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How Did Nuclear Weapons Get on My Reservation?
A member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation digs into a decades-long mystery: how 15 intercontinental ballistic missiles came to be siloed on her ancestral lands.
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November 14, 2023
How Did Nuclear Weapons Get on My Reservation?
A member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation digs into a decades-long mystery: how 15 intercontinental ballistic missiles came to be siloed on her ancestral lands.
By Ella Weber edited by Tulika Bose, Jeffery DelViscio & Sébastien Philippe
[Illustration of a Bohr atom model spinning around the words Science Quickly with various science and medicine related icons around the text]
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This podcast is Part 1 of a five-part series. Listen to Part 2 here. The podcast series is a part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.
Air Force Member (tape): Yeah, unfortunately, right now we can’t have anybody on the access road because they’ll just, like, come out and monitor. I’m sorry.
Ella Weber (tape): Gotcha.
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Ryo Morimoto (tape): No, no, that’s okay.
[CLIP: Music]
Ella Weber: You’re listening to my first encounter with the Air Force at a nuclear missile facility.
My name is Ella Weber. I am a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes, which is located in the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in central North Dakota.
In this podcast, I’m going to tell you about myself, my community and our relationship with nuclear weapons. I’m 20 years old and a junior at Princeton University.
You’re listening to Scientific American’s The Missiles on Our Rez, a new miniseries from Science, Quickly. This is Episode 1: “Becoming Nuclear.”
[CLIP: Music]
Weber: I’m part of an undergraduate-directed project called Nuclear Princeton. We’re driving on the Fort Berthold reservation to look for nuclear missile silos.
The people you’re about to hear are my friends Lillian Fitzgerald, a member of the Klamath Tribes, and Blue Carlsson, a member of the Cherokee Nation. Joshua Worth, who’s Native Hawaiian, is kind of observing from the back seat.
We’re also there with Ryo Morimoto, a Japanese anthropologist and assistant professor at Princeton. There are five of us documenting the experiences of people living near missiles.
Weber (tape): Are we turning here?
Morimoto (tape): Yep because this 87.
Weber (tape): Oh wait, It’s not on 87. It’s, like, right off this road. It’s … we have to pass it.
Carlsson (tape): Oh, okay.
Fitzgerald (tape): We haven’t passed it, or…?
Carlsson (tape): So, we’re going ….
Weber (tape): We have to pass it.
Carlsson (tape): So, we’re going through and straight.
Weber (tape): Yeah….it’s right there.
Fitzgerald (tape): It’s this?
Weber (tape): Yeah…yeah, it should be that! That little mound right there? That’s it!
Carlsson (tape): Oh….
Fitzgerald (tape): With the porta potties by it? What if I need to pee?
Weber (tape): No, that’s the missile silo.
Carlsson (tape): H-09.
Fitzgerald (tape): Oh yeah, wow!
Morimoto (tape): [Laughs]
Weber: Our team had surveyed at least three nuclear missile silos. Because they’re underground, we usually could only see a barbed wire fence with a long pole sticking out of the ground.
We arrive in front of what looks like a nondescript tan house. It sits atop miles and miles of empty prairie, blanketed in snow. An eagle even swoops overhead. It’s very cinematic.
I and other members of the project’s research team are at Hotel-01. It’s this missile alert facility of the 91st Missile Wing, located between New Town and Parshall, North Dakota.
Fitzgerald (tape): Air force!
Carlsson (tape): Yeah, he has a U.S. government plate… [expletive].
[CLIP: Car sounds]
Weber: Before members of the Air Force came outside, I didn’t actually know what a missile alert facility was. So I turned to Wikipedia to try to understand where we were.
Weber (tape): Oh, it used to be known as the launch control facility. It is a soft, or not able to withstand nuclear explosions.
Carlsson (tape): Oh, God, this guy’s coming out.
Weber (tape): It consists of a security control office, dining room, kitchen, sleeping areas for security forces stationed there and occasional maintenance troop garages for various vehicles and other facilities.
Weber: I’m so distracted that I’m not paying attention to what’s happening outside of the car.
Weber (tape): That’s what a missile ...
Carlsson (tape): Ella, look up.
Weber (tape): Well, that’s fun.
Carlsson (tape): Yeah, there’s two guys—one of them has a really big gun. They both have really big guns.
Weber: Ryo decides to talk to the two Air Force guards.
Fitzgerald (tape): You guys, take a picture.
Carlsson (tape): I don’t want to take a picture. I’m scared. Ugh….
Research team (tape): Hi….
Weber: We get out of the car, too.
[CLIP: Car doors shutting; everyone shuffling outside]
Worth (tape): These people are nice.
Weber (tape): Of course. This is North Dakota, guys. Woo….
Morimoto (tape): You guys stationed here?
Air Force Member (tape): Yeah.
Carlsson (tape): Must be fun….
Air Force Member (tape): Where are you guys from?
Research Team (tape): Princeton University.
Air Force Member: Oh, wow. It’s pretty nice in Princeton.
Morimoto: We’re trying to think where to go to get food [laughs].
Air Force Member: So, I mean, there’s a place in Parshall that you can get food, but that’s probably the only place for, like, 50 miles.
Morimoto: Well, thank you so much.
Weber (tape): Sorry to disrupt your day. Have a good one.
[CLIP: Footsteps receding]
[CLIP: Music]
Weber: Over the past 60 years, three generations of my people have lived with nuclear missiles on our ancestral lands. The missiles came in 1962, when my grandmothers, Debra Malnourie and Carol Schulz, were in boarding school.
Debra Malnourie: Where was I in 1962? I think I was at Wahpeton Indian school.
Weber: In case you don’t know, such boarding schools were founded to eliminate traditional American Indian ways of life and replace them with mainstream American culture.
Carol Schulz: There were rows upon rows of beds where everybody slept in the first night. You could hear everybody cry.
Weber: Just a decade prior to missiles being installed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flooded more than a quarter of the reservation. That quarter consisted of nearly all of the agricultural land and 80 percent of the Fort Berthold population.
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