BOOK REVIEW

‘Yellow Dirt’ Explores Toxic Legacy on Navajoland

By David Frey, 1-18-11

Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed
By Judy Pasternak
317 pages, Free Press, 2010

The deserts of the American West were about as far-removed from the battlefields of World War II as any place could be, but they played a key role in the war, and in shaping the atomic age that followed.

The first nuclear mushroom cloud rose over the Trinity bombsite in New Mexico. The uranium used for the nuclear bombs was processed in Colorado and Utah. Some of the ore that provided the uranium came from Utah and New Mexico, particularly the Navajo Reservation. The Manhattan Project may have been based in New York, but its work was carried out in the West.

Navajos famously provided their language for the war cause, their code talkers turning their mother tongue into a code undecipherable by the Axis. But the Navajos who remained at home working in the uranium mines also became unexpected war victims, beginning a toxic legacy that has plagued the tribe ever since.

In the annals of the Cold War, the Navajos are the forgotten victims, but they paid a heavy price for the nuclear escalation that brought the world’s superpowers to the brink of mutual annihilation.

In her book Yellow Dirt, former Los Angeles Times reporter Judy Pasternak presents the horrific story of Navajos and the uranium mines that were bored into the earth beneath their mesas and buttes – a landscape considered sacred to them. It is a story of environmental destruction, and yet another tale of betrayal of American Indians. It’s a heartbreaking story, and Pasternak tells it masterfully.

As the book’s subtitle says, Yellow Dirt is “an American story of a poisoned land and a people betrayed,” but those adjectives could easily be flipped. The beautiful desert landscape was no less betrayed, and it was the people who were ultimately poisoned as radioactive waste contaminated their water, soil, air and homes. It’s a toxic legacy that continues today, at a time when interest in the uranium under the desert is on the rise again.

As an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Pasternak began piecing together this tale through interview after interview, reams of scientific documents and government hearings. It closely follows one Navajo family through the trajectory of contamination on the Navajo Nation.

Adakai, the patriarch, was so suspicious of the white prospectors hunting for yellow rock, he killed a few of them. His son opened up a treasure trove of uranium to them, however, helping launch a uranium boom on the reservation and ushering in a legacy of contamination that would affect his descendants and the Navajo Nation for decades to come.

“The first white men showed up in the summer of 1943,” the book begins. They were looking for uranium to supply the Manhattan Project. The rock under Navajo land would soon fuel the Cold War nuclear escalation.

By 1956, the United States had become the free world’s top uranium producer, thanks largely to the deposits found there. The Navajos reaped some of the benefits of the boom. They won royalties and found work in the mines and mills. But they were unknowingly paying a much steeper price. Early studies of the miners found cancer deaths were rising sharply among them, and the tragedies increased with the years.

The full danger of uranium exposure wasn’t known at the time, but it was no secret that the radioactivity was harmful. Whistle-blowers were ignored, though, and Navajo concerns were brushed off as the industry, and their accomplices in the government, pressed to maximize uranium production in the name of national defense.

“I have no doubt that the uranium industry will successfully solve its radiation problems,” President Johnson announced, an indication of the hands-off approach that did nothing to protect the people or landscape harmed by the uranium boom.

The industry, of course, didn’t solve its radiation problems, and as the death toll grew, mine inspections became more lax. Then the Cuban missile crisis ended the headlong rush for uranium. The boom busted. The Navajo mining jobs were gone, but the nuclear legacy wasn’t. 

Poorly reclaimed mines and mills continued to bleed radioactivity into the soil, water and air. Navajos, unaware of the dangers of the rock they were providing, used the radioactive tailings for building materials.

Cancer had once been so rare on the reservation that some scientists speculated the Navajo had a natural immunity. By the 1970s, cancer was becoming an epidemic far beyond the uranium workers themselves. A “slow-motion disaster … was clearly unfolding in Navajoland,” Pasternak writes. Government agencies were aware but did little to stop it. Courts dismissed lawsuits to redress the damages, despite evidence that Navajo uranium miners had suffered radiation exposure 40 times higher than the levels unleashed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“I believe the powers that be committed genocide on Navajoland by allowing uranium mining,” Navajo President Joe Shirley stated bluntly in 2005.

This terrible tale has something of a happy ending though. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., took an interest in the issue after Pasternak published a series exposing the Navajo nuclear legacy in the Los Angeles Times in November 2006. Finally, the powers that be were listening.

“Uranium mining and milling on and near the reservation has been a disaster for the Navajo people,” George Arthur, a Navajo tribal council delegate testified before legislators. “The Department of the Interior had been in the pocket of the uranium industry favoring its interest and breaching its trust duties to Navajo mineral owners. We are still undergoing what appears to be a never-ending federal experiment to see how much devastation can be endured by a people and a society from exposure to radiation in the air, in the water, in mines, and on the surface of the land. We are unwilling to be the subjects of that ongoing experiment any longer.”

Finally a real cleanup plan went into action. Residents living in the most contaminated of homes were given the choice of new, clean homes built at government expense or funds to move them to safer places.

With a renewed interest in uranium, though, attention is focused again on the uranium under Navajoland, which the tribal government has declared off limits to future uranium mining. Contamination cases remain. Court cases may, too.

“It is hard to review this record and not feel ashamed,” Waxman once said. “What has happened just isn’t right.”

Closing the cover on Yellow Dirt, impeccably researched and compassionately told, it’s impossible not to agree.

David Frey writes in Glenwood Springs, Colo. Follow him at www.davidmfrey.com and on Twitter.

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