2008 Nuclear-Free Future Award
Manuel Pino, Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, USA
He is a messenger between heaven and earth. Manuel
Pino comes from the Acoma Pueblo, an ancient adobe village
west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Beyond the earthcolored
dwellings one sees only blue sky – Acoma Pueblo
occupies the rim of a steep mesa. Standing on the center
plaza, one has the feeling that a great invisible magnet is
pulling the settlement into the clouds. Tourist guidebooks
and highway billboards refer to Acoma as, "Sky City."
Manuel Pino was born in 1952 and grew up "down
below." The population of the Acoma had so grown that
the village split into two: the division on top of the mesa,
and the section at its foot. Already as a child Manny was
an avid runner and on some days, when not racing long
distances across the surrounding desert, time and again
he would repeat the climb and descent between the village
halves. Manuel's culture treats running not only as a physical
activity, but also as a means of meditation, an art of
communicating with the unseen world.
Each run has its spiritual component. To run against
the wind is to encounter the forces of nature in prayer. And
here begins the problem: shorty after Manuel was born, in
the close vicinity of Sky City, the earth was ripped open by
Anaconda to give rise to Jackpile-Paguate – North America’s
largest uranium strip mine. Waste mining rubble and
millings from processing yellowcake grew daily, the wind
spreading the radioactivity across the New Mexico landscape.
Anaconda officials assured locals that there was
absolutely no health danger. Manuel Pino, who had always
been a stubborn, critical thinker, didn’t fall for the comforting
disinformation – he started doing his own investigating.
From this point on opposition to uranium mining played
a central role in Pino’s life. The theme for Manuel’s sociology
dissertation was The Destructive Impact of Uranium
Mining on Native American Culture. Many men of the
Pueblos and of the neighboring Navajo who worked at
Jackpile mine died of cancer. At the 1992 World Uranium
Hearing in Salz-burg, Manuel gave the victims of
the uranium boom in his homeland a loud voice. He has
spoken out at a number of international conferences, and
his theme remains ever the same: to make plain before the
eyes of the industrial world that to say yes to nuclear technology
means saying yes to human victims. Manuel Pino,
who today is a professor at Scottscale Community College
in Arizona, lays out the toxic dialectic in his classes,
ensuring that the resistance to nuclear power and nuclear
weapons is passed on to the younger generations. Like a
messenger who passes on the important dispatch to the
outstretched hand of the runner ahead: The uranium must
remain in the earth!
–together with Claus Biegert, Craig Reishus
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