the following was published in Akwesasne Notes New Series,
Spring -- April May June -- 1997, Volume 2 #2, pp. 10-12.
and is reproduced here with permission.
The High Cost of Uranium in Navajoland
by Bruce E. Johansen
When Native Americans in the Western United States were
assigned reservations in the late nineteenth century,
many were sent to land thought nearly worthless for
mining or agriculture. The year 1871, when treaty-making
stopped, was a time before sophisticated irrigation, and
before dryland farming techniques had been developed.
Industrialization was only beginning to transform the
cities of the Eastern Seaboard and the demand for oil,
gas and even coal was trivial by present-day standards.
And, in 1871 Madame Curie had not yet isolated radium.
Before 1900, there was little interest in locating or
mining uranium, which later became the driving energy
force of the nuclear age.
In a century and a quarter, the circumstances of
industrialization and technical change have made many of
these treaty-guaranteed lands very valuable, not least
because under their often barren surface lies a
significant share of North America's remaining fossil
fuel and uranium resources. Nationwide, the Indians'
greatest mineral wealth is probably in uranium.
According to a Federal Trade Commission Report of
October 1975, an estimated 16 percent of the United
States' uranium reserves that were recoverable at market
prices were on reservation lands; this was about
two-thirds of the uranium on land under the legal
jurisdiction of the United States Government. There were
almost 400 uranium leases on these lands, according to
the F.T.C., and between 1 million and 2 million tons of
uranium ore a year, about 20 percent of the national
total, was being mined on reservation land.
Moreover, if the uranium reserves on reservation
land are added to those estimated on land guaranteed to
Indian nations by treaty, the Indians' share of uranium
reserves within the United States rises to nearly 60
percent; the Council of Energy Resource Tribes places
the figure at 75 percent to 80 percent. About two-thirds
of the 150 million acres guaranteed to Indians by treaty
has been alienated from them -- by allotment, other
means of sale, or by seizure without compensation. Some
of these areas, notably the Black Hills of South Dakota,
underwent a uranium mining boom during the 1970s, even
though legal title to the land is still clouded. Sioux
leaders have refused to settle with the United States
for the land, despite a price tag that had grown to $351
million principal and interest by 1993.
Uranium Mining in Navajoland
About half the recoverable uranium within the United
States lies within New Mexico -- and about half of that
is beneath the Navajo Nation. As in South Dakota, many
Navajos have come to oppose the mining, joining forces
with non-Indians who regard nuclear power-plants and
arms proliferation as a twofold menace.
Uranium has been mined on Navajo land since the late
1940s; the Indians dug the ore that started the United
States' stockpile of nuclear weapons. For thirty years
after the first atomic explosions in New Mexico, uranium
was mined much like any other mineral. More than 99
percent of the product of the mines was waste, cast
aside as tailings near mine sites after the uranium had
been extracted. One of the mesa-like waste piles grew to
be a mile long and 70 feet high. On windy days, dust
from the tailings blew into local communities, filling
the air and settling on the water supplies. The Atomic
Energy Commission assured worried local residents that
the dust was harmless.
In February 1978, however, the Department of Energy
released a Nuclear Waste Management Task Force report
that said that people living near the tailings ran twice
the risk of lung cancer of the general population. The
Navajo Times carried reports of a Public Health Service
study asserting that one in six uranium miners had died,
or would die prematurely, of lung cancer. For some, the
news came too late. Esther Keeswood, a member of the
Coalition for Navajo Liberation from Shiprock, N.M., a
reservation city near tailings piles, said in 1978 that
the Coalition for Navajo Liberation had documented the
deaths of at least fifty residents (including uranium
miners) from lung cancer and related diseases.
The Kerr-McGee Company, the first corporation to
mine uranium on Navajo Nation lands (beginning in 1948)
found the reservation location extremely lucrative.
There were no taxes at the time, no health, safety or
pollution regulations, and few other jobs for the many
Navajos recently home from service in World War II.
Labor was cheap. The first uranium miners in the area,
almost all of them Navajos, remember being sent into
shallow tunnels within minutes after blasting. They
loaded the radioactive ore into wheelbarrows and emerged
from the mines spitting black mucus from the dust, and
coughing so hard it gave many of them headaches
according to Tom Barry, energy writer for The Navajo
Times, who interviewed the miners. Such mining practices
exposed the Navajos who worked for Kerr-McGee to between
100 and 1,000 times the limit later considered safe for
exposure to radon gas. Officials for the Public Health
Service have estimated these levels of exposure; no one
was monitoring the Navajo miners' health in the late
1940s.
Thirty years after mining began, an increasing
number of deaths from lung cancer made evident the fact
that Kerr-McGee had held miners' lives as cheaply as
their labor. As Navajo miners continued to die, children
who played in water that had flowed over or through
abandoned mines and tailing piles came home with burning
sores.
Even if the tailings were to be buried -- a
staggering task -- radioactive pollution could leak into
the surrounding water table. A 1976 Environmental
Protection Agency report found radioactive contamination
of drinking water on the Navajo reservation in the
Grants, N.M., area, near a uranium mining and milling
facility. Doris Bunting of Citizens Against Nuclear
Threats, a predominantly white group that joined with
C.N.L. and the National Indian Youth Council to oppose
uranium mining, supplied data indicating that
radium-bearing sediments had spread into the Colorado
River basin, from which water is drawn for much of the
Southwest. Through the opposition to uranium mining in
the area, among Indians and non-Indians alike, runs a
deep concern for the long-term poisoning of land, air
and water by low-level radiation. It has produced
demands from Indian and white groups for a moratorium on
all uranium mining, exploration and milling until the
issues of untreated radioactive tailings and other
waste-disposal problems are faced and solved.
The threat of death which haunted the Navajos came
at what company public-relations specialists might have
deemed an inappropriate time; the same rush for uranium
that had filled the Black Hills with speculators was
coming to the Southwest as arms stockpiling and the
anticipated needs of nuclear power plants drove up
demand, and the price, for the mineral. By late 1978,
more than 700,000 acres of Indian land were under lease
for uranium exploration and development in an area
centering on Shiprock and Crownpoint, both on the Navajo
Nation. Atlantic Richfield, Continental Oil, Exxon,
Humble Oil, Homestake, Kerr-McCiee, Mobil Oil, Pioneer
Nuclear and United Nuclear were among the companies
exploring, planning to mine, or already extracting ore.
During, the 1980s the mining frenzy subsided somewhat as
recession and a slowing of the nuclear arms race reduced
demand. Some ore was still being mined, but most of it
lay in the ground, waiting for the next upward spike in
the market.
As a result of mining for uranium and other
materials, the United States Geological Survey predicted
that the water table at Crownpoint would drop 1,000
feet, and that it would return to present levels thirty
to fifty years after the mining ceased. Much of what
water remained could be polluted by uranium residue, the
report indicated.
Local residents rose in anger, and found themselves
neatly ambushed by the white man's law. The Indians
owned the surface rights; the mineral rights in the area
are owned by private companies such as the Santa Fe
Railroad. "If the water supply is depleted, then this
[Crownpoint] will become a ghost town," said Joe Gmusea,
a Navajo attorney. "The only people left will be the
ones who come to work in the mines." John Redhouse,
associate director of the Albuquerque-based National
Indian Youth Council, said that the uranium boom is "an
issue of spiritual and physical genocide." "We are not
isolated in our struggle against uranium development,"
Redhouse said. "Many Indian people are now supporting
the struggles of the Australian aborigines and the Black
indigenous peoples of Namibia [South West Africa]
against similar uranium developments. We have recognized
that we are facing the same international beast."
The Largest Nuclear Accident in the United States
Thanks to its location between the United States'
media capital, New York City, and its political capital,
Washington, D.C., as well as the coincident opening of
the movie "The China Syndrome," Three Mile Island was
America's best-publicized nuclear accident. It was not
the largest such accident.
The biggest expulsion of radioactive material in the
United States occurred July 16, 1979, at 5 a.m. on the
Navajo Nation, less than 12 hours after President Carter
had proposed plans to use more nuclear power and fossil
fuels. On that morning, more than 1,100 tons of uranium
mining wastes -- tailings -- gushed through a packed-mud
dam near Church Rock, N.M. With the tailings, 100
million gallons of radioactive water gushed through the
dam before the crack was repaired.
By 8 a.m., radioactivity was monitored in Gallup,
N.M., nearly 50 miles away. The contaminated river, the
Rio Puerco, showed 7,000 times the allowable standard of
radioactivity for drinking water below the broken dam
shortly after the breach was repaired, according to the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The few newspaper stories
about the spill outside of the immediate area noted that
the area was "sparsely populated" and that the spill
"poses no immediate health hazard."
Since 1950, when a Navajo sheepherder named Paddy
Martinez brought a strange-looking yellow rock into
Grants, New Mexico from nearby Haystack Butte, the area
boomed with uranium mining. Grants styled itself "the
Uranium Capital of the World," as new pickup trucks
appeared on the streets and mobile-home parks grew
around town, filling with non-Indian workers. For
several years, before the boom abruptly ended in the
early 1980s, many workers in the uranium industry made
$60,000 or more a year. The local newspaper displayed an
atomic logo, and blamed the publicity that followed the
spill on "Jane Fonda and the anti-nuclear weirdos [who]
have scared the hell out of people . . ."
While no one in New York or Washington, D.C., had
much to worry about, the Navajo and white residents of
the Rio Puerco area did. The area is high desert, and
the Rio Puerco is a major source of water. The Los
Angeles Times sent a reporter, Sandra Blakeslee, to the
area a month after the spill occurred. By that time,
United Nuclear Corp., which owns the dam, had cleaned up
only 50 of the 1,100 tons of spilled waste. Workers were
using pails and shovels because heavy machinery could
not negotiate the steep terrain around the Rio Puerco.
The cleanup was limited and frustrating. Where were
clean-up crews going to put 1,100 tons of radioactive
mud, when the next substantial rain would leach it back
into the river course?
Along the river, officials issued press releases
telling people not to drink the water. They had a few
problems; many of the Navajo residents could not read
English, and had no electricity to power television sets
and radios. Another consumer of the water -- cattle --
don't read. An unknown number of livestock died from
consuming radioactive water.
John Bartlitt, of New Mexico Citizens for Clean Air
and Water, expressed perplexity over the lack of
attention paid to the accident. About 80 percent of the
radioactivity in uranium ore remains in the tailings, he
said. "The radioactivity which remains in a pile of
tailings after 600 years is greater than that remaining
in [nuclear] power-plant water after 600 years,"
Bartlitt said.
"Grants Enchants"
After the Rio Puerco spill and the collapse of
demand for uranium in the early 1980s, Grants, New
Mexico dropped its nickname as "Uranium Capital of the
World," and began promoting itself as a haven for
retirees under the new slogan "Grants Enchants." A
report from the New Mexico Environmental Improvement
Division said that while the spill had been "potentially
hazardous . . . its short-term and long-term impacts on
people and the environment were quite limited." While it
issued these soothing words, the same report also
recommended that ranchers in the area avoid watering
their livestock in the Rio Puerco. The same report noted
that the river water was not being used for human
consumption and, "The extent to which radioactive and
chemical constituents of these waters are incorporated
in livestock tissue and passed on to humans is unknown
and requires critical evaluation." The report also said
that the accident's effect on groundwater should be
studied more intensely. Several Navajos said that calves
and lambs were being born without limbs, or with other
severe birth defects. Other livestock developed sores,
became ill, and died after drinking from the river. Tom
Charley, a Navajo, told a public meeting at the Lupton
Chapter House that "The old ladies are always to be seen
running up and down both sides of the [Rio Puerco] wash,
trying to keep the sheep out of it." The Centers for
Disease Control examined a dozen dead animals and called
for a more complete study in 1983, then dropped the
subject.
More problems began to appear. A waste pile at the
United Nuclear mill which had produced the wastes that
gushed down the Rio Puerco in 1979 was detected leaking
radioactive thorium into local groundwater. On May 23,
1983, the state of New Mexico issued a cease-and-desist
order to United Nuclear to halt the radioactive leakage.
The company refused to act, stating that its leak did
not violate state regulations. Allendale and
Appalachian, two insurance companies that were liable
for about $35 million payment to United Nuclear because
of losses related to the accident, sued the company on
the belief that it knew the dam which burst was
defective before the spill. The dam was only two years
old at the time of the accident.
Along the Rio Puerco, several ranchers reacted to
state assurances that the spill left no long-term
effects by selling their land, for millions of dollars,
to the federal government. The ranchers sold out under
the 1974 Relocation Act, meant to move Navajos from the
former "joint-use area" claimed by the Hopis. The land
was purportedly acquired to relocate Navajos who had
lost their homes in the land dispute with the Hopis.
The Navajos asked the federal Environmental
Protection Agency, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the
Relocation Commission for assurance that the land was
safe. All three declined to provide the requested
written assurance to the Navajos. The Navajos raised
several questions, including the extent of contamination
in underground aquifers; the extent of remaining
radioactivity in surface waters and soils, the effects
of wind-blown dust from the contaminated area, and the
long-term effects of the contamination on livestock and
people in the area.
Death in the Mines
The enormous spill of nuclear waste into the Rio
Puerco was but one incident in a distinctly nuclear way
of life in Navajoland. The nuclear-mining legacy of 30
years blows through the outlying districts of Shiprock,
N.M., the Navajos' largest city, on windy days. The hot,
dry winds shave radioactive dust from the tops and sides
of large tailings piles around the city. One of them is
70 feet high and a mile long. Until the mid 1970s, the
Atomic Energy Commission assured the Navajos of Shiprock
that the tailings were harmless.
In early 1978, however, the Department of Energy
released a Nuclear Waste Management Task Force report
which said that persons living near the tailings piles
have twice the expected rate of lung cancer. By 1978,
the Navajos were beginning to trace the roots of a lung
cancer epidemic which had perplexed many of them, since
the disease was very rare among Navajos before World War
II. In addition to exposure from the tailings piles,
many of the miners who started America's nuclear
stockpile had died of lung cancer.
Although health and safety measures have improved in
the mines since the 1950s, due to governmental and
popular pressure, present practices still expose workers
to unhealthy amounts of radon. As for Kerr-McGee, in
whose mines many of the Navajos worked, a company
statement maintained as late as mid-1979 that
uranium-related deaths among miners were mere
allegations.
Lung cancer results from inhalation of radon gas, a
by-product of uranium's decay into radium. Tom Barry, in
an investigative series for the Navajo Times, found
documentation that miners who worked for Kerr-McGee
during the 1940s were exposed to between 100 and 1,000
times the dosage of radon now considered safe by the
federal government. Harris Charley, who worked in the
mines for 15 years, told a United States Senate hearing
in 1979, "We were treated like dogs. There was no
ventilation in the mines." Pearl Nakai, daughter of a
deceased miner, told the same hearing that "No one ever
told us about the dangers of uranium." The Senate
hearings were convened by Sen. Pete Domenici, New Mexico
Republican, who is seeking compensation for disabled
uranium miners, and for the families of the deceased.
"The miners who extracted uranium from the Colorado
Plateau are paying the price today for the inadequate
health and safety standards that were then in force,"
Domenici told the hearing, held at a Holiday Inn near
the uranium boom town of Grants, N.M.
The 1979 Senate hearings were part of a proposal to
compensate the miners for what investigators called
deliberate negligence. Radioactivity in uranium mines
was linked to lung cancer by tests in Europe by 1930.
Scientific evidence linking radon gas to radioactive
illness existed after 1949, but measures to ventilate
the Navajo mines were never taken, as the government
pressured Kerr-McGee and other producers to increase the
amount of uranium they were mining. The Public Health
Service recommended ventilation in 1952, but the Atomic
Energy Commission said it bore no responsibility for the
mines, despite the fact that it bought more than 3
million pounds of uranium from them in 1954 alone. The
PHS monitored the health of more than 4,000 miners
between 1954 and 1960 without telling them of the threat
to their health.
Dr. Joseph Wagoner, special assistant for
occupational carcinogens at the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, a federal agency, said that of
3,500 persons who mined uranium in New Mexico, about 200
had died of cancer by the late 1970s. In an average
population of 3,500 persons, 40 such deaths could be
expected. The 160 extra deaths were not the measure of
ignorance, he said. Published data regarding the dangers
of radon was widely available to scientists in the
1950s, according to Wagoner. Health and safety
precautions in the mines were not cost-effective for the
companies, he said. "Thirty years from now we'll have
the hidden legacy of the whole thing," Wagoner told
Molly Ivins of The New York Times.
Bills that would compensate the miners were
introduced, discussed, and died in Congress for a dozen
years. By 1990, the death toll among former miners had
risen to 450, and was still rising. Relatives of the
dead recalled how the miners had eaten their lunches in
the mines, washing them down with radioactive water,
never having been told that it was dangerous. Many of
the men did not even speak English. The Navajo language
contains no indigenous word for "radioactivity."
By the early 1990s, about 1,100 Navajo miners or
members of their families had applied for compensation
related to uranium exposure. The bureaucracy had
approved 328 cases, denied 121, and withheld action on
663, an approval rate which Rep. George Miller, chairman
of the House Natural Resources Committee, characterized
as "significantly lower than in other cases of radiation
compensation".
Representative Miller said that awards of
compensation were being delayed by "a burdensome
application system developed by the Department of
Justice."
Miller's committee was investigating not only the
Navajo death toll from radiation poisoning, but many
other reports that indigenous peoples were willfully and
recklessly exposed to radiation during the Cold War. The
geographic range of purported radiation poisonings spans
half the globe -- from the Navajos in the United States
Southwest, to Alaskan Natives whose lives were
endangered when atomic waste products from Nevada were
secretly buried near their villages, to residents of the
Marshall Islands in the South Pacific, an area in which
the United States tested atomic and hydrogen bombs in
the atmosphere between 1946 and 1958. As investigations
deepened, it appeared that the treatment of Navajos was
not the exception, but one example of a deadly pattern
of reckless disregard for indigenous life in colonized
places, human and otherwise.
Portions of this article are excerpted from: "Ecocide of
Native America: Environmental Destruction of Indian
Lands and Peoples," by Donald A. Grinde, Jr., and Bruce
E. Johansen. Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1994.
Bruce E. Johansen is a professor of Communications and
Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at
Omaha. He is presently working on an annotated
bibliography of the debate regarding Iroquois influence
on democracy, to be published by Greenwood Press, and a
narrative of the debate, to be published by Clear Light
Publishers.