Art as Storytelling. Art as Evidence. Art as Resistance.

This month our Reclaim Community Fellows will be meeting Indigenous artists, John Harvey, Lisa Leilani Williams and Mallery Quetawki to discuss the role art plays in nuclear resistance and story telling for affected community members.

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"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you."

Maya Angelou wrote those words about grief and voice. They also describe something true about the nuclear age.

Nuclear violence has depended on silence from the start. Test sites were chosen for their distance from power, not their absence of people. Communities were exposed without informed consent. Illness was denied, minimized, buried in classified reports. Governments built entire nuclear programs on stories they did not want told.

Storytelling and art is how nuclear-affected communities take that power back. Some of the most powerful nuclear resistance imagery in the world did not come from a government report or a peer-reviewed study. It came from artists translating what science and policy could not, or would not, make visible.

Artwork above by Zuni Pueblo artist Mallery Quetawki titled DNA Repair (2017. 16 x 20 in. Acrylic on Watercolor Paper).

Art that is not simply decoration, but acts as a bridge

Zuni Pueblo artist Mallery Quetawki, who trained in biology before turning to painting, creates work that bridges Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Western science to communicate the health impacts of uranium mining on Indigenous communities. Her paintings do work that a data table cannot. They make contamination legible, felt, and specific to the people living with it, rather than abstracted into statistics. Mallery designed the beautiful Nuclear Truth Project logo.

Nukunu and Kokatha artist Yhonnie Scarce works in a different medium entirely, using blown glass to hold the memory of British and Australian nuclear testing on her Country. Her work insists on naming something too many institutions avoid: the extractive relationship between researchers and the communities whose knowledge, land, and bodies they study. Yhonnie was a core part of our early development of our Protocols, bringing particular attention to the exploitation of artists.

Not all resistance art is complex. Kathleen McCann's Hand Symbol, created in Australia, became a worldwide symbol of nuclear resistance precisely because it required no caption. A single image carried the same refusal across languages and borders, proof that visual art can travel where policy language cannot.

Poetry carries what policy cannot

Some of the most precise language about nuclear harm has come from poets, not policymakers. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner's Anointed and Bedi Racule's See You Soon, Lagoon hold the weight of the Marshall Islands' nuclear legacy in verse, in ways a briefing paper cannot. Fijian poet Luisa Tuilau's Bravo reckons with the Castle Bravo test with an urgency that refuses to let it fade into the past tense.

Testimony refuses to be history

Documentary film has become one of the most powerful tools for this work, precisely because it centers people the historical record tried to erase. 

First They Bombed New Mexico, a documentary by Lois Lipman, tells the untold story of Trinity, the world’s first nuclear bomb, detonated in New Mexico in the United States, one month before Hiroshima. It gives voice to the Downwinders whose exposure to US atomic testing has never been fully acknowledged. 

The Vow from Hiroshima produced by Nuclear Truth Project board member, Mitchie Takeuchi, follows Hiroshima survivor, Setsuko Thurlow, who carries Hibakusha testimony forward. 

Jara: Radioactive Patriarchy, a film by Reclaim Community Fellowship Advisor, Aigerim Seitenova, centers the survivors of Soviet nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk in Qazaqstan, a program whose harms are still being counted.

Our Planet, The People, My Blood, by Daniel Everitt-Lock follows nuclear veterans’ advocate Alan Owen, (an advisor to our Reclaim Community Fellowship) as he fights for transparency, recognition and justice for millions affected by nuclear weapons testing programmes worldwide.

These films are testimony to harm that persists including contamination that has not been cleaned up, illness that moves through generations, land that remains unusable, and communities still fighting for acknowledgment and remedy. Watching these documentaries means understanding the nuclear age as unfinished business, not history.

Whose history gets authorised

Artist Kent Monkman has argued that history is never neutral. It is a narrative shaped by whoever holds power, and reinforced through the words and images that serve them. Nuclear resistance art and storytelling exists to break that pattern, authorising versions of history that official records have tried to keep out of view.

Scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, famous for her book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples has named a related pattern directly, that institutions extract Indigenous knowledge and imagery while denying the people who created it a place as ongoing creators of their own culture. Visual art made by affected communities refuses that extraction. It insists that imagery of nuclear harm belongs to the people who survived it, not to the institutions that studied them.

Exhibitions like Black Mist Burnt Country, which holds public memory of British bomb tests on Australian soil, exist for the same reason: because official histories will not do this work on their own.

Every one of these artists and their work makes the same argument in a different form – that testimony is evidence, lived experience is expertise, and the people most affected by nuclear violence are the most qualified to narrate it. They do not need permission or translation to do so.

This is the heart of the Nuclear Truth Project Protocols - Rights, Respect and Reciprocity. Reciprocity does not mean inviting affected communities to contribute a quote to somebody else's report. It means recognising that communities are already telling their own stories, in their own languages and forms, and making room for those stories to lead.

Nuclear abolition is not only a matter of treaties and policy. It is a matter of who gets to narrate the nuclear age, whose knowledge counts as expertise, and whose images represent harm. Art is not a footnote to that fight. It is part of how the fight is won.