CLEANING UP A SAD LEGACY

"What we say is we want long-term protection. We have been here for seven generations, and we want to stay. And we want this to be a safe place for the seven generations that come after us."

– Teddy Nez

For Teddy Nez — a Vietnam veteran, OSHA-certified hazmat operative, traditional native healer, and resident of one of the most contaminated residential areas on the Navajo Nation — the first half of 2007 has been a wild ride.

“This was all a new territory for me,” Nez said, reflecting on the whirlwind of events that by May saw heavy machinery removing radium-contaminated dirt from his front yard while he and his family spent two weeks in a Gallup motel while crews tested his home for radioactive dust. “Getting into the nitty-gritty of all the uranium issues in the Eastern [Navajo] Agency has been an eye-opener.”

For Teddy Nez, it all began in January when he became SRIC’s second Navajo community liaison, splitting his time between organizing around abandoned uranium mine concerns in his and other communities and working with the Diné Network for Environmental Health (DiNEH) Project team on a study of the role of environmental exposures in kidney disease in the Eastern Navajo Agency.

By the end of February, he was leading a group of family members and neighbors to Santa Fe to testify against a pro-uranium mining memorial, explaining what it was like to live with the constant threat of exposure to contaminants from two large-scale abandoned mines that sandwich the community on both sides of Red Water Pond Road in Coyote Canyon Chapter.

Field studies by the Church Rock Uranium Monitoring Project (CRUMP) in 2003 had revealed high levels of gamma radiation next to mine waste dumps and close to residences. Soil samples collected by Stanford University student Christine George working with CRUMP and the DiNEH Project in 2004 and 2005 showed uranium in soils near the Nez home and the homes of several of his neighbors nearly 20 times higher than normal. An unreclaimed and largely uncontrolled mine waste pile that towers 45 feet above the landscape is located less than 1,000 feet from Teddy Nez’s front door.

Then, during the first week of April, Navajo Nation EPA and USEPA officials came by to deliver some bad news: Further soil testing by contractors to United Nuclear Corporation (UNC) — the past operator of the nearby Northeast Church Rock Mine and now a subsidy of General Electric Company (GE) — last November revealed levels of radium-226 (a human carcinogen associated with bone cancer) along roads and near homes high enough to merit emergency cleanup. Within six weeks, the residents were told, a USEPA emergency response team would descend on the community to scrape up six to 12 inches of contaminated soil and replace it with clean dirt. Teddy Nez and his family, and three other families, would be temporarily moved to motels in Gallup while the contaminated dirt was removed.

In the weeks that followed, the livingroom of Nez’s home became a meeting hall for weekly updates for community members, for discussions with on-site federal and tribal officials planning and eventually conducting the soil removal, and as a haven for elected officials and dignitaries touring the area on days when strong spring winds were nudging 70 mph. On one day in June, the same livingroom was turned into a medical clinic, with three nurses from the University of New Mexico and a nephrologist from the University of Texas Houston Medical Center collecting blood and urine samples from residents participating in the DiNEH Project’s Kidney Health Study.

“I probably smell real bad,” said Bertha Nez, Teddy’s wife, as she arrived home one day after shearing sheep to find 35 people in her home listening to presentations on the progress of cleanup in the neighborhood.

While information on the extent of contamination around the neighborhood had been communicated by CRUMP, DiNEH Project and SRIC staffs to residents on several occasions over the past three years, USEPA’s findings and announcement of the emergency cleanup turned the Red Water Pond Road area, and Teddy Nez in particular, into something of a poster child for the impacts of abandoned uranium mines. One of four segments of a Los Angeles Times series on uranium impacts in Navajo Country in November 2006 featured the “Church Rock Mine Area” as an example of the failure of the federal Superfund law to deal with the unique conditions of abandoned mines in Navajo communities. Since the soil removal began in early May, reporters from Al Jazeera International, the Gallup Independent, the Navajo Times, and the French television station Channel 24 visited the community, interviewing Nez and other residents about their reactions to the events unfolding around them.

Elected officials also got into the act. Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley, Jr., toured the community on May 17, meeting with high-ranking USEPA officials from Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Members of the Indian Affairs Committee of the New Mexico Legislature visited on July 10, greeted by community members, including children, holding signs calling for health studies and demanding “no new uranium mining.”

“I wouldn’t live here,” said one state senator from Albuquerque, observing the close promixity of one of the mine dumps to the Nez resident.

“What we say is we want long-term protection,” Teddy Nez repeats to each successive group of officials that passes through. “We have been here for seven generations, and we want to stay. And we want this to be a safe place for the seven generations that come after us.”

Nez, who says he represents the 96 children and grandchildren of his extended Navajo family, thinks that the events have also served to educate the children of the community.

“The kids are now saying, ‘We didn’t know how this was affecting us,’” he said. “Now they have some information about it and they’ve been talking about it. It’s like education for them, like a government history test. And they can talk about the exposure to these contaminants.”

While USEPA remains in negotiation with UNC and GE to develop plans for cleanup of the Northeast Church Rock Mine site, concern remains among community members, scientists, and elected officials that the soil removal was just a first step in cleaning up the area.

Harry Allen, USEPA’s on-site coordinator for the soil removal, admitted in a meeting with the community in April that the agency may have to revisit the cleanup in the residential area, especially if cleanup of the adjacent site over the next two years re-contaminates land around the homes. He also acknowledged the CRUMP findings that uranium was still present in the soils at depths greater than 12 inches.

“It’s not been safe to live in these areas for a long time,” he told the Gallup Independent in May.

THE NAVAJO NATION — A URANIUM HISTORY

The uranium industry started in the 1940s and continued until the 1980s across the Navajo Nation. Most of the mining that took place on the reservation was under the Manhattan Engineering District (i.e. “Manhattan Project”) and the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission). This was entirely a government project. The sole procurer of the uranium ore was the U.S. government starting in December 1942 to 1972. The procurement program ended in 1970.

In August 1949, the Bureau of Mines, the Colorado Department of Health, the U.S. Surgeon General, and the Indian Health Service came together in Colorado and agreed to retain 3,450 miners as a unique study group. When we initiated the Stewart Udall lawsuit back in the early 1970s, we dug up records of 779 Navajo miners that were included in those studies. The study was two-fold. The first one was to evaluate the effects of radiation on miners and how much damage it would cause. The second component was to develop guidelines for the industry for worker protection and the general public. The miners were never told about these studies.

Uranium workers weren’t warned. There are no words in Navajo for a lot of things you and I throw around -- alpha, beta, gamma. And then there is the issue of death and dying. You don’t talk about uranium, because something happened. There was disrespect for life and there was disrespect for the environment. This is something that killed human life, the five fingered ones. So you have to recognize those things. Those play important roles in developing culturally sensitive environmental education.

We have to keep in mind that for indigenous nations like the Navajo Nation, everything we do is tied back to our universe, our nature, and our environment. There has to be moderation and balance. There has to be a holistic approach, spiritual approach, and we have to understand it. There is a Navajo saying that you should not probe the earth with anything sharp. By the same token, as Navajo’s we should never intentionally probe Mother Earth as we call it, because in doing so there will be some major disruptions. Ore was mined, so it disrupted the balance between earth and sky, and it was disrespectful to the earth. And because of that illness it was created. There was a huge unbalance in our lives – a holistic healing concept was disrupted. How do we get back to this holistic approach? How do we get back in harmony with one another? You have to know what it is you’re fighting, and you back to go back to the Navajo concept: Give it a name.

New Mexico was one of the largest producers of uranium. Thirty-nine million dry tons of uranium oxide was mined -- the majority of it in the Grants Mineral Belt. Currently, the Navajo Nation has over 1,200 abandoned mines on the reservation. Radioactive waste has scattered down mountainsides. Mining in the Grants Mineral Belt started in 1950, mostly around Paguate (Laguna) and around areas in Churchrock (Navajo). In July 1979, millions of gallons of highly acidic and contaminated water, as well as radioactive waste, washed down the Rio Puerco (Churchrock Uranium Mill Tailings Spill), all the way, almost to the Grand Canyon. This is our sad legacy of mining. These mines dot the landscape, our lands and our sacred sites, the areas where people work, live and play. It’s in the deserts, such as in the Cameron area, to the beautiful mountains: Chuska Mountain, Razor Mountain, and Monument Valley. The list goes on and on. These are the things that we had to live with for many years.

A lot of mining companies want to get back on the reservation. In Colorado they are waiting for the next boom to start. There is actual ongoing mining happening outside the reservations. How are we going to handle it if this should ever happen again? We have mining corporations that are ready to come back to the Navajo Nation. We need to stand firm and educate our people.

The sad legacies of uranium mining are birth defects, cancers, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), and the health and safety aspects. We have various types of lung cancer that, in my opinion, has not begun peak among miners. Science has developed in medicine, so there is a lot of hope.

I am head of a project in Diné College where we are naming cancer terminology. We have survivors if the cancer is detected well in advance, so we had to rename the concept. That is what we are doing, we are beginning to attack this monster. This is the Navajo concept of trying to get back to harmony. If we understand, and if we know how to address it, we can better educate not only the young ones, we can educate the medical people, the health educators, the technical people out there, the social workers, our teachers, our college students, and what have you.

In Navajo, we say that we need to know our enemy, we need to know this monster. We need to know how it grows in order to battle it. All of this was disrupted because of ignorance by the industry.

— Perry Charley is an educator and researcher at Diné College.

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