Danielle E. Endres, Ph.D.

This area of research seeks to critically understand the role of rhetoric in the relationship between Native peoples and nations and the nuclear production complex, specifically in relation to nuclear waste siting decisions in the United States. I became interested in this topic as a college student, seeking to intersect my interests in environmental justice, anti-nuclearism, and Indigenous Lands protection movements. Throughout this body of work, I have worked with rhetorical theories of nuclear decolonization and nuclear colonization. This work is deeply rooted in analysis of specific controversies that have arisen over high-level nuclear waste siting decisions in the U.S., primarily the proposed (and now unfunded) Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository that resides in Western Shoshone and Paiute ancestral treaty-guaranteed land.

​

I have a new book coming out in November 2023 called Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to Nuclear Waste Siting. 

As a part of this research program, I created a publicly available Nuclear Technologies in the American West Oral History project as a way to document the stories of activists, Native Americans, and other people who are heavily involved in nuclear controversies in the American West.  

This research program has been supported by a variety of University fellowships and grants including the inaugural Research Professorship in Environmental Humanities, a Faulty Research and Creative Grant, the Virgil D. Aldrich Faculty Fellowship, and the University Research Council Faculty Fellowship.