Nuclear Normalizing and Kathy Jetn¯il-Kijiner’s “Dome Poem”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay explores U.S. Cold War medical discourses after nuclear detonations in the Marshall Islands (1946–1958) in conversation with contemporary Marshallese poetry. In a process I term “nuclear normalizing,” I show how the U.S. government repeatedly obscures the causal relationships of their nuclear detonations regarding Indigenous experiences of illness, specifically in Project 4.1 and two Department of Energy pamphlets. Poet Kathy Jetn¯il-Kijiner rehistoricizes these imperial narratives of radiation by evoking Indigenous ecological knowledges to promote intergenerational healing.