Service
Select Service Record:
- A founding Trustee and Secretary of the new 501(c)3 non-profit Institute for Research on Trauma and Resilience (IRTR—advocating for survivors and children of survivors of genocide, eugenics, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity and ecology), which serves as a fiduciary and fiscal agent for NGO Forgotten People, Navajo Nation: Surveying of indigenous cultural sites with Diné (Navajo) people in the Navajo Nation, photography / videography and archiving, non-profit corporate paper editing, documentation of cultural interchange, organization of indigenous art for fundraising—August 2017 – present. Follows up on service work done in the Navajo Nation since 2010.
- City of Riverside, CA: LSU Academic representative of former Mayor Ron Loveridge's Clean & Green Advisory Committee or Taskforce (advising on the Green Accountability Performance or GAP goals, i.e., 38 action plan items adopted by the Riverside City Council in 2008, many of which have been met ahead of deadlines in our city).
- In the Spring of 2010, became Faculty Sponsor to a student-directed volunteer organization, Project Pueblo, which began working with indigenous people to start building homes and facilities after the end in April 2009 of the ~40 year US federal government-enforced "Bennett Freeze" on development within a 1.5 million acre region of the western Navajo Nation.
- Assisted the Forgotten People NGO with collecting potentially radioactive samples from the vicinity of abandoned-uranium-mine-mill sites in the Navajo Nation, taking gamma energy spectra with equipment from the Department of Physics on both our samples and those collected by student Jarred Wheeler of Eastern Washington University.
- Joined Project Pueblo in the Navajo Nation (Arizona) to help the Forgotten People in September of 2010 to collect more samples and run gamma ray spectra. Presented our results at the Uranium Stakeholders’ meeting in Tuba City, AZ on 15 September 2010: “Decolonizing the Navajo Nation: Using Grassroots Driven Development & Activism to Secure Environmental Justice” http://www.epa.gov/region9/superfund/navajo-nation/stakeholder.html; “EPA posts LSU scientist’s uranium pollution presentation” http://www.lasierra.edu/index.php?id=6740)
- Also presented our work with Forgotten People representatives, Marsha Monestersky and Don Yellowman, at a special session on environmental refugees and the struggles faced by indigenous peoples all over the world facing environmental degradation from resource extraction interests at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver (03 November 2010) and afterward at the First Unitarian Church in Denver. Our work has been covered in “Abandoned Uranium Mines: An ‘Overwhelming Problem’ in the Navajo Nation,” published by Scientific American (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=abandoned-uranium-mines-a#comments) and also Science Line (http://www.scienceline.org/2010/12/an-%E2%80%9Coverwhelming-problem%E2%80%9D-in-the-navajo-nation/).
- September 2010: “‘Uranium rush’ prompts Grand Canyon fears” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11350744; where the reporter inadvertently misspelled my name Grier and had me at UCR rather than LSU).
- In December 2010, we spent time in the Nation visiting sites and video-documenting oral histories of survivors of the Diné evictions from Wupatki National Monument (“Wupatki eviction survivors remember….” http://forgottennavajopeople.org/blog/?p=143; see http://projectpueblo.org/ and http://www.forgottennavajopeople.org/).
- Became a Trustee of the Board of Forgotten People in early 2011.
- During the last week of March 2011, we returned to the Navajo Nation to continue gathering information on the Wupatki evictions as well as on cultural sites linking the Navajo to the ancient Anasazi peoples of the American Southwest. Collected materials for testing. Ran gamma ray spectra on materials collected from samples in the area.
- During the Spring Quarter (2011), a student worked with me in writing a draft of right-of-return legislation for Navajo evictees and their descendants to the Wupatki, in partnership with Marsha Monestersky and Anthony Davis (grandson of Stella Peshlakai, the sole remaining survivor still on the land after the forced expulsion of Navajo people from the Wupatki by government personnel and local ranchers in the 1930s and afterward). Our draft legislation was incorporated in part in legislation passed by the Arizona state legislature (March 2014: http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/51leg/2r/bills/hcr2029h.pdf).
- April 2012: Our work on uranium contamination has been referenced in an article in The New York Times (31 March 2012 online; 01 April print, Sunday edition, p. A16) “Uranium Mines dot Navajo land Neglected and still Perilous” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/us/uranium-mines-dot-navajo-land-neglected-and-still-perilous.html).
- In the Fall 2016, Marsha Monestersky and I worked with an attorney on a proposed US presidential executive order designed to accomplish a right-of-return to the Wupatki, in the closing months of the Obama administration.
- July of 2017: Wrote with Marsha Monestersky "Hope and Trauma in a Poisoned Land"
- LINKS of interest on the rights of Indigenous Peoples and all Peoples (indigenous to Earth as we all are) to a world where there is a sustainable and healthy planetary environment, with protection for freedom and a life of well-being for all, and where this is restorative justice for victims and a bringing to account of perpetrators in remembrance for the crimes of the past and present: UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, an extension of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights; History: David Stannard's American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (1993: Oxford University Press) and kindred historical works; HiddenNoLonger.com.