Judy Pasternak expands her prize-winning Los Angeles Times series of articles on uranium mining on Navajo land to powerful effect in this important and unsettling investigative report. Presented in historical context and free of polemics, her book is both an indictment of past mining and workplace-safety practices and a grave warning regarding future disruptions of fragile ecologies.
Returned to their original land (reduced in size, of course) after being forcibly relocated in 1864 and 1865, the Navajos had a longtime policy against mining on their reservation. When they reversed that policy around 1940, the tribe earned money from mineral rights leases and, later, negotiated to have first choice to work in mines on their land. To an outside observer of the time, the Navajos had been savvier than most: they were living on their original land, they had retained the mineral rights to that land, and they were earning money from working in the mines. To anyone who knew that those miners were excavating ore that also contained uranium, however, the story was far from rosy.
Since the 1920s, at least in Europe, a connection had been made between radioactivity in mines yielding heavy metals and lung cancer in miners. Whether or not that connection was widely known or credited in U.S. uranium-mining circles, nobody warned the Navajos of the risks or proposed mitigating measures; even within the Public Health Service, chemists who raised concerns were ignored. Reading the sentence, "Though Duncan Holaday had pointedly noted that cancer was certain to hit the miners, he'd also said that it could take ten years or more to show up," tells us how little those appointed as guardians of the Navajos did to protect their interests.
Disturbing questions about who knew what when and who was accountable proliferate throughout Pasternak's investigation. Bureaucratic buck-passing was standard operating procedure; budget constraints were repeatedly invoked to justify taking no action. In the end, the Navajos were left hanging out there on their own: they had no idea what they had been exposed to and what was coming; most shamefully, nobody told them about the dangers lurking in the slag piles left behind when mandated clean-up efforts were not completed. Their land had been rendered an open-air dump for radioactive waste. Cancer incidence soared.
Pasternak's meticulous reporting on mining operations, the urgency to mine more faster because of national security issues, the health studies carried out on tribal members (without explaining to them the reasons or implications) and the ecological disaster wreaked on Navajo land is compelling as it is disturbing. All the more telling is that it was not until October 2007 that Congressman Henry Waxman held hearings on the issue at which he declared, "It is hard to review this record and not feel ashamed."--John McFarland
Shelf Talker: An important and unsettling study that is both an indictment of past mining and workplace-safety practices and a grave warning for future disruptions of fragile ecologies.