CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Return of the Yellow Monster of the Diné: Uranium Mining on the Big Rez

Church Rock uranium mine, Navajo Nation lands. Photo: EPA.

A dark storm cloud of ignorant financial speculation hovers above the Navajo Nation, the largest indigenous reservation in the country, rich in mineral resources, livestock, farms and sacred landmarks. It stretches across parts of northern Arizona and New Mexico, and southern Utah. Some young billionaires and wannabes, with minds full of fungible narratives about new riches in data centers and small modular (nuclear) reactors, have begun to speculate on resuming uranium mining on the Colorado Plateau. Mountain-state members of Congress authored a successful bill to make buying Russian uranium ready processed for power-plant use illegal (except when no other source is available – which is most of the time), the moribund uranium-futures market has begun to rise, and the mining press has begun to write about a uranium boom.

A mine opened near the rim of the Grand Canyon last year, despite local protests, particularly by the Havasupai tribe living directly below the mine. It had already contaminated one aquifer in an earlier incarnation.  Four more mines on the Colorado Plateau are in late stages of permitting. Diné activists have begun protests against these mines.  A mill that processes uranium to power-plant specifications is operating in southern Utah and faces continual opposition from one of the Ute tribes living nearby, protesting against air and water pollution.

A battle is shaping up on the Colorado Plateau between its Native inhabitants and capitalist natural resource plunderers. The government and the speculators will pose the question in terms of property rights. But Diné activists, with more than adequate data, pose the issue in terms of their health, the health of miners who died of cancers and lung disease, and even of unborn children exposed to radioactive waste around abandoned uranium-mine tailings.

During World War II, the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, developed the atomic bomb, using uranium in part from the tailings of vanadium mines on the Navajo Reservation. From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, during the Cold War, the federal government played an unusually filthy role in the affairs of Native tribes living on the Plateau, mainly Diné. It used its property rights to tribal land “held in trust” to facilitate the opening of hundreds of practically unregulated mines on the reservations, its National Security authority to be the sole buyer of uranium, and even invoked National Security to prevent the Surgeon General from notifying miners, mainly Diné and Hopi, of the health risks from working in uranium mines. When rates of lung and kidney diseases and cancer began to soar among retired miners, the federal government, with few exceptions, ignored the growing health crisis among the miners, many of whom had been code talkers during WWII. “National Security” became a vehicle for the federal government to open the reservation for the plundering of as much uranium as it desired. Stuart Udahl, JFK’s Secretary of Interior, was an exception, however, who spent years after he left government representing victims of atomic bomb tests downwind and ailing miners and working on legislation which at long length became the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990, providing (with some serious flaws) compensation to miners and downwind victims of radiation exposure from nuclear bomb tests.

Udall commented on the behavior of the Atomic Energy Commission in his book, The Myths of August:

When AEC officials embraced the idea that their efforts would be discredited and disrupted if they admitted that radiation might cause cancers or that their activities were exposing innocent bystanders to excessive doses of radiation, they were entering a moral wasteland. All subsequent decision-making was perverted by that twisted reasoning. It fostered a conviction that it was more important to protect the tests than to protect civilians. And it spawned a policy that the impact of radiation on human health and all ‘harmful’ facts about radiation ‘accents’ had to be concealed from the American people.

When AEC officials embraced the idea that their efforts would be discredited and disrupted if they admitted that radiation might cause cancers or that their activities were exposing innocent bystanders to excessive doses of radiation, they were entering a moral wasteland. All subsequent decision-making was perverted by that twisted reasoning. It fostered a conviction that it was more important to protect the tests than to protect civilians. And it spawned a policy that the impact of radiation on human health and all ‘harmful’ facts about radiation ‘accents’ had to be concealed from the American people.

RECA was allowed by Congress to expire in 2024 but was reauthorized in 2025, with yet another sunset provision. Evidently, Republicans focused on the political horror of imported Russian uranium decided to repress all knowledge of the domestic consequences of uranium mining, but later relented at least on behalf of the downwinder communities.

Despite whatever the rhetoric of the moment has been, the government’s de facto policy about health damage from uranium mining in Indian Country has been to try to wait out and not compensate as many of the sick and dying as possible. In the case of the Diné, the sickness of contemporary American “narrative” is on full display, making icons of WWII Navajo code talkers but ignoring completely what happened to so many of them who took jobs in uranium mines after the war.

Alongside RECA, years of frustrating efforts by the Diné and their supporters at last led to government surveys of abandoned mines and plans to remove radioactive waste, which, until warned, people were still using as material to build houses and fences. The problem with the achievement of these goals has been money. The only safe way to detoxify the Native lands on the Colorado Plateau is to remove the mine waste. But that has proved to be very expensive, in most cases more expensive than the finance caps the feds have placed on the enabling legislation. And there remains the problem of where to safely store material that is radioactive for more than four billion years.

Editors for American Indian Republic described the living situation on the reservation in October 2017 in harsh terms:

Despite many of these efforts to reconcile the damaging effects of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation reservation, pollution from the uranium has made it unsafe for many people to live on the reservation long term. While many of the abandoned mines shut down years ago, mounds of toxic waste are still piled atop the dirt as the radioactive dust has become a primary issue for many local Tribal residents, with the continued struggle to restore their sacred land and to remove the contaminated material still underway.

Despite many of these efforts to reconcile the damaging effects of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation reservation, pollution from the uranium has made it unsafe for many people to live on the reservation long term. While many of the abandoned mines shut down years ago, mounds of toxic waste are still piled atop the dirt as the radioactive dust has become a primary issue for many local Tribal residents, with the continued struggle to restore their sacred land and to remove the contaminated material still underway.

The idea that it is no longer safe “to live on the reservation long term” suggests a more sinister federal motive: simple relocation, making the Navajo homeland one huge, uninhabitable federal energy-resource region for oil and gas drilling, and coal, uranium and other rare earth mineral mining.

Areas affected by Abandoned Uranium Mines. Map: GAO.

The idea of relocation programs for Natives was made unpopular by the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island, the former federal penitentiary in San Francisco Bay, and by the subsequent Lakota uprisings and political agitation on other reservations during the 1960s and 70s. But that generation is largely just a memory now, while demand for energy resources continues to grow.

At the 1992 World Uranium Hearing in Salzburg, Diné activist Phil Harrison Jr. described the situation on the Colorado Plateau:

My father, when he died two years ago, was only 43 years old. It was very, very hard for me to see him die a painful death. He weighed only 90 pounds when he left us. I have never witnessed anything like the way he died. And I watched my mother suffer. My mother had to pick up the responsibilities of raising us. . . . Hundreds have died now of similar patterns, mostly from lung cancer and respiratory problems. The first 16 miners who died: their average age was only 43 years…Today, we still have to look for solutions and continue to........

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