it's going to be really hard to do in ten minutes fresh was started in the fall of one thousand nine hundred four there were rumblings and rumors in our community that there had been humongous dust releases from a very noxious facility that sat on a thousand and fifty acres that nobody really knew what they did it sort of mirrors christian iverson story almost i told her earlier and it made me cry that every time it said rocky flats i could've inserted fernald and every time it's that plutonium i could've inserted uranium it it's like this everywhere and there were some women in the community a nurse specifically who began to ask him questions about this dust that was being released and there's i can't quote pound each and all this stuff anymore i just can't do it if it was heavy dust this was well behaved dust came out of the stacks went right back down on the ground never left the thousand fifty acres ever well behaved just then late in the year of eighty four early eighty five there was reports of three offsite contaminated wells in this community my husband and i lived in a rented farmhouse directly across the street from this facility right in my checkerboard watertower the materials production center little point paint guy down in the corner sign nobody really knew what they did there you know again it mirrors christian story you know people said they may dutch boy paint they you know dog food you name  man just and that's what i think did it for us as the mothers of this community said we're not going to take this anymore we're going to stand up and we're going to fight because you're not going to contaminate and make our kids on healthy you're not going to do it fresh was formed the men's game home with the kids and the women went out and raised holy livin hell we were called crazy housewives you know get a job i had a full time job everybody in this organization worked full time i worked in a mental hospital honey talk to me talk to me about working in a mental hospital and dealing with the deal we on the side many times i would have loved to have put them in a room all by themselves we found us a lawyer you know you don't know what to do you really don't know what to do and a friend of mine suggested we talk to this lawyer named stan chesley and immediately a class action lawsuit was filed if you've never been through a class action lawsuit talk to me psych evaluations ten twelve fourteen hour depositions poked around in every aspect of your life everything if you cut a secret you don't have it anymore believe me and we all have skeletons in our closets i'm sorry i know i have a few which everybody knows about now but i'm trying to just set the stage for you nine hundred eighty five front page cincinnati enquirer toppled every single day that year there was a story about f this done why weren't these people told and the deal easy answer was because they didn't need to know you know we did this we knowingly and willingly did this and there's really not a damn thing you can do god look what happened to chernobyl and one of my fresh members who has now passed away said you're outraged overture noble why are you outraged about what's happening in your backyard you know it's like come on we we kicked the dealy store down we didn't take no for an answer we just i mean we just raise holy live in hell expose them for everything we could expose them for you can because this is too much for me and i think this was this was a group of mostly women nobody got paid in this organization everybody was a volunteer i was a volunteer coordinator at the mental hospital so i didn't know how to coordinate volunteers but i think and i think that made us a much stronger organization you know volunteers do really good work because you're working hard you're not getting paid you know i think when when i took my first airplane flight as bill mitchell talks about to  colorado and i'd never been on a plane before i was absolutely terrified and white knuckled and i got and i said to my husband before we left you know i was like twenty eight thirty years old then i said if these people are really weird don't go home don't go anywhere because i may have to call you wouldn't come and get me to the airport on the next day and you know if we've not wonderful great people through the years  site i tell you what they did and this is the lesson learned i think in one nine hundred eighty six when they stopped nine hundred eighty nine when they stopped production at the site they literally just hit the switches left everything in the lines left everything the way it was barrels everywhere waste everywhere waste pits dug in the ground with buried contamination and everywhere you know he was contaminated awkward for they just turned it off and hit the switches you know god common sense would tell you to finish what you were doing before you turned the switches off and i not we talk about lessons learned and god i hope that's one of them probably didn't sink know i mean we have rusty barrels everywhere we had our fluent line that went from the site to the great miami river that they just dumped and dumped and dumped into hundreds and hundreds of pounds a year running into the great miami river city into cincinnati to find all so this the government could put pershing missiles in somewhere i can't remember where that even was now you know you don't ask anybody this is the part that gets me is you don't ask anybody fresh like i said we were we were the first community organization to get to take a tour of the deal east of and i don't know how we we financial this with our congress folks and we got there that day and i said the only way i'm going is if i can carry my rattler and a camera you know we were i was a media darling you know you don't talk to me i'll talk to you come on let's do it we got here that day in the r guy said you can't bring your camera i said they were not going one out the parking lot and have a press conference we took our cameras we took our rattlers two can play this game issues we laid out and was kitchen floor this math very crude you know and put pens red pens for people who was sick with cancer and black pins for people who had died and i think when we got done and we had about three hundred names at that point and we started it was just so overwhelming because directly the way the wind blew and directly the way the water flew you could just see this pattern of course we took it to a fresh meeting in the deal we tipped big pretty damn scientific to me you know i'm not a ph d i'm not a scientist i'm not a i'm a little bit of an egghead since arjun taught me how to be water but you know don't talk about my stuff i think through the advisory board process you know we started to work on the balanced approach and i think a lot of that came through m p and not the in a nimby and you know decisions were starting to be made about what do you do with your waste and you know where are you going to send it and you know we're going to bury it and all this stuff and yeah and i think we had to go back as a community and say you know we're not going to be nimbys here and we did the balanced approach we kept eighty five percent of our waste on the anything that was under our waste criteria acceptance level we capped and the rest did go off site and i think i really think that was the most helpful thing was talking to other people you know we met with the nevada test site advisory board we brought them to for all we went to the test site you know this we you had to make those connections with each other and talk to each other and you know if we keep this will you take that well we ended up getting screwed in the end but you know it when therefore and i think this the advisory board came at a time for us at fernald that we were we were really getting close to be in and over our heads and we knew we needed some help and we needed it really quick we were getting ready to go into the remedial investigation feasibility study or get righted right broads and do milestones and all this stuff and you know so that we needed and i think that was another really helpful thing for us all just fast forward like twenty twenty two years and we finished it we did our clean up is a perfect absolutely not is it safe i believe it's safe at this point i think we got the best we could have possibly gotten we have a humongous onsite disposal facility that holds our waste that's our legacy that's our part of being part of the nuclear weapons complex that's the way it is we are a protected green space now we have a great visitor center we have a museum that sort of tells our story i still quibble with that a little bit i didn't pay for it so that's ok deal we think one of the things they say they called it weapons to wetlands and that just rubs me the wrong way a little bit you know i won't go into it but i just want you to know that there are people like me you know we're not we're not great we don't get everything but when you threaten somebody children and you threaten help the safety of their lives they do have a right to get mad and fight every nuclear weapon in the united states arsenal was either designed at lawrence livermore in california or at los alamos in new mexico and susan asked me to speak a little bit about how through the and hand in alliance for new york on abilities grassroots groups work on national issues so i'll try to tell a couple of those stories  environmentalist she's an extract of lee linked at their root and then after we were founded we were an all volunteer crew we began to meet other groups and this process accelerated x the net because of the military production network and to understand that other groups were making the same connections at their sites each in their own way and and just sort of historically the moral argument to get its nuclear weapons had already been very well explicated by about one nine hundred eighty three when we were founded and we agree with them and the guns versus butter the economic arguments which we still make had been pretty well developed what the groups in this room were part of developing was the environmental and health argument that connection between nuclear weapons research development testing manufacture and deployment and the health and environmental impacts in those communities all across the country that was not very well developed until the eighty's and each of our groups was doing it in our own way as you heard in the morning and then by getting together and sharing information and making sure that a group success in one part of the country didn't become a group's problem in another part of the country is really at the heart of the and he and a story i met bill mitchell when he called me on the phone and asked to come and meet me it was about nine hundred eighty eight nine hundred eighty nine we were an all volunteer group that was almost a full year before i could get time off of work in order to attend my first meeting which i believe was late one nine hundred eighty nine and it a broadening of the military production at work because it was founded with the production sites hence the name which was already there when i got there and we were from a nuclear weapons and the network has been incredibly good about sort of growing in a really logical organic kind of way and the the issues we understood were at once local and at once national in terms of policy so many gifts three quick examples among hundreds there was a nuclear bunker buster that was proposed during the bush administration the robust nuclear earth penetrating bombs are now some of you may not that thank you apologies some of you may not have heard of it this is because it never got developed the more things that nobody hears about it means that we fund very quickly it was the local groups that were part of the alliance for nuclear countability who immediately understood what that was in fact it was the lawrence livermore national laboratory design that was being adapted to give it vance earth penetrating capability as they called it so a lot of the early research analysis publications you know fact sheets reports advocacy going to talk to congress to cut its funding going to talk to administration offices  came from the alliance for nuclear accountability and we worked also with other groups across the country so i'm not saying it was all of us but a lot of the early information and early understanding about it importance came from those of us who lived and worked at the site and i just brought a single little press release that bob shaffer did after a and a and a d c days called secret pentagon documents call for usable nuclear weapons and there's actually several of them because we heard when we were in d c that they were supposedly within several weeks of the pentagon issuing a need for this and once there's a military requirement it becomes much more difficult to stop and i don't possible more difficult that military requirement was never issued that  was never designed so then the nuclear weapons designers came up with something called the reliable replacement warhead program r r r w they did learn one lesson don't name something where people understand what it is it was the alliance for nuclear accountability it roots who jumped on it earlier a and we worked with a lot of d c based groups  and so this is not intended to be a slur but it was actually the alliance for nuclear countability groups who wanted to go after its funding early and helped convince our allies to join together in a campaign to go after its funding and that is ultimately what stopped of this nuclear weapon from being developed and we talked to then senator o a who became president obama and he put that tried to put the nail in the coffin by declaring it official policy that that weapon would not be developed and we are still working on these issues because now they've come back through something called life extension programs it's actually government single payer universal health care it's not for people it's for nuclear weapons and so we're vignette over on the cleanup and environmental protection side of the department of energy came out with something called risk based and states you may have noticed that that was listed killing that as a as a one of our chief ment's which it was well at many of our sites we noticed that risk based and states was going to in fact subvert the superfund law it was going to be what we call getting variance was going to be a variance based and state kind of thing it was going to affect the quality of cleanup at just about every department of energy site and i really honestly believe it was the collective work that we did commenting on how it was going to affect our site at our site but working together nationally that ultimately stopped that program and literally saved the superfund law from being got it so i want to just offer those as three of many of examples where by working collaborative groups in a in a in a in a itself have from me bringing our unique grassroots knowledge and our unique grassroots experience to the national level have changed policy both in terms of nuclear weapons policy and in terms of our environmental laws and environmental policy thank you a traditional readings from cherokee pamela king fisher born of the bird clan which makes us messengers but more importantly than that i'm a daughter of plutonium i was born and raised in hanford my father started there hundred forty three as a guard at the gate they gave that man a gun and i think collectively within my family we have about eighty years it hampered my brother ran a nuclear power plant there for thirty years my father was there thirty years i still have family there today i started asking skins and apparently the i thought all the wrong ones but they were the right ones about fourth or fifth grade hearing the stories about daddy saying yeah they drive out the trucks at night and sleep and make up good numbers they don't even check the tank levels and you know so i started knowing this at a in the sixty's as as a young pretty impressionable person  of the oddball in my family i'm really the only one that cared about culture that cared about who we were they cared about the animals i had all the horses and you know the boys and got on to race cars and girls and things like that so i just was sort of the odd one out and it meant it was very easy for me to leave and to you know go on and out into my life but to be born and raised on the fence line where we knew the rabbits were hot we pain people to go pick up radioactive bunny food i mean this is just unbelievable to me but coming to my first one i moved to oklahoma and discovered that i was near a cur magee uranium conversion facility i had no clue what that meant i knew that hanford made the plutonium i knew that all of our fathers in our town made off that's about all we knew we knew tucker role we learned all that in the early or late fifty's early sixty's but we didn't know what any of it meant science i don't know it just didn't quite i don't know if they talked about it at school i i don't really know that we had that class so it will again then i just continued to hear the story throughout the day we didn't know what was going on there there were no rumors about hanford we knew was the bomb that nobody taught nobody's daddy's talked it just it just didn't happen so there were these mysteries my life of what does it mean my dad built the bomb what does that mean i'm cherokee and those have been the two paths that i followed my whole life going to oklahoma and discovering that i was thirty miles upstream from  conversion facility owned by kermit he after they had killed karen silkwood they were burying a hot tanks and trucks from her site over at our site the rods that karen exposed were coming to hanford i started to make the connections and i don't know someone with a better memory than i will remember how i ended up in the room at e m p and it cool font eating pie or whatever we were doing but it changed my life every one of you in these groups changed my life and made me see the bigger picture and to understand you know we can go back to the treaties and talk about that when they wanted to know why and it was out in the middle of nowhere let's just move those indians or you know that's that's just get them off of there so we can talk about washington i don't know probably every site was native lands and these were seeded territories that were then retaken and hopefully will never be given back to us although that may start to happen you know  so it just learning that native americans are impacted you know i want to draw a big circle in its land health foods and culture and it's all connected and you cannot separate is affected us in every way possible if we don't have our territories to hunt on if we don't have our traditional foods if all the rabbits are hot you know i mean if it were moved away from our medicines and from our waters and from where we should be where they mined it and coming he owned those mines and when they drove trucks from oklahoma out to quote very mine they just left the spigot on a little bit so by the time they got to new mexico it was in deep but we were finding out these things and coming to an empty and meeting back in the eighty's late eighty's i guess i was here pretty early just blew my mind and open it up to know and see the whole fuel cycle and understand where natives hit all the way along the cycle from yellowcake to waste when the united states government hired a waste negotiator to come out to try to pay them two hundred fifty thousand dollars to have a conversation to pay them five hundred thousand dollars to have the next let's look at paper you know and then how many millions if you'll take the monitored retrievable storage and we just call that more disease blankets you know hello been there done that we get this picture but when it should when the ways negotiator showed up at the sac and fox nation he lit a fire that he didn't realize he should have stayed away from miss grace thorpe the daughter of jim thorpe called lance hughes and just went off like a rocket she was actually at the travel council meeting running outside calling lance on the pay phone you know going what does this mean he's here he's trying to sell it to the tribe my travel council once it  it's really hard to speak of the people that we've lost because these were amazing more years who just stood up and i've learned so much from them from all of you and to know that they're not with us but we're still carrying on you know the hall in their song karen silkwood we're doing it for you we're doing it for two and there's so many more than two that we're all still doing it for so we must bring up and mentor the young ones and let them know and the families of the families and even  in my family you know there's nobody here obviously they're not going to listen to you know what i have to say my brother that ran a power plant we could really have that conversation until he developed maleo fibrosis and i had to get stem and you know he can make no blood his his bone marrow turned to fibers tissue and don't tell me that wasn't from working at hanford for ever so nice force formed in one thousand nine hundred two they were going to deep well inject waste we didn't know what that man were were like out middle of nowhere to big red state you know we buy and not eighty nine ninety nays was being just inundated with phone calls how did you do this how do you raise money how do you organize from other tribes that were being approached and they asked us to become the indigenous environmental network and we had to make a decision are we going to help the rest of the natives and spend our time doing that are going to shut this plant down and we just stop with all the national organizing and focused we told greenpeace don't you dare drive that bus in our state we'll run you out on a rail this is ours and we're going to kill it and we did by nine hundred ninety three  the ninety had sold to general atomics in ninety three they shut down overnight on a friday saturday night they had had an explosion killed one man earlier and then they had just a complete breakdown nobody evacuated you know we did all kinds of media we never could do what we did in the media and now our pictures our names our stories the cancer map the cows i mean just the everything everybody said monsanto went together and bought five thousand acres and dumped the you know the happy casting was around the fence and they had the cow dumps in the middle because they were spraying rathore nate they had created fertilizer out of this sludge and the toxic bottoms of the ponds you know so i could go on for days and it's a huge story to try to tell and the company walked away they moved the money in the middle of the night they changed their name they made a new other natives coming though we didn't have the issues i think of the hispanics and anger in the oh you white people stuff i was just so happy to be fed and to know that i had friends doing the same thing crying about the same stories you know all around the country i just felt so connected that we had gone and so it i don't know this it just there's so many stories i just can't even go on all the toxic i mean you know the bonding in the middle of these most contaminated sites in the country and to know that it's up to us we are the ones we're waiting more but we've got to reach i i think natives have every we go back into our communit we have a lot of young people are fighting pipelines we've got a long a lot of young folks out there not quite so many new kids but we really have to make that bridge and bridge that gap because the amount of information in this room is volumes and we can't lose so i'm i'm so on are pleased to be here today wired dot thank days and who i knew from boston had been the director of the lawyers alliance for nuclear arms control approached me about the possibility of doing training for their grantees around the country dealing with nuclear weapons and related issues and he came up with a list of potential groups that could perhaps the benefit from this training and on that list i was able to dig out of a file where many of the folks in the organizations commitment that along the way early on i met bill mitchell who had been connected to me through a variety of ways and bill invited me to do a training as part of the ploughshares grant right after the first  a strong network and i met many of the folks in this room back in harpers ferry and the one nine hundred eighty nine right after the first d c day among other things i got to see the briefing book from the understanding that you need both expertise and passion and a bunch of other things  the perspective i have about this thing i don't know what rightly call we call of the alliance or they were used to call the network it's totally different than everything else out there on the progressive and advocacy scene at least in my experience i've worked closely with what used to be called the military toxics project and with a number of nuclear power organizations this thing the m m p n n a is a complex system i can't i start off as a biology major before deciding that you could actually get paid for doing the work you love i can't come up with up with a perfect biological metaphor maybe it's like you know it's like a colony of of of coral or something like that which are independent but well connected and that connection makes them much stronger oh you guys are a lot less path of than carl by by every means and trying to understand this system let's call it i that makes the organism the whole and the separate entities particularly strong and first we need several people referred to this already is the neural system the communications infrastructure that's from the very beginning has made it possible to instantaneously communicate across the country about the bad what the bad guys in that deal we were doing and what the good women gartside were doing and largely women who were the head of these organizations were doing to stop it and ward it and you know that the mentions of things like the environment the greenpeace provided for me and the free conference calls there isn't another network that does that now twenty five years later as far as i know and that that built the connections and passed information down and up the neural system now we use modern technologies as well we facebook we use twitter we use the web site of course but that is it focused a lot and i give bill tremendous credit for this on capacity building not just the the circuit riding media work that i train in public speaking and whatever else training that i did but every meeting it's had the skills training in addition to a technical spraining we've had training and fundraising skills with with kim cline and training on down diversity in the diversity of dismantling racism with andrea vaizey and me people who are the best in the country at th were brought to a and a and made available to to you because you asked for it in the third thing that you've got in that same sort of capacity building if you understand that extra expertise doesn't necessarily flyin to get off a plane that you're all the experts to do and so there was funding from early on through cross train travel and cross training minutes from the second and a meeting in blue mountain center one nine hundred eighty eight two practical creative ideas were dead a five for meeting the ongoing needs of network participants with first day cross training projects for local national organizations which would allow it for an exchange of perspectives the purposes of the cross training are twenty camps the level of understanding and trust more about that moment among the organisations and to build upon the collective skills and expertise already present in the group the second related idea was put develop an expensive computer communications bulletin board system we've already talked about so the capacity building was important the third thing this organism system whatever did was coordinated actions beginning with that first d c days and the fact that you all as of next spring will have done twenty five p c days to move the message forth interesting characteristic collective characteristic is that organisms that get strong have to feed themselves that one of the focuses of other n p n a has been on joint fund raising we've done several funders briefings to collectively and individually expose groups we've done a briefing books for funders etc and the fifth and i  but maybe the most important is this organism has developed a sense of mutual respect and over the years not initially trust that we believe that other people in this room are possible the successes of the path twenty five years you know take a look at the west or the hilton not terribly exaggerated reflect what is a unique institution and set of individual components on the u s activism scene the least as far as i've seen it the accomplishments show that this is really a higher level organism an