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On digging IT: Correspondences between the Dineh Uranium Miners' Advocacy and the Health and Safety Program of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' Union in the United States
| This exploration of occupational health and safety campaigns is framed in the 1950s and 1960s, as the intensity and the scale of industrial toxicity reaches new dimensions. It brings forward some of the obstacles and pathways to making common cause against this headlong growth that were encountered by Native American mobilizations and by the organizing campaigns that gave rise to the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers' Union innitiative for passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The research involved is at once intensely local and far-flung, on one hand following Dineh advocacy from its base on the uranium mine-ridden Reservation to the nation-wide advocacy of the Native American Youth Council, and on the other, paying close attention to the roots of the union activism in a local of cosmetics factory workers on Long Island, New York.
Sources
Interviews with Local 149 veterans, Long Island, 2009
National American Indian Youth Council Files, Southwest Research Center, Albuquerque, NM, 2009
"On Digging it: Correspondences between Dineh Uranium Miners Advocacy and the Health and Safety Program of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union", in New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (Palgrave, publication forthcoming)
earlier versions of this paper presented to the Working Class Studies Association, Pittsburg, usa, 2009; International Labor and Working Class History/Pacific Northwest Labor History Assciation, Vancouver, CA 2008; Global 60s conference, Kingston, CA, 2007.
Julie Boddy is an independent cultural historian of the United States
in transnational contexts on the staff of the Library of Congress.
For the past five years she has been an Observer at the United Nations
Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
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