Terry Tempest Williams Research Paper

Would you be concerned if the United States governments decided to test nuclear bombs and had their fallout landing in your backyard? As an American citizen I would never dream that the government would bomb its own people however this is exactly what happened in the southern Utah desert starting on January 27, 1951 and continuing through July 11, 1962. During those years the United States was right in the middle of the cold war so there was a great push to further develop our nuclear weapons to prepare for the threat of a possible nuclear war. To our Politicians it was simple the nuclear testing was for the greater good of the country and the southern Utah desert was “virtually uninhabited”.

However amid the hot sand, buttes and mesas there were still thousands of people who called the southern Utah desert home. Year after year they would witness the eerie lights, smoke and ash of the nuclear test blindly believing those across the country in Washington DC who continued to promise it wouldn’t do them any harm. Little did they know the radioactive ash

She tells us about how in her dream they circled a fire in the desert and talked about how they as women represented the earth they would reclaim the desert for the sake of their children and for the sake of the land. Williams continues to describe how in her dream the Shoshone women broke into the camps outside the site of the nuclear tests and how the authorities were called and all the women were arrested. Terry Tempest Williams ends her essay with the end of her dream where the soldiers left her and the Shoshone women in the middle of the desert as a cruel joke, but the joke was on them because they didn’t realize the land they were bombing, the land where they left these women stranded was the same land they called