Trina Sherwood gazes out at the Hanford nuclear site as she speeds across the Columbia river in a small motorboat. More than 500 sq miles large and ringed by rocky mountains, the decommissioned nuclear production site is considered one of the most contaminated places in North America.
It also sits on the ancestral lands of the Yakama Nation and other Indigenous peoples in Washington state. Here, precious wildlife, vision quest sites and burial grounds lie side-by-side with signs reading “warning hazardous area” and towering nuclear reactors, some of which date back to the second world war.
