Danielle E. Endres, Ph.D.

This area of research seeks to critically understand the role of rhetoric in the relationship between Native Americans 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 environmentalism, environmental justice, and Native American activism. Throughout this body of work, I have developed a rhetorical theory of nuclear colonialism—the material/discursive system in which Native Americans are disproportionately affected by the harmful effects of the nuclear industrial complex—that highlights specific rhetorical strategies of domination and resistance that circulate within the nuclear colonialism discursive formation. 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.

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.