattle  but over in america over the last thirty years and it's a lot of it is directly related to internalized racism and and all of the of the events that is going on but i believe that  this issue and there's a culture of death that our children have accepted and they live out of and not believing that their life is worthwhile and valuable and that they have will have stepped in to contribute to society and so how do you turn that around is what this is all about and we fortunate to be by this point we're fortunate to have a partnership not only with the cell parks department and team to put flyers out what we did in jail and february was to take one hundred twenty young people to see red tails i it was such a good experience here because most black kids and adults have never seen a black pilot i mean you did every down then you might see one but to see a whole movie about by pilots in world war two i mean the kids left there with so much pride and so on the whole idea is how do you teach people their history and then knowing that we had so big choices of the time that we've lived in america we have overcome so much as a group of people who actually have known no safe no safe harbor and so it's constantly trying to educate and say hey we have a right to be on the planet and that you have opportunity you really the world really needs you let's put down these guns and less look at how we can be involved in bringing more peace to our community so it's about it's about bringing peace to the community in and expecting people to stop being violent i think we have to expect that i think that we've lived in such a violent world for so long i mean america is a violent country you know it was founded on violence i mean we like to say all of this other stuff but they had proud living in america when it meant when the when the when the boat people came here when it's that little bit when they came by way of vote boat a bit proud people you had many many tribes of people who call north is part of the land and so we've lived in a violent country we've taken violence to other places very much so we're still taken violence to other places right now as we speak and so  i believe that it's a learned experience but i also believe that to be can unlearn it and know that we are divine beings having a human experience and everybody has a right to be so what tools do you use to help us too and learn this violent culture that we perpetuate well right now what we're doing is asking for more volunteers to be able to get out with our posters you know right now we got a lot we got a campaign going around tyrone love he was just tyrone love so much because his name was love i mean we you know you got to be kind of disconnect that from life to go shoot somebody with a name tyrone love and so what we do is we keep talking about the issue we've got we've got lots of posters and we have a poster that says break the silence stop the violence break the silence and spread the peace and we asking people to put that up we had  volunteer campaign and two weeks ago people came out and picked up posters and we keep working on my own other media campaign and been altered to get the message out i think i think i think is that like always messaging you got to always be messaging because all the other messages about violence i mean violence in the you know it's a whole campaign i mean that you know i mean you know when you when i was growing up but you had road runner  is so entrenched in us and also we're working with the violent with the virtues project to actually call people to the highest and best good because the virtues are within us i mean that's really who we are but sometimes we have to be called somebody have to call you to your highest and best to say hey wake up you know you mean it's a one on one campaign i mean if we had had all of the answers by now we'd be healed it by now you know it's an american problem violence is an american problem and h it and i think that we have to own it as an american prior problem and then how do you move from that once you own it i think that the whole world opens up to you once you owned a fact that's a problem when such the not i mean i think americans live their life and sets the nile's and there's so many different worlds i mean you have the ninety nine percent san let me and i want some of this and you're doing me you know we're not getting it what we want and then you have the one percent that never goes to the grocery store i mean you know being they're never going to buy a new suit because somebody brings all that stuff to them so they insulated from they insulated from from from the real world so you have every you have so many different groups of people living in separate worlds and less we can come out of the nile than this madness keeps going on you know and so it's like wake up you know wake up it's time to wake up on the planet goes the planet is changing i mean everything is changing and we're changing to i you know i have a lot of hope but i mean i'm just really not a jaded person i see that the world is going to be wonderful i believe that you know i don't believe that the world is going to be two two two two you know going to down the drain i don't believe that i don't believe that i believe that we have fine people in the world and i believe that every day people are working the hardest to change this most people who do this work don't get paid they do it because they love children they do it because they love the community and and so i think the volunteers i'm in america is really really alive and i think that people really want to make a difference and i think that one reason why we have violence in our community what our youth we have not asked them to do hard things age you know we must ask them to actually do something that scratches them stretches their ability to believe and one such child scratches their ability to believe that they can do something they change and so what did drug guys do when in gangs they they recruit these kids and they ask them to do something hard a j already asked them to do something hard to first thing they might do hard is you know might go do some shoplifting and don't get caught that target if you've never done it before your heart is pounding and then they might ask him to  punch somebody out you know at a bus stop and don't get caught and then the next hard thing they might do is give them a gun and then somebody gets killed but just think if we were asking them by the time they were nine years old to do something hard as a community you know it's all kinds of hard jobs they can do when they can learn how to volunteer i mean you can take them to the base of mount rainier in the summer and you know they can they get making horn a skilled out in nature is so many hard things that we can be asking how children to do and that builds character you know and i think that we have not i think that parents have jazz not done that they've given  way much than what they've earned children get way too much more than what they've earned and then that they're not required to do anything you must require them to do so you know i mean you can't send them to school and don't require them to bring their books home it can't have them bring their books home and not sit at the table to do their homework you know we must require everything you can't get in universe to watch them without meeting the requirements i don't care how you want to go but if you have not finished high school or you don't have a ged and you know we can't do math it's just some things you've got to have you got to fill that end and meet the requirement and i think that we have not put enough pressure on our children to help build character so do you think we need to also ask parents to do something hard i do i do i think we have to ask parents to be engaged they have to stay engage you cannot evelyn turn them loose you can't wait when they get to be in high school you can't back off you've got to double your time you've got to be in the building you've got to show up unexpected you got it they cannot clock you if two children know what time you coming home and they you know i mean it that's what it is i mean and i think that parents is not a list of enough help from other people so you can't raise your children by yourself cannot it's not a possibility cannot raise your children by yourself and i think that is specially city people don't understand you can't raise your children i had a group of people i called my little round robin and i was always somebody watching my children in a city i know and to say something to me so i raise my children and i ran my life that way in seattle and so my children there was on the bus and they were in acton big for well they were misbehaving somebody  that i believe that june children have to always know that somebody is watching them and now i mean you know when i was growing up people could give you the bad eye and you kind of straighten up now you why would you give you kind of glare at kids they glare at just because they know that there's no consequences and then and then when my kids come on this is some lady on the bus say tell your mother i said hello i didn't know who she was  that's good that's good that's good and that's what it takes it's going to take it's going to take really activating the village i don't think the village has never gone away i think it has not been activated i think that this sort of like and i'm just  i it's to the parents benefit to activate the village sold it to when the children are leaving the house and also that the parents have to have a little bit more consequences the they have to know the children have to know that you know what you know you've got to be home by ten o'clock oh i'm going to get in trouble i mean like these kids with this new movie that's just tearing up the parents homes when they're not there and they have friends coming over i'm saying wow these kids have no healthy fear of their missing something is missing and i think what's missing is the wisdom of the elders you know i mean at one point elders used to speak more often and they used to correct more and i the wisdom goes to the grave you must not take that music with you it must be played and and so it's like well you know so now i just i just talk to young people fair you know pull your pants up you know you run as a man life is good and then look at me and i saw you come on you know i had to did that and history will not judge it's very carefully very kindly not as african american people because i don't think that we did all we could to save our children  and i and i think that that i mean i'm forty one has been killed in chicago this year forty one since january i mean that's a crime and baby got killed a few weeks ago in chicago in a shoot out i mean what is happening in america that people actually missed not like they go in there warring in the cities it's not like they going to mean that warring on the property that they don't own it warring over substance may be dead they don't i mean so most people around the world are warring for its wars about land so they can have a place to stay or food or some right to exist this is not a right to exist kind of war this is just a war kids what are they fighting about you know what is this what is this beef about when it's way more opportunity in the world today than it was for me growing up in segregation it is so much opportunity in the world today i mean it really is i mean if you really want it bad enough you can you can find a way to be successful and even in a so called downed economy i mean open or ship is up i mean there's so much creativity out there so it's like it's like you have to we order the world and that's what we're about we're trying to reorder the world with that with that with conversations that would focus groups  i just would field trips i mean that's why the red tailed it was a good trip and then we're working with some other women and we're going to be taken some young girls up to to the tulips to be able to get out of the city we believe that more expansion and i think exclaimed beauty also changes people i mean you know it's was a beauty just to go and see something beautiful will actually open you up to joy and know to deep joy and that kind of stuff so again i'm just really h so i grew up in sanford florida in that time it was segregated i lived i lived in it goes for a part of sanford florida that was at all segregated town you know into excuse me and i went to segregated high school i went to segregation all my life so i never went to integrated schools and i i think on some levels the price we paid to integrate was way too high i mean we lost way more than we gained i mean we lost the we lost the control of our children their minds of our children and the history that they should know has not ever been taught to them and all of these other settings but i grew up in a in a community where i was called that but then cut mine and so i had master teachers who believed in me i mean i isn't credible journey to have teachers that believe in you and i think that our children go to buildings every day when by the believe in them you can go guide to twelfth grade and integrated system and not have any better to believe in your capabilities to believe that you're fabulous to believe that you're beautiful and that you're wonderful and one of the things that keep going on i have a nine thousand or five dictionary acolyte dictionaries and it's amazing what you find in the dictionaries and the one thousand and five dictionary is says to be white is to be pure like snow and sinless like a white if you find zero dictionaries it is just really and all of this language is what feeds this stuff i mean it's what makes us be so suspicious than people think that we're that we're criminals or we're criminal mind has been charged that they are that worthless that they have no value and and course we've had young people not to internalize that they actually believe that they have a no value and that they call them momentary group of people and they had a limited ability to learn and that are limited that ability and by the time that they're twenty one years old so that definition still feeds every public policy i mean that's why didn't believe then i could not learn it was not even but it was no in attaining of any special ed special it was designed to make sure that a group of people could not advance when we had no special ed and segregation if you had kids who were slow to get it they would just would do they were every day everybody was in groups and you always has mark people in the groups with the people who had a hard time getting that it was no it was not special led you know and so at the results of integration you have special ed and it's like wow how did that come about for and then also after integration you had the people who had the most experience of teaching black kids they lost a job in the south twenty thousand people lost a job as a result of integration because white people would say a term and that like teachers were not teach their children so the people who had the most experience at teaching black kids who was not afraid of them who knew that they capabilities who knew that they can learn they lost a job we never recovered from that vacuum from that vastness of teachers losing their job and so and so now you fast forward here to young two thousand and twelve you have our kids going into buildings where people don't care about them what people who don't believe that they can learn and if they have the capacity to learn they don't think they're going to be able to keep it very long because by the time that they're twenty one their ability to learn kind of ceases and sold all of those old definitions still fund runs public policy whether it comes to medicine i mean you know even people who have money black people still aren't getting the best care as other people so so it really is i think the fundamental reason why we haven't shifted racism in this country is because what's been called a fight in the dictionary and how that finds it way you know even with the prosecutors you know i'm often think i mean i would love to do a power point w prosecutors and just show them the language and they see how it just impacts them because it does mean in a courtroom and packs the fact that you think that all these people are criminals you know and cook asians have harmed us away for the history is on our side the historical record is on our side how we've been harmed and now you can take this last thirty years and it would be like the point on the space needle you cap the point on the space needle and you have that just opposed to five hundred years almost in this country that's just a dot on the page a historical record of violence and harm and  unlocked out of a system is surely on our side and with the projection that goes on with the projection of that that you know we're somebody to be feared and you know we're the ones who are cynical and and that we need to be watched it's all made up i mean because most of the harm we do we do we do with this black on black harm we harm myself way more than we harm everybody else and that and see and so a black mother in america has three things to worry about she has a worry about her son get getting killed on black on black violence on the bible because of internalized racism i have to worry about an event just like trayvon martin and then you got to worry about the police i mean so it's three different ways that your son might not come home i mean i think that's an awful burden for black mothers to to have to live a lifetime and dealing with that and a lot of it is just because the way that society is i mean we have such a right to be a knob and it's not a crime so you know i mean i and you know being black in the world is not a crime i mean in fact country not get jaded and i want to bring your gifts to the tape i mean how do you do all of that when like an estate when i got rid of i two hundred well i mean i was getting rid of affirmative action the tax money doesn't come back to our community so there's disparity i mean so it's again it's like once you get one place then the snowball effect of the system trying to make sure that that it didn't work i mean it's always we're always starting over again that's what it feels like for black people on a lot of levels we always starting over again but again we're just going to keep at it because we have a right to be here you know we didn't just get here i like to tell cook asians this i really do it to the last slave ship came in the eight hundred eighty eight hundred thirty s you know so we've been here from the sixteen hundred sixteen sixteen ninety to sixteen you know sixteen i mean the compromise that the enslaved human beings once they were freed free free people would not be able to go past missouri so if you want to have manifest destiny and people west you have to open up  you have to open up immigration so most of the people in america today cajuns came after the eighteen thirty eighty i mean after the eighty eight is and they don't know that so it's like ok i mean we've been here for such a long time you know i mean we've been here well a long time so we're we going back to like you know i mean that's just it what does it take to shift the opinion that we've been here we didn't just come here we've been your most a lot of ways and longer than a lot of the tea party event on april twenty first at four pm at the senior center at the senior is called the central area senior center and you can get information from my hotline and i numbers to six three two nine two zero three three and i email is mother's for police accountability at yahoo dot com very good over there were unfortunately out of time we're very lucky to have back with us holly barker tony barker is an applied anthropologist who has over eighteen years of experience working in the marshall islands and with political leaders in the marshall islands first as a peace corps volunteer army toll and later as the senior advisor to the ambassador embassy of the republic of the marshall islands in washington d c she is author of the book bravo for the marshallese regaining control in a post nuclear post colonial world co author of the consequential damages of nuclear war the wrong la report and contributor to the book half lives and have troops confronting the radioactive legacies of the cold war and she currently lectures full time at the anthropology department at the university of washington where she teaches classes including u s nuclear policy and environmental health and public policy hanford so let's talk about the what has the u s has done to the marshall islands in the marshallese start out if you would and give us a kind of an overview of nuclear u s nuclear testing there in the marshall islands yeah sure be happy to yeah right after world war two the united nations gave the united states administering authority for the mar islands which meant that the u s government was the only government or power that was essentially like a colonial government of the marshall islands and so the us realize that it had gotten  geographically isolated location in the pacific that was very far away from the eyes of the u s public but also from the soviets and the us decided to use that area to test its most secrets weapons at the time it's atomic weapons and so in one nine hundred forty six the u s launched a program to better understand the impacts of its newest weapon the nuclear weapon which until that time had only been used in japan at the end of the war and so from one nine hundred forty six to nine hundred fifty eight the us conducted sixty seven atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the marshall islands  and it comes out to the equivalent of about one point six hiroshima bombs every single day for that entire twelve years and so although differently from the japanese the marshallese definitely know what right well at the end of world war two the japanese and the us had fought bitterly in the marshall islands japan had a military occupation of the marshall islands going into the war and so the us had essentially liberated the marshall e from a japanese regime at the time and so the us was seen as the likely power to be but were to consider their own nation prior to that you know it had been about four hundred years of constant occupation by outsiders so the spanish the german the japanese and then the americans after that and then you know we can get to this later on but eventually in one thousand nine hundred six the us administration great footage of this in it's almost like hollywood footage where you know the navy administration goes to the leaders of bikini atoll which eventually became one of the ground zero testing sites and brought together the community and sat them down and said you know we want you to be involved in helping us do something that will bring peace to the world then and god wants us to do this you know sort of drawing on the fact that it was the divine right of the u s to test and to have these weapons and they say they you know the u s didn't really know what these weapons were going to do at the time so they had no ability to you know accurately portray what the effects would be like for the marshallese so they general request for permission which you know are you with us are you on god's side are you going to help us promote world peace if you do say yes and the leaders said you know yes you know here was a group of a powerful group of people who had just gotten rid of a very chair around a cold japanese regime which had been very brutal during the war time and they had a lot of faith in their new friends and so when their new friends asked for permission to utilise their land to bring peace to the world it was without a full understanding of what the impacts of nuclear weapons would do so what were their thoughts once they started seeing the effects of these nuclear weapons being used you know marshallese were asked to sacrifice an awful lot and for some communities they had to leave their homelands entirely and go live on other people's lands or even live on some of the naval vessels that see for several months floating in the waters while the navy and the u s government ended up using their test ever by this point they had figured out thermonuclear weapons tubes they had progression the atomic to the thermonuclear weapons and then march first nineteen fifty four you know an anniversary date that's coming up here shortly so that particular detonation caused a lot of illness and despair amongst the marshallese and after that events there was a petition that went to the united nations by the marshallese the marshallese did everything they were supposed to do in terms of you know protesting the events of the occupation of the u s of their lands for the testing purposes and so they drafted a petition to the united nations calling on the u s to end the testing program and because it was a colonial arrangement at the time it was the united states that spoke for the mar islands at the united nations and so the him bassett or at the time went to the secretary general of the united nations and said i have this petition from the marshallese but we need to finish our testing series and so  the u s and the united nations agreed to hold on to the marshallese petition finish the detonations that had been scheduled and then just bring the petition forward to the united nations and by then they had ability to do anything differently and it's you know we see this right now with france and french polynesia friends since when that colonial arrangement is still in place you know the people the people of french polynesia aren't able to protest what the colonial powers doing sort of talk some more about the effects of the sixty seven weapons nuclear weapons that the us detonated in the marshall  to the islands themselves some of which right you know were obliterated as well as the people right right yeah in terms of the the land itself even there only seventy square miles of land in the entire country so when does the most precious resource there is you know land is where people get their social identity that's where they get their economic support their livelihood it determines where you're buried where you can live  everything about who you are in the world and so we don't have that equivalent in the western world you know if my land in seattle became everyday that i would pick up and move someplace else and sure i would miss it a whole lot but there isn't that sense of connection to a place and a lot of indigenous communities have and so from the marshallese when their land was either a bullet or rated as in you know it no longer exists because it was vaporized by the test it became too contaminated to live on then that had that sort of catastrophic implications for marshallese culture and for the people in again in a way that we can never fully appreciate in a western  animals people and so when the people were exposed to radiation the d n a be to get altered and so this gets passed on for first several generations and so it's not just the mar are alive during the testing period you know certainly the people who are alive then suffered incredible burdens and probably suffered the most out of them all the marshallese but this isn't an issue that's gone away it's not just a historical event because the the violence of the testing program is imprinted in the d n a of the people and they carry it on you know for instance a woman has her full supply of eggs in her body when she is born a and you know as an anthropologist done a lot of interviewing in the marshall with the marshallese and talking particularly with the women who have been exposed to radiation and you know certainly the  abnormalities have been one of the most acute experiences of one of the marshallese and certainly one of the saddest and most disturbing events can you talk about that a little bit more i know again and you are unique in this position that you actually have done oral histories with the marshallese talk about some of the birth problems when women have had their yeah you know i was fortunate to work for the marshall islands governments and they've got some brave and fabulous political leaders who you know in the post colonial relationship of been trying to assert certain their right to reclaim the history of the nuclear weapons testing and so when i was working for the marshall islands government they asked me to conduct these oral histories because the marshallese government thought that the u s sort of account of history of what the testing had done didn't fully grasp the scope of the damages and injuries that the marshallese people were experiencing and so the u s had always really minimize what the effects of the testing program were whereas the marshallese knew about it but had never really had an x opportunity to document it fully because during the colonial relationship it was all u s scientists and u s health business you know all of the people who were involved in the testing program were u s researchers and so that information was controlled in interpreted by the u s government so post nine hundred eighty six became an opportunity for the government to do its own research and so the marshall islands government had asked me to conduct oral histories with a lot of the people and communities who were downwind from the nuclear weapons testing  and i began to focus quite a bit on the women as a result i think of you know me being a woman and having access to the women made it you know it gets a likely research project and so what the women have began to tell me this certain themes started to emerge as i talk to them i probably did more than two hundred interviews with folks who were directly downwind from the testing program but the women in particular would talk about you know how before the testing program marshallese had always had stillbirths or miscarriages because they had always existed you know as as they do in any human population but after their exposure to radiation they started to give birth to what they considered almost non human offspring that they had never seen before and what was interesting is embedded in the language are clues about these new reproductive abnormalities that the women had to devise an entirely new language really to describe what they were giving birth to because the  had these words before because they had never been exposed to radiation before so they didn't need them and so women started talking about giving birth to great babies and great baby is are you know in english we call them high data molar pregnancies which are extremely rare you know there may be about one in a million but it's when my ptosis begins and after conception and the cells started to start to divide at some point with the hideout of form older pregnancy the the cells stop dividing and then just start to grow and get large and it's when a woman a woman looks like she's pregnant and goes through all the st pregnancy and then it and give birth to what the marshallese essentially called groups it looks like a bunch of grapes of like large purple cells sermons the frequency of this occurrences is evident in the fact that they gave it a name because they had to it wasn't such an anomaly that you know people talked about it as want to vent it became prevalent enough that they had to devise words for that and so within the marshallese language there's evidence of women giving birth to what they call you know coconut head b b s or sailfish babies if you can you know picture the big marlin fish with pretty true sions of the fin on the back and that's because many of the babies were born with the spines actually outside of their body or with grotesque deformations along the spine and so they look to their local environment and look for non human words within  am an asshole ecosystem to try you know sort of to describe what was indescribable if that makes any sense and in addition to the women having to in terms of illnesses you know there's the thyroid there's been a lot of thyroid illness and thyroid cancer that's been associated with the radiation exposure there have been a lot of cancers in the marshall islands again we know when people are exposed to radiation the radiation is cancer causing and so there's high incidence of cancer throughout the marshall islands what i find most difficult than just really unbelievable is that we know radiation causes cancer and you know it still today the testing ended in one nine hundred fifty eight still today there is no there's no one colleges to the marshall islands and so there's no issue if you get cancer in the marshall islands today and you know in two thousand and twelve there is no chemotherapy that's available in the marshall islands there's no one colleges that you can go to and talk to about cancer treatment there 's no facility in the marshall islands to deal with your cancer and so cancer can essentially be a death sentence for the marshallese and it's only those that have the means or the wealth or the ability or the family connections to get themselves out of the country to find treatment elsewhere who have the best chances of survival and to me i think that's one of the most difficult aspects of the whole testing program is that young the cold war maybe the united states did not know a whole lot about the impacts of the weapons and what they would have done you know and that's being generous and critique you know the maybe they didn't fully understand the potential of the weapons but certainly after the for act one with our knowledge today i just find it inexcusable for the u s government to not provide the health care that the marshallese people in the as a result of their radiation exposure because you know the events in the marshall islands essentially led the us to win the cold war you know we we used our proving ground to prove that we had the best nuclear arsenal and we were the strongest nation and for the marshallese you know what do they get and the they've got illness and they've got displacement and then inability to be on their homelands then you know and for their future generations to be sacrificed for this and so i feel like we have a debt in this nation to the marshallese the marshallese you know it there's a lot of us security that came at the scientists and or doctors examining the martian leaves after these terrorists were they giving them medical help then or were they just recording the results of their tests yeah yeah you know to another disturbing aspect of this whole history you know following the bravo event in one nine hundred fifty four the united states set up top secret medical program that was called project four point one and project four point one was to study the effects of radiation on human beings and you know prior to this time the united states had conducted lots of medical experiments in exposing animals like the lab rats to radiation and understanding what radiation would do to these animals but the marshall line and became an opportunity for the us to take it to the next step to understand what radiation would do to human beings and so there were aspects of purposeful exposure of marshallese to radiation for the perth this of scientific study with the idea that if the us was ever in a nuclear war the us needed to understand how its citizens would fare us soldiers were sent into a nuclear exchange the us government would know how the soldiers would survive and so the marshallese did become human test subjects to study the effects of radiation these tests just to remove them from harm's way but then on the day that the us had decided ok the they're getting ready to test their largest weapon ever they purposely decided to leave the  also whether accounts from the morning and the evening before the test shot show that the winds were blowing towards wrong the lab and that the u s government was aware of that and that the winds were blowing exactly from the test site to wrong a lap  on the eve of the bravo test there was also a u s naval ship that was anchored right at wrong lap and that naval ship stayed when the bravo shot was detonated and then when it began to pick up the radiation cloud that was moving towards wrong go up and infirmed that radiation had come to ranga lap that ship still took off it left and left without taking the people of wrong with it there had been an opportunity they could have removed the marshallese and evacuated them from wrong but they didn't and so the people stayed as the radiation coded their islands and  for communities like wrong the left that had never seen radiation before when the radioactive ash fell from the from the nuclear detonation the people thought it was snow in many cases you know i interviewed people who said that they went out and played in it because they had always heard about snow or seen pictures of snow but they had never experienced it before so when the white powder or ash fell from the sky they went out you know kids put it on their eyes like makeup or on their lips like lipstick some people tasted it and wanted to see how it's meld and put it in their pockets or or brought it home and so they really didn't have an understanding of the dangers because the u been conveyed that before and then once this community of wrong had been exposed to the radiation the u s government left them there for about two days before coming in and evacuating them  ia where the u s doctors came in and it rolled them into this top secret medical program project four point one without their knowledge or without their consent and this project became a study to monitor what radiation would do to the people you know not treating them not taking where of their illnesses as you know a normal doctor patient relationship would be to try to improve the health or wellbeing of the subjects but this was to take photographs of you know what did the burns in the skin look like and then to watch it over time to really understand what the effects would be and so you know the marshallese that i interviewed would often talk about how you know they had burns that went down to their bones where the balloons were visible and there their feet they were in agony and all the us would do was take pictures of their illnesses and you know without giving them painkillers without giving them treatments it was you know they understood freight from the beginning that they were like test subjects and  it's interesting because the marshallese had to again going back to the language they had to borrow a term from the english language to sort of convey these experiences as research subjects and now you hear marshallese talk about being guinea pigs and that animal the guinea pig doesn't exist in the marshall islands but that that term is needed to convey that dehumanization that they felt as being test subjects and they can't get medical help to this day right well medical help is severely limited in the marshall islands so if you were from one of two communities wrangle up a new trick that are to downwind communities if you were on one of those two areas on march first nineteen fifty four then the u s presumes that you were exposed to radiation from the four then you'd be eligible for a medical program that's provided by the department of energy the offspring of any of these people are not eligible for any compensation communities that were resettled on highly contaminated lands are not eligible for any medical assistance and so there's as a tiny portion of the population is eligible for some health care it's not complete health care because it's only for certain illnesses things like by reuter cancer but not not for other illnesses we now know were linked to radiation exposure and so u s assistance has been wholly inadequate for the marshallese we're talking with holly barker she is author of several books bravo for the marshallese regaining control in a post nuclear post colonial world and co author of the consequence still damages of nuclear war a lot the wrong lab report and you're going to be speaking this coming friday here in seattle i am coming friday february twenty fourth at seven thirty pm at university temple united methodist church here in seattle cross street of it's at fourteen fifteen north east forty third right behind the post office and the subject is from nuclear weapons to nuclear energy the u s the marshall islands and japan so love to connect people thanks mike