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Abstract
Lee Marmon and Will Wilson’s aerial photographs of extractive landscapes in and around their homelands of the Laguna Pueblo and Diné Bikéyah respectively counter the dominant state narrative of nuclearism that is perpetuated by photographs of The Mushroom Cloud. Their photographs counter this narrative by photographing sites of “slow violence,” inverting the gaze of militaristic technologies back onto sites of state violence, and establishing an “incontestable” Native presence within the landscapes. In this process, the images become situated within a long history of storytelling and witnessing as practices that assert an Indigenous presence in the face of settler-colonial violence. Thus, I argue that their photographs are “spatial testimonies” to the violence of nuclearism and to Native survivance. Ultimately, Marmon and Wilson’s photographs emerge as documents and aesthetic objects that contribute to a reimagining of nuclear histories and futures, where the temporal and spatial violence of settler colonialism and the hierarchies that reproduce it, are confronted and reconfigured.