Voices from the Earth: Current Issue

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In the News

Table of
Contents
HOMELAND: Four Portraits of Native Action
Gail Small: The Coal Wars
Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Lame Deer, Montana
Evon Peter: The People and the Caribou Are One
Arctic Village, Alaska
Rita & Mitchel Capitan: Yellowcake, New Mexico
Navajo Reservation, New Mexico
Barry Dana: A People and Their River
Penobscot River, Maine
Winona LaDuke
Book Reviews
SRIC Extras

"There's a prophecy, it's called voice form the north, there's gonna come a time when a voice from north is gonna rise. When that voice from the north rises, it signifies a time for human kind to change their ways."

Rita & Mitchel Capitan: Yellowcake, New Mexico
Navajo Reservation, New Mexico

RITA CAPITAN: In 1994, we were living a quiet, comfortable life in our hometown of Crownpoint, on the Navajo reservation. One evening we were here at home. Mitchell brought the paper home as he does every day, and we both read it about 2 or 3 times in disbelief that uranium mining was to begin in Crownpoint and Churchrock. They're starting up again. Without any public hearings, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted permission for the deadly carcinogen to be mined right next to Crownpoint schools and churches.

MITCHELL CAPITAN: I don't understand the NRC, the United States government. Why they could do this again, why they would have a mine like this near our community?

From here you can see the whole town of Crownpoint. Mitchell and Rita live just below the water tank there in the distance. And as you can see, very, very close to where the Hydro Resources, Incorporated (HRI) plans to put the uranium mine.

The NRC had granted permission for the Texas based company to conduct the mining with a process called in situ leach mining.

The mining company intends to inject chemicals down into the aquifer, next to the community water supply. Those chemicals will leach, or strip the uranium off of the rock into the aquifer creating basically, a toxic soup.

DR. JOHN FOGARTY M.D., CHIEF OF STAFF
INDIAN HEALTH SERVICE HOSPITAL, CROWNPOINT, NM

MITCHELL CAPITAN: Rita start to ask me questions, "Isn't this what you had worked before? This kind of mining, insitu leach mining?" I said, "Yeah."

RITA CAPITAN: Mitchell worked as a lab technician for Mobil Oil in the 1980s.

MITCHELL CAPITAN: Mobil was doing a pilot project with the in situ leach mining west of Crownpoint. I worked in the lab with the engineers. And no matter how hard we tried we could never get all the uranium out of the water, so Mobil gave up. We closed the project.

This is what made me start thinking about the environment, especially our water.

RITA CAPITAN: We talked about having a community meeting

MITCHELL CAPITAN: And we decided to do something about it.

RITA CAPITAN: We put an article in the newspaper. To our surprise, at our first meeting, close to 50 community members came to that meeting. There were so many people there, a lot of faces I've never seen before. But when we went up there to talk about it, right away we had landowners start to tell us we should stay out of their business - that's their land, they can do whatever they want. It was scary. It was humiliating. It just felt like the whole community just split.

There were people who stood up, and accused them of anything from witchcraft to taking food out of the mouths of their grandchildren, and standing in the way of people making lots of money off of the uranium leases.

This proposal split families. It didn't just split the community, and it didn't split clans, it split blood families.

CHRIS SHUEY, DIRECTOR
SOUTHWEST RESEARCH AND INFORMATION CENTER

RITA CAPITAN: We lost some friends. That's something that was real sad for us. We never wanted that to happen in our community.

There was some scary times when we were told just be careful, take care of yourself. I had to really protect my family. That's one of the reasons why Mitchell and I really had to find faith and three years ago we became members of the Catholic Church.

There's a few families, they own the mineral rights for their land. And in the distance you can see the area around where the mining company is. That's owned by a few Navajo families (allottees). Those families have been promised huge sums of money by the mining company, and they have been told that this mining process is quote "safe."

DR. JOHN FOGARTY

RITA CAPITAN: We're not fighting with landowners, allottees. We're fighting with this company.

The Mother company of HRI, Uranium Resources, have worked with this technology for 30 years in South Texas, so, that experience, that's what they're going to use here to mine uranium.

BENJAMIN HOUSE, REPRESENTATIVE
HYDRO RESOURCES INC.

With in situ mining, we drill wells. No one ever goes underground, there are no occupational hazards associated with underground mining and solution mining. In fact, our miners are electric pumps. We use natural ground water, to leach the uranium. It's brought to the surface, and what we add is oxygen, and possibly some carbonate - club soda - to the water where is re-injected into the ground.

It's safe as long as it's contained, and as you can see here in this jar it is contained.

The entire well field is circled by monitor wells.

MARK PELIZZA, PRESIDENT
HYDRO RESOURCES INCORPORATED

The action of pumping dissolved oxygen and sodium bicarbonate into the rocks causes that uranium concentration to increase almost 100,000 times. So you go from very high quality, pristine water, and you make it a toxic soup. Nobody could drink it.

So, the company has to make sure that none of that stuff escapes, because it's a poison.

Because the underground buried stream beds are narrower than the distance between the monitor wells, our fear is that a leakage of the mining fluids will escape, go past those monitor wells, and never be detected.

CHRIS SHUEY

We have experts and hydrologists that have shown that that contamination will reach the drinking wells within less than seven years. It will, if this mine goes through, destroy the only source of drinking water for 15,000 people.

DR. JOHN FOGARTY

RITA CAPITAN: We're tired of it. This time they're not going walk all over us like they did then.

MITCHELL CAPITAN: We started to organize a community group

RITA CAPITAN: We finally came up with our name, ENDAUM, which stands for the Eastern Navajo Dine Against Uranium Mining. It was really funny, Mitchell and I, we've never, never been involved in politics or anything like that before.

MITCHELL CAPITAN: It created the public awareness.

RITA CAPITAN: And that's what people are wanting, they're wanting information.

MITCHELL CAPITAN: We try to talk about facts. HRI is feeding them the wrong information. I started to drive around in our community. I felt like I was like Paul Revere. Here's comes the mining!

We need to ask the council, our Navajo Nation President: Why are we going to go to something that already has hurt our people? We need to turn that around.

RITA CAPITAN: At the end we got more votes to oppose the mining. Pretty soon, we had a petition that went around with over 1600 names saying 'no' to uranium.

Despite local opposition, the energy bills of 2001 and 2003 contain measures to revive the failing nuclear industry, and in particular, millions of dollars of subsidies for in situ leach mining.

One of the companies that would qualify under the wording of the proposed provisions right now, is HRI's parent company in Texas, Uranium Resources Incorporated. You can imagine what a grant of 10 million dollars in a year, or 30 million dollars over three years, what infusion of cash that that would do for that company.

CHRIS SHUEY

MITCHELL CAPITAN: We had to intervene. We had to file so many papers with the NRC and testify.

RITA CAPITAN: We filed a lawsuit to prove to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that this was not safe.

MITCHELL CAPITAN: We told them would you let this happen at your back yard? Think about it. This is the same thing. We're just protecting our land.

Would this happen in Santa Fe, would this happen in Manhattan, would this happen in San Francisco? No. I think this is a case of environmental racism.

This is a community that is one of the lowest income in the country. Many of the people don't speak English. Many of the people don't have phones to be able to call their politicians. To think that a community with so few resources has been able to stop the uranium industry, the nuclear industry, you know, it's an amazing win for grassroots democracy.

DR. JOHN FOGARTY

RITA CAPITAN: I'm sorry. I don't think you could do this and at the end say that your water is going to be safe. Safe enough for our children and generations to come. We might double our piles of paper here, but that's okay. We're going to continue to fight them.

If Rita and Mitchell and other people in Crownpoint had not started the ENDAUM group and intervened to stop the license, there would have been mining.

CHRIS SHUEY

MITCHELL CAPITAN: You know, looking at the corn pollen and uranium, they almost look the same. The corn pollen is a blessing. If we bring that uranium up for quick money, it's going to destroy us.

RITA CAPITAN: With grassroots organizing and endless legal challenges, we have been able to block the new mine for nearly a decade.

We have celebrated every victory, but with the renewed interest in nuclear power and the price of uranium rising, time may be running out for our community.
 

Health Affects Linger

EARL SALTWATER, JR., FORMER MINER: When I started working in a mine, I was only 22 years old. There's no protection clothes. I used to pick out the big ore and put it in the cart with my own bare hands. No glove. Only time they allowed us to go outside was quitting time. If we wanted to use the bathroom, we just use it here. There's no toilet tissue, nothing. So we just used the ore, and clean ourselves with that. There's no drinking water that we could drink when we get thirsty. And so, we just use the water that's inside of the mine, which has a lot of radiation.

HAROLD PLATERO: The people that we used to work with… most of the people are gone. They're gone.

Uranium's a poison. If you inhale it, it leads to lung cancer; if you drink it, it can lead to kidney failure, renal failure. So, it doesn't matter how you come in contact with uranium: it is a poison.

There were more than a thousand mining operations that took place on Navajo Nation. While they were working, they blasted away the ore, and they would be covered in uranium dust. So, they would bring home their jackets at the end of the day, have their wives clean it.

DR. JOHN FOGARTY M.D., CHIEF OF STAFF,
INDIAN HEALTH SERVICE HOSPITAL, CROWNPOINT, NM

ANGIE YAZZIE, DAUGHTER OF URANIUM MINER: I remember my Dad being covered with dust. And then my Dad would come home and I would smell that smell on him. And it just became a part of him. And just to me, that smell was my Dad. There was 15 of us that lived in here, plus my Mom and Dad. I remember him coming down that hill after work. My youngest brother was three. When he would say, "Where's Dad?"and he would look up looking for him and we just told him he wasn't come back down again, and he didn't understand.

After my father died, my mother had to make rugs, and she'll go sell it to get money. And it takes forever to make rugs. And there was eight siblings at home.

FANNIE YAZZIE (SPEAKING NAVAJO - ANGIE TRANSLATING): She said they had an account at the trading post and they closed it. She wanted Kerr McGee to pay that bill at the trading post, but that didn't happen.

EARL SALTWATER: The former miners they go home, they sleep with their working clothes at night. And some of them, they don't wash their hands, and they touch their woman like that at night. This was how they exposed to radiation. They murder my father and my mother.

NAVAJO URANIUM HEALTH STATISTICS

• Risk of lung cancer among Navajo uranium miners is nearly 29 times higher than in Navajo men who never mined.
• Two-thirds of all new lung cancer cases in Navajo men between 1969 and 1993 were attributable to a single exposure to underground uranium mining.
• More than 850 Navajo uranium workers had received compensation for their radiation-related deaths and illnesses through 2004 — a number that's less than 20% of potentially eligible Navajo uranium workers.

Current Developments...

• ENDAUM and SRIC continued their legal challenge of HRI's license, filing a 1,200-page brief on groundwater issues and financial surety with the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board on March 7. The brief, which was accompanied by 38 exhibits, including written testimony of seven experts, charged that (1) NRC's secondary groundwater restoration standard for uranium of 0.44 milligrams per liter (mg/L) violates the federal Safe Drinking Water Act and Atomic Energy Act because it's nearly 15 times the EPA's national drinking water standard of 0.03 mg/L and more than 200 times the background level of uranium form in the Crownpoint water wells; (2) NRC has illegally allowed HRI to defer defining baseline water quality and the hydrologic properties of the drinking water aquifers around the mining sites; (3) HRI's plans for restoring groundwater after mining and estimating its costs of cleanup are inadequate to satisfy NRC regulations; and (4) HRI's license violates federal law because HRI failed to demonstrate that drinking water supplies will be protected from unlawful and unsafe uranium contamination.
• The Navajo Nation Council on February 11, 2005 tabled until April consideration of a bill that bans conventional underground and open pit uranium mining and places a 25-year moratorium on uranium processing, including uranium in situ leach (ISL) mining. The legislation, which is backed by ENDAUM and the affected chapters of Church Rock and Crownpoint, was sponsored by Delegate George Arthur and had the support of five standing committees of the Council.
• Groundwater at URI's Benavides and Longoria ISL mining operations in Texas was declared "restored" by Texas agencies only after regulators approved relaxing restoration standards because the company could not restore the groundwater to pre-mining baseline levels for uranium and other contaminants. In some cases, the final approved "restoration" level for uranium was more than 2 orders of magnitude (i.e., >100 times) higher than original baseline.

Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action has won The Fund for Santa Barbara Social Justice Award for Documentary Film at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, and The Audience Award for Documentary Film.

Homeland was shot on film by cinematographer, Dyanna Taylor; directed by veteran documentary filmmaker, Roberta Grossman, executive produced by Lisa B. Thomas and produced by Katahdin Productions/The Katahdin Foundation. Composer Todd Boekelheide created the music for the film.