Rufina Marie Laws considers herself an "accidental activist." When the tribal council of the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico announced intentions to pursue creation of a temporary nuclear waste storage site on reservation lands in the early 1990s, Laws was shocked by what she viewed as a desecration of her familial and tribal traditional lands. She became a door-to-door opponent, urging her fellow Apaches to oppose the nuclear waste project. In 1995, a tribal referendum defeated the proposal.

Laws was interviewed on the Mescalero Apache reservation near the town of Ruidoso, New Mexico, by program Producer Ken Verdoia.

Ken Verdoia: Let's go back to the very beginning. What was your reaction when you heard that the Mescalaro Apache tribal council was considering bringing high level radioactive waste to tribal lands? What was your first reaction?

Rufina Marie Laws: Well, when I first heard of their plan I didn't know what they were talking about. It was new to me and I've heard of nuclear energy and nuclear bombs and things like that but I never thought in terms of nuclear waste. I didn't think beyond that point. And my late mother Magdelina Faddie, when she told me about this plan, I was just puzzled. I didn't know what it meant. But I had a vision. And the vision was a probably the most dramatic vision I ever had. And when that occurred it left me puzzled for quite some time as to the meaning of this, dream that I had.

Verdoia: Can I ask you what the vision was?

Laws: It took me probably a week when I made the connection. I woke up one morning and then I made the connection to what my mother spoke of as an enterprise that the tribe was going into. And what the vision, what the meaning of the vision was, it started coming together. The vision was about the future, and my role in deciding what would happen next for my people and the land.

Verdoia: What turned you into a person that was opposed to this idea?

Laws: The vision. It was beautiful and it's mine. The visions that I've had since I was very young are like this. Like what we're experiencing right now. They're quite vivid. They're, sometimes it's hard to tell between reality and the vision. And I've had dreams like this ever since I was very young. And at certain point in my life I had to let go of that world and start functioning in this world. And every once in awhile they come and when this vision had come it was probably the most horrifying one that I ever had in terms of the way it ended. You know? And it had my family, I know my family was there, but at the time I didn't realize which part of my family was there. But as I, came to terms with what the struggle was about, what nuclear waste means, how long it lasts and what it does to the environment, then I realized that the seventh generation was what I had seen. And it was that generation, who are my relatives, that actually were the ones that were to pay the price, in the future and it was horrifying.

Verdoia: So then you realized this was something that you had to oppose.

Laws: Nuclear waste is a foreign substance and a foreign idea to Humans [Editor's note: Apaches, like many Native American tribes, refer to themselves in their own language as "the Humans" or "the People" It carries a deeper connotation than the English translation can capture.] And to put that on sacred lands, whether it be the Mescalero lands or any other tribal land whether it be here in the continent of the United States or Australia or Africa or anywhere else, it's, there's no place in this world for nuclear waste. It can't be in the water. It can't be held underground. It can't be shot out into space, like I've heard some people say. It's a problem that is growing, I know because when I stepped away from the issue, the problem, of course, was energy. Where is the energy source going to come from in the future and pardon me, one of the things that I'm seeing now is the effort to search for electrical providers in California cause the lights are going out. But I know for Humans, it is wrong to have this poison on the land.

Next