The House That Uranium Built:
Perspectives on the Effects of Exposure on Individuals
and Community'
Margaret Amalia Hiesinger
Introduction
Every day the heartbreakingly beautiful canyons that slice through
this mesa top convey 250,000 gallons of industrial sewage toward the
Rio Grande-itself contaminated with plutonium. Radioactive peach
trees have been found growing downstream from the lab and traces of
plutonium have been detected in chilies and in the catfish of Cochiti
Lake. Honeybees in the canyons have tritium in their bodies.
--Ruta, Resident of the Four Corners Area
In the wild grandeur of the American southwest, more than one radioactive
river flows through canyons and poisons the surrounding plant and wildlife. The
region's beauty inspires hope that these desert Edens might somehow be isolated from
human life and left as small, unfortunate pockets of poisoned paradise. However, the
physical and emotional sores, cancers, and sickness growing in people's bodies belie
such wishes. Contaminated rivers carry radioactive sewage not only to catfish in
Cochiti Lake, but to kitchen faucets in Shiprock. The breeze that blows uranium
tailings across open plains also blows it into the mouths and noses of people living
nearby.
While journalists lament the atrocity of such environmental ruin,
anthropologists must trace its roots to human behavior and address the subsequent
social consequences. This paper demonstrates the negative impact of uranium mining
1 This paper is based on a senior honor's thesis written in 1999 under the supervision of
Professor Laura Nader at University of California-Berkeley. It is the result of a student field
research project conducted on the Navajo Nation in 1999, as well as several brief periods of
field research between 1993 and 2000. This paper would not have been possible without help
and support from several people. They are: Laura Nader and Donald Moore at University of
California-Berkeley for their invaluable criticism and encouragement; Madelyn Iris, Leighton
Peterson, Kristy Noonkester, and the rest of the Northwestern Ethnographic Field School for
making this project possible; Linda Torres and Timothy Benally of the Uranium Education
Program at Dine College, Shiprock campus, as well as the rest of the faculty and staff for their
time and generosity; and most importantly, the people who shared their time and personal
experience about the dangers of uranium.
Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers
on people and their communities through a humanistic perspective and examines the
larger social context that perpetuates this kind of destruction. The first part of the
paper outlines the results of interviews conducted with residents of communities
where uranium mining and milling occurs, and focuses on the meaning of their
experiences. The second part of the paper extrapolates upon the issues that these
informants emphasized and relates their individual experiences to certain cultural
paradigms in our society.
Many people besides miners have suffered. Some individuals live in areas
where contamination is literally inescapable-where if uranium has not left a physical
wound, then it has certainly left its mark in another way. People living in areas
contaminated by uranium understand it as a substance that is transmitted easily
between objects, people, animals, and the natural environment. They believe that they
have been and are currently being contaminated from multiple sources, despite the
fact that operative mining and milling sites no longer exist. The richness of their
collected narratives demonstrates the complexity of radiation exposure and its effects.
Though mining activity in the Four Corners area ceased over twenty-five
years ago, people still live with elevated levels of radiation. What were once mine
and mill locations are active communities today. In these places, uranium mining
does not represent a closed chapter in American history; it remains a part of ordinary
life. People wonder whether their sons will be sterile. They worry about the
possibility of falling ill, just like an aunt or uncle did, and discovering that cancer has
spread throughout their bodies.
The perceived effects of uranium cover a number of different spheres,
incorporating physical, mental, and psychosocial aspects. While informants discuss
physical ailments known to be linked to mining and radiation, their stories reveal a
much deeper sense of contamination. In addition to suffering from cancers and birth
defects, people also feel that their entire bodies and landscapes are contaminated.
Miners suffer from guilt and self-blame about contaminating family members. People
sometimes identify themselves by their status as resident in a radioactively
contaminated community. In addition, the rapid mass death of former miners,
combined with concern about the health of the living, weighs heavily on those left
behind.
These phenomena and their social context have not been carefully examined.
The actions, thoughts, and behaviors related to illness and suffering reveal the way
uranium impacts families and communities. Twenty deaths from lung cancer in a
small mill town my help researchers link lung cancer to radiation in a clinical study.
But how does that community absorb and cope with those deaths? One can not
predict or comprehend the long-term impact of a phenomenon like uranium mining
without examining all of the facets of life damaged by death, illness, and pollution.
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The House that Uranium Built
By representing the voices of those living daily amidst the fallout of nuclear
activity, anthropologist research bears witness to the everlasting and continuing harm
of uranium. First hand accounts by people living with radiation are an important part
of any serious argument against the use of nuclear power and weaponry. They reveal
the kinds of scars left on individuals, families, and communities that do not show up
in statistical surveys.
This insight leads to the paper's next goal: to contrast how local people are
affected by uranium versus the way scientific research determines its impact.
Scientific standards for determining radiation exposure apply only to a narrow
spectrum of circumstances. The infiltration of radiation into the entire organic system
renders these methods incomplete and inadequate. Relying solely upon scientific
measurement to assess radiation damage ignores the fact that not all damage can be
measured quantitatively.  Residents witness and experience multiple forms of
radiation damage despite having little or no knowledge of radiation levels.
Because the scientific perspective has dominated the investigation of uranium
in the Four Corners, official government research has ignored factors unique to
Navajo. For example, the way Navajo people utilize their land, and its resources
increases their risk for exposure, yet outside researchers have not taken this into
account in their studies. They also fail to appreciate the complexities of translation
and meaning in explaining their concept of risk to a population that still largely speaks
a different language.
My critique of the use of scientific research to the exclusion of other means of
collecting information does not constitute a criticism of science in general. Rather, it
is a demonstration of the way in which, when used carelessly or to fulfill political
agendas, official science can perpetuate dangerous and hanmful institutions. It is also
a warning about the consequences of ignoring the experiences of community members
and local cultural elements.
Several contrasting perspectives emerge as themes throughout the paper.
These include visibility and invisibility, the hidden and the illuminated, and voice and
silence. Powerful kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing, such as Western
science, emerge as visible and possessing a voice. Research has focused primarily on
tangible forms of uranium damage, as a result of a visually-based scientific knowledge
system. It therefore obscures Navajo and other "non-expert" knowledge which lacks
social and political power.
The Uranium industry does, however, recognize Navajo and other rural
peoples for their possession of large resource caches and their low per capita incomes.
Both the government and industry have targeted Navajos to conduct nuclear tests and
deposit nuclear waste on their land in exchange for the promise of money and jobs.
This paper explores elements of environmental racism and nuclear colonialism that
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shape uranium mining and clean-up efforts. It also describes the government's use of
language and metaphors to obscure the forsaking of selected lands (often deserts) and
their inhabitants, rendering them sacrifice zones and designated wastelands. These
rhetorical devices obscure the colonialist property ideology and adherence to an
economic model of nature that declares deserts useless for anything besides nuclear
activity. Emphasis on efficiency and minimum cost excludes from the equation the
value not only of designated land but also of human lives.
Many of the surreal qualities of nuclear phenomena, such as the vast expanses
of time and remote, often exotic, regions they require strengthen the barrier between
the executors of nuclear activities and their victims. Yet the voices of the victims
remind us of the fmal consequences despite the attempts by the nuclear industry to
hide them.
The last section of the paper outlines the failure of individual monetary
compensation to make up for the damage. No retroactive measures can erase the
destruction caused by uranium; moreover because compensation is paid to individuals,
it does not support communal rehabilitation efforts, such as treatment centers and
education programs. Awarding money to victims serves to silence their complaints
and provides an easy way for the nuclear industry to continue their dangerous activity.
Background
Officially, uranium mining and milling began in the Southwest in the 1940s.
The years that the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act ("RECA") currently
recognizes for mining activity are 1947 through 1971. However, an old publication
by Union Carbide and Carbon Company displays a picture of a mill in Slick Rock,
Colorado dating back to 1900 (Union Carbide Co. 1956: 3). Whether the legacy of
uranium mining has existed for more than sixty or over one hundred years, no one can
argue that it has made a dramatic impact on both the landscape and lives of people
living in the Four Corners area.
Epidemiological studies of uranium mill workers and miners have been
performed as early as the 1950s. What has not been as carefully examined are the
ways in which these health issues function in relation to the lives of those who suffer
from them. Recently, the need to make such connections has been recognized. As
noted by Ken Silver, of the Boston University School of Public Health:
By weaving together technical data and local history in
communicating about risks, health agencies can provide working
people some official validation for their health concerns, their
sacrifices, and the shared memories of their lives at work. [Silver
1996:117]
The House that Uranium Built
Another person who has been instrumental in expanding the way officials perceive the
effects of uranium is Gilbert Badonie. The son of a uranium miner, and resident at a
mining camp for some twenty years, Badonie has become a strong voice in speaking
on behalf of families of miners and mill-workers. Mr. Badonie suffers from a mining
related disease although he never worked in the uranium industry. Mr. Badonie's
experience attests to the chain of illness that has followed from workers through their
descendants. This issue raises "a question that's unanswered and virtually un-
addressed," (Magazine of the Tufts University Medical Alumni Association 1999:
Inside Cover).  Mr. Badonie encourages those who grew up under similar
circumstances to stand up and share their stories.
Mr. Badonie's work ties in with the Oral History Project - a collection of
photo-essays about former Navajo workers and their families. The project, titled
"Memories Come to us in the Rain and the Wind," reveals the concern that present-
day communities have about their lost relatives, damaged environment, and
themselves. George Lapahe, from Two Grey Hills, NM, explains:
Now they also found some tumors in their inner organs, both my boys
and daughters. Where is this coming from? There never used to be
stories like this. Now those of us who worked with uranium see our
children beginning to be affected by it. [Navajo Uranium Miner Oral
History and Photography Project 1997:20]
"Memories Come to us in the Rain and the Wind" has been one of the few, if not the
only, publications to illuminate the role of families and communities in the uranium
issue.
While years of health studies have confirmed that uranium mining and milling
poses numerous risks to the communities in which they are based, many scholars and
activists point out the current impact on people today. The message of people like
Silver, Kuletz, Badoni and local residents is clear: Uranium must be examined with a
multi-disciplinary approach in order that policy-makers and the public alike fully
understand the toll it has taken.
Methods, Site, Participants
Participant interviews were used in conjunction with the results of a larger
randomly-sampled survey about community uranium knowledge. All place and
personal names have been changed to protect the privacy of participants. I conducted
my interviews in three locations on the Navajo Nation in Arizona and New Mexico.
The first is the town in which I lived, called Thick Water. It is one of the largest
communities in the Navajo Nation. The second site is a small uranium-impacted
community near the town in which I lived. I refer to this community as Little Valley.
The third site is the closest major border town to Thick Water and is called Millstone.
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Both Navajo and Anglo participants aided in this study. Some of the major
participants include: Melinda Marquez, a woman in her early forties who works in the
uranium field. James Garnet is a retired politician in his sixties who lives in Thick
Water. His name was given to me by one of the faculty at the college where I worked,
as someone who would be knowledgeable about uranium. Janice Calvin came to the
study through a chapter meeting in Little Valley. She is a schoolteacher and the
daughter of a uranium miner. Betty Ray is also a middle-aged woman who works in
Little Valley. Her family received compensation from the government under RECA.
Lane Gerald, an Anglo man, lives in a small community just off the reservation
between Thick Water and Millstone. A small man in his early fifties, he is a well-
known proprietor of several Millstone establishments, and is a former uranium mill
worker.
Findings
First, I present the ways in which people describe being exposed to uranium,
followed by their accounts of its effects. Next, I examine some of the psychosocial
ramifications of uranium that emerged in these interviews. These consist of the
perceptions of themselves and their environment as contaminated, the guilt associated
with uranium mining, and the social disruption that uranium has caused in Navajo
communities.
Means of Exposure
Informants list extensive ways they believe they, and other people, are
exposed to uranium and associated radiation. Working in the mining and milling
industry represents one direct way, as well as breathing it, using contaminated water,
eating it, and playing with radioactive waste. Other modes of exposure include
through contact with animals, simply living around it, and through contact with other
people.
Everyone except one informant worked as a miner or miller, or had an
immediate family member who did. Knowledge of working conditions in the uranium
industry led everyone to agree that workers were exposed to high doses of uranium
and radiation on the job. Lane Gerald provides one graphic example of the extent of
radiation exposure in the mills. He begins:
I've seen guys work in what they called the "hot areas" [areas with
high levels of radiation], um - never be out in the sunshine, and they
was all dark-skinned.
According to Lane, the men's darkened skin results from exposure to radiation
underground.
The House that Uranium Built
Informants not only mention the numerous ways working exposed miners and
millers, but also the ways the industry contaminated surrounding areas. Several
people note that uranium has infiltrated local and regional water sources. These
include rivers, wells, and swimming areas. Lane Gerald describes the runoff from the
mills flowing into the Dolores River in Colorado:
I mean tailings were drippin' in it, I mean it was.. . tailings piles was
right on the edge of it, and if we got an extraordinary amount of
runoff and stuff, I mean it'd wash it into the river.
The "tailings" to which Lane refers are the piles of unused processed ore leftover from
the milling process.
In Lane's Colorado milling town, steam from the mill even heated the local
public swimming pool. People often describe family members who worked at the
mines on hot days and drank the water that ran through the mine. Families who lived
near the mines drank water from wells near the working area. The scale of
contaminated water sources ranges from small springs and wells, used by perhaps
several families or workers-to major rivers such as the Dolores and Animas-
impacting not only select individuals but entire populations as well.
Airborne contamination troubles residents who share concerns about
breathing in uranium or radiation. Workers wore no masks or respirators on the job,
and inhaled dust from blasting and shoveling. Breathing uranium dust also concerns
anyone currently living in the area, as the wind carries the debris and spreads it
through out the vicinity. James Garnet says," And the dirt you know, the wind blew
like this, it carried [the uranium] somewhere else to somebody's place." In some cases
wind has eroded tailings piles to the point where vast regions have been covered with
tailings deposits. People living near such places describe being able to watch the piles
disintegrate on windy days. As early as the late 1940s, doctors noticed this
phenomenon around the Naturita mill, where "a pronounced yellow staining of the
rocks for a radius of a half a mile or so from the plant was demonstrated" (Wolf and
Eisenbud 1948:3).
Organisms can ingest as well as inhale traveling dust. These include livestock
as well as people who eat food near mines or waste piles. People can ingest radiation
in other ways besides eating dust-covered food and plants. Some families grew their
vegetables in piles of mill tailings. Informants describe the dangers of growing
vegetables in contaminated soil and, in one case, of storing them in a root cellar built
from radiated wood. Because tailing piles lie out in the open near residential areas,
growing food in radioactive soil still poses a threat today.
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Parents worry about children playing in contaminated areas. When the mines
and mills were still open, ore rocks and piles transformed into regular play areas for
kids. Lane Gerald remembers:
My uncles were driving ore trucks, and I'd go out and some of the
rocks would be purple, some would be green, some would be this,
some would be that. I was totally amazed by 'em. And I'd go pick the
pretty rocks out and I'd put 'em in my closet. Sometimes my mom
would get really pissed because she would go in there and I'd have
three hundred pounds of rocks in my closet. Which I now know that
was radioactive rocks.
Betty Ray feels that she and all of her brothers and sisters have been exposed because
"we used to play in that ore." Again, many of the waste piles still stand in the midst
of communities today. Adults often mention locations of water-filled mines and
nearby tailing piles where local children play.
Other means of exposure pose a less direct, but equally dangerous threat. One
such way is through animals that contaminate people who utilize and depend upon
their products. Dogs bring it home. Ranchers who graze their cattle near the mill
fmd their bulls sterile and their cows giving birth to two-headed calves.
Just as animals can expose a person to uranium, humans can contaminate each
other. This can occur through reproduction or from contact with persons covered in
contaminated material. James Garnet explains:
I have a daughter that's borderline retarded, the second one. During
that year in the '60's, we - um, 'cause I spent alooot of time in my -
with my dad, brothers, hauling that uranium back and forth.
He feels that if people have been exposed and are young enough to reproduce, then
"it can be transferred. Through the woman or man to the next generation." Other
participants echoed this sentiment and described birth defects that they believe have
been caused by fetal exposure to uranium from a parent. Both parents are thought to
be able to contaminate the fetus, as opposed to only the mother carrying the unborn
child.
Husbands can also contaminate wives, when they come home covered in
debris from the mines or mills. Melinda Marquez tells the story of her aunt who
developed cancer throughout her body as a result of having sexual intercourse with
her husband. Melinda says:
My aunt. Her husband would come back to her and he would just go
to bed with dust on his clothes, in bed-you know-and had these
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The House that Uranium Built
kids. She had cancer in the uterus. She had cancer in her lungs. She
had cancer all over. From radiation exposure.
By combining the idea that family members can contaminate each other with the
understanding that it can be passed down through generations, radiation exposure
becomes a socially contracted problem as well as an environmental one. A web - or
chain of exposure - through people's bodies develops as husbands contaminate their
spouses who contaminate their children.
With all of the pathways for exposure, some people feel like "it's floatin' all
over the place." These remarks indicate that people think simply living near uranium
exposes them. They do not differentiate between modes of exposure because they
believe their entire area to be contaminated. In his description of life in a milling
town mn Colorado, Lane Gerald exclaims, "It was all uranium related!" When he
speaks of his exposure working in the mill, Lane reflects:
I think I'm fortunate enough to have got away from it only after just
four or five years of exposure - of course I had more then that as a
kid, from the time I was about flve until the time I was, oh, I'd say in
my twenties I lived around it.
Exposure takes on a new meaning as people move from describing certain
elements as contaminated, to describing entire communities as contaminated. In some
places, the networks of exposure become so entangled that people begin to perceive
the vicinity itself as a source of contamination.
Effects on Exposure Communities
Participants speak candidly about the ways in which their communities have
been permeated by uranium. They articulate the effects of exposure with equal
emphasis and detail. Radiation exposure stems from a wide spectrum of sources, and
so do its effects. These range from physical damage to humans and animals as well as
enviromnental impact. Effects also incorporate emotional and social aspects.
Most informants spent a lot of time discussing the physical ailments resulting
from exposure. They describe radiation as something that destroys the structure of the
body. According to their observations, radiation exposure causes deterioration,
accelerated aging, and ultimately, death. It becomes a part of the body and causes
abnormal growth. As Melinda explains:
I think that the radiation causing you to deplete in the ... immune
system, its causing it to lower the metabolism and weaken the body,
maybe that's what happened. It caused these sicknesses [such as
cancer and diabetes] to take over the person's health a lot faster.
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In this passage she explains how radiation allows the body to deteriorate much more
easily than it normally would. Other speakers echo this sentiment.
People also describe specific physical ailments caused by radiation. Lane
remembers watching his father, also a mill worker, die of a brain tumor:
He went from, like I told you, about a hundred and forty-five pounds
to about eighty pounds. Um, just very shortly. I mean just skin and
bones like he had dried leather over his bones . . . His skin turned
terribly bad, you know, leather-type quality.
Skin problems, rapid weight loss, and cancer are all common symptoms of people
who have worked in the uranium industry. Other noted physical effects include
reproductive difficulty, hair and tooth loss, loss of appetite, and respiratory problems.
As a result of contact with uranium, animals suffer from some of the same
ailments as humans. Cancer, shortened life spans, and reproductive problems plague
exposed animals in the same way they afflict humans. Amongst a rural population
that relies upon grazing animals to feed their families and supplement their incomes,
livestock contamination has serious ramifications. Lane describes the herd of cattle
owned by close family friends, the Snows. After moving their cattle onto open land
near the mill, the Snows' herd began to show signs of damage. Lane remembers:
They were coming out with mutated cows. I've actually seen a cow
with two heads - a calf. I've seen 'em with five legs ... their birthrate
went down ... That particular area, we was lucky out of five hundred
cows to come up with a hundred calves.
To qualify the last figure, Mr. Gerald estimated that six hundred and fifty calves were
a nornal amount for a herd that size. In another instance, Melinda Marquez described
an older Navajo woman who butchered one of her sheep to find its insides riddled
with cancerous tumors. The woman said her sheep regularly drink from a spring that
flows out of an abandoned mine.
Radiation modifies the environment and plant life as well as other living
organisms. While some people believe it mutates plants to an abnormally large or
lush state and others think it kills them, they concur that it alters their local vegetation.
For example, Lane remembers growing "carrots as big as your arm" According to
him:
You could raise damn near anything in [the tailings] and we never
fertilized . . . I still to this day cannot explain to you - we had
beautiful lawns, we had beautiful trees ....
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On a hike up to an abandoned mine led by two of Janice Calvin's family members, her
son pointed at a plant with enormous leaves that looked like it belonged in a tropical
rainforest and said, "Uranium." When asked if he was kidding, he shook his head
"no."
Melinda views the impact on vegetation in another way. Driving down a
well-traveled highway on the western portion of the Navajo Nation, she pointed at the
bare lumps of tailings piles scattered across the landscape. She said, "You see there's
certain areas that just - just - there's no vegetation." After a minute she pointed to an
area where some sparse grass and brush appeared and said, " But I betcha if there was
pilings that took place up in those areas, all this would be no vegetation." She
explained that the high level of radiation in and around these piles prevents plants
from growing in this area.
The accounts of Lane, Melinda, and Janice's relatives reveal the various kinds
of changes radiation can make on the environment. According to these people,
radiation affects vegetation differently depending upon the conditions - perhaps upon
the level of radiation. These stories demonstrate the multiple and varied ways in
which residents have observed uranium affecting their land over time.
In addition to the more visible toll taken on human bodies, animals, and the
environment, uranium also causes social and emotional damage in communities.
Janice Calvin describes the way former miners in her community died from radiation
poisoning:
Some guys were b  rely getting on with the good life and then
they had to go. They suffered. The saddest part is when they suffer
the last few months ... For a long time suffer. Reeeeally suffer from
from sickness.
Janice's description does not just pertain to one particular death, but to the deaths of
multiple members of her community who all died in the same fashion as a result of
uranium. This transcends a personal account of one family dealing with death,
becoming a collective experience.
So how do these families and those around them deal with the death and
suffering? Lane answers:
The mental effects are very hard. I mean for god's sake, I'm only
fifty-two years old and I'm an orphan ... all of a sudden you wake up
one day and you realize that everybody you knew - is dead. I mean,
yeah sure, maybe radiation don't kill people, and maybe it'd kill one
or two. But for god's sakes everybody that you've known you're
entire life? I mean that's a little hard to deal with.
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The suffering can not be restricted to those who have lost their lives to radiation
poisoning. The entire community bears a large part of that burden as well. The
narrators' testimonies exemplify the way in which uranium distresses communities
socially and psychologically as well as physically.
Perception of Self as Contaminated
While informants carefully articulate the causes and effects of the uranium
cycle, their stories also reveal a deeper relationship between uranium and their
communities. In their histories of the effects of uranium, they describe the way in
which radiation becomes a part of people. They manifest a belief in themselves as
having been contaminated. This impression emerges in the terms people use in their
everyday speech.
Janice Calvin describes her experience:
I thought we were just like everybody else, people in Pinon, Chinle,
Gallup ... and then when they um heard that they said, "You guys are
- something's wrong with you guys. Those waters are coming down
with uranium. You guys are drinking it. One of these days you're
gonna get sick from it.
Janice thought that the people in her community were just like everybody else, but
because of the "water coming down with uranium," they are, in fact, not.
"Something's wrong" with them according to the residents of surrounding
communities. The radioactivity not only poisons the water, but also marks the people
living in that area with a geographic scarlet letter. She says, "And I ask myself, Why
me? Why am I . . ?" Local residents like Janice become stigmatized because they
depend upon a contaminated resource.
Individuals also bear the badge of uranium. Lane uses his whole body as a
map to demonstrate the damage uranium can leave on a human body. He first showed
me a small, pitch-black mark under his thumbnail. He says, "As the nail goes out, the
hole still stays there and that's been since the sixties." His father had two such burns
on his fingers and "'til he died in the nineties, he still carried it." Lane refers to the
hole on his finger that stays there while the rest of his nail grows, and to the spots on
his father's "marred" fingers as something which he "carried" with him. His use of the
metaphor "carrying" reveals a sense of feeling disfigured and tainted by uranium.
Later, he revealed radiation-caused burns and discoloration on his legs, chest, and
arms.
Through constant reinforcement, people begin to accept their radioactive
identities as nornal, even amusing. This is evident even in the jokes that circulate
through uranium industry towns:
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The House that Uranium Built
How do you find your kids at night? Just look for the glow.
[Chuckles]. How do you know if a guy works in a uranium mill? Is
if his kids glow on the dark.
The rest of the jokes follow the same pattern, featuring a contaminated individual - in
this case, a uranium worker - who leaves his taint on various family members and
women.
However, the real life "jokes" that Lane experienced are even more poignant.
They follow in the same vein as the fictional jokes. At age seventeen, he arrived at
the town doctor's office for a physical before his first marriage. He was asked to give
a sperm sample.
And I said, "Well okay," you know and I was just a dumb kid. I was
only seventeen for god's sakes. And I said "Okay," and she come out
with a gallon jar! And I says, "I've gotta fill that up before I can get
married?" And she said "No." She said "Just do it once in there. It'll
grow itself."
When asked if the nurse was kidding, Lane laughed, "They was just screwing with me
because I was young and dumb." The nurse's joke about mutant sperm reflects his
milling town culture's belief that residents are so contaminated that even their
reproductive faculties are impure. In this instance, Lane's routine physical had
become a means of simultaneously reinforcing and familiarizing him with his
radioactive abnormality.
Guilt and Self Blame
In communities where people can unknowingly harm others through ordinary,
even loving, acts such as hugging or having intercourse, issues of guilt and self-blame
arise. Even though it is a joke, how does the miller whose kids "glow in the dark" feel
about that? How do men who bragged about receiving high pay from the mills and
finding steady work feel when their wives and children begin to get sick? How do
wives who encouraged their husbands to work closer to home feel when they die from
lung cancer at age forty? How does this situation become the victims' fault? Yet in
the end, the burden of these questions lies on the shoulders of these families and
communities.
There are several ways in which the outcome of uranium mining has fostered
feelings of guilt and self-blame. The first is that when contaminated individuals can
and do expose their loved ones; they feel responsible. Second, people's work in the
uranium industry seems to linger in their minds as they explain the reasons why they
did and that they were not warned of the danger. Third, some Navajo informants
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blame themselves as a result of traditional beliefs about the meaning of mining and
disturbing the earth.
Melinda speaks about the ways in which community members participated in
the uranium industry. They discovered it, they mined it, and they contaminated each
other. She characterizes her own family's involvement through the actions of her
Aunt's husband:
the husband worked and discovered the mines - the ore. He was one
of the main guys that worked with the white people that came in and
digged the ore out ... They brought it home down to the Gray Valley
area where they lived. Down the mountains. The exposure was so
tremendous because this guy was like yellow-caked down to the foot
with dust.
The workers and residents did not play a passive victim role in the sense that they
were forced to work in the industry. This was a livelihood for many people who made
money and supported families from their part in the uranium business. In addition,
Melinda's depiction of the workers bringing uranium down from the mountain into
their communities illustrates the way these men engaged in a hazardous practice and
unknowingly introduced that danger into the lives of their families.
This circumstance of contamination has been difficult for residents to grapple
with, as they find themselves maintaining the roles of both victim and assailant. As a
way of coping with this double-sided identity, people often repeat the fact that they
were not warned. Betty Ray portrays the way in which this dilemma plays out among
surviving community members. She says:
And it - it really bothers us now. If they had, if they had been
warned, yeah, they wouldn't have worked in the mines. But it was -
they weren't warned. They just used to go in there and did their job.
Everyone with whom I spoke mentioned that the workers were never warned and were
not wearing protective gear; often several times in one conversation. People made
similar disclaimers when they described workers exposing family members through
contaminated clothing. For those living with uranium, the ignorance in which they
participated in the industry's cultivation remains a central part of their experience
even now. It is perhaps the single most important part of their story.
Another reason for self-blame in Navajo communities comes from their
concept of the earth's Natural Order. In Navajo, there is a word to describe this
balance of the universe. It is "Hozho," which Melinda translated as "the beauty of
life" (Marquez 1999). Melinda explains the way in which mining uranium relates to
this concept:
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The House that Uranium Built
Navajos say that, you know, for instance this uranium, you know,
people go and dig in there and dig it out. You're disturbing the
Natural Order of the, of Mother Earth. And so Mother Earth is gonna
defend itself. You know. And by defending itself, you're gonna see
health problems related from uranium because radiation is hazardous
to the health. The person who's disturbing the earth is the one who's
gonna be affected. This is exactly what's happening ... And that's
what Navajos believe.
According to her explanation, mining uranium has disrupted the Natural Order - or the
way the world is meant to operate. The earth protects itself by lashing out and striking
the perpetrator. In this scenario, even though the Navajo people may have done harm
accidentally, the earth's instinctual reaction remains the same. In this vein, nothing
can immediately prevent the ill affects brought about by uranium. The fact that many
Navajos accept that there is no cure for the effects of radiation corresponds with this
as well. Some people, like James, believe that things may improve over time:
But if they cover it up, don't fool around digging out gold anymore,
then I think in a hundred years we could do - have a better life.
Because the subject of uranium falls outside the boundaries of traditional
Navajo culture, no established ceremonies exist to effectively heal victims physically
or symbolically.
Entire Landscape as Contaminated
Every aspect of the landscape had been contaminated - from the earth to the
plants, animals, and people living in and on it. It is not surprising that, as discussed
earlier, many people view their whole environment as contaminated. Melinda says:
It destroyed our lives because that uranium was dug out. The Natural
Order was disturbed. And the environment, the plants, the vegetation,
you could see that. Its also destroying our livestock. You know. Its
creating cancer in the animals, uh babies are being born deformed. Its
also affected the people.
James Garnet's depiction of living in a radioactive landscape resembles
Melinda's description of a system that has been disrupted and completely tainted. He
says:
These people were livin' thirty feet away from the mine. Its probably
hotter than a skunk in the reading of the - of the ah - what do you call
radiation [makes the gesture for a geigercounter]. They lived right
there. They spent twenty-four hours there with their kids, 'cause that's
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their home. They ate the food that grew off the tree of the mine,
burned it in the fire and cooked with it. Had the water well from
down the road were probably full of radiation. Made their little, uh,
hogans out of the rocks, of the uranium, hard uranium, live in that.
Had a nice smokestack, but radiation was there.
The portrait James paints of the family in their "little Hogan" with its "nice
smokestack" contrasts sharply with the uranium that he describes as poisoning every
aspect of daily life.
While his particular account refers to the time when mines still operated, other
narrators spoke of their immediate communities with similar sentiments. Janice
Calvin's husband told her he no longer wanted to live in her community because he
believed it was too heavily contaminated. She remembers him saying: "I shouldn't
have come to this community. You guys are - uranium's all over. I don't want to live
here."
Locals also perceive the area as being so damaged that there are no "safe"
places. Driving through an area that the Bureau of Abandoned Mine Lands had
reclaimed, Melinda pointed out patches where soil had been transplanted over
radioactive waste to diminish its toxicity. It was difficult to differentiate between
waste piles and the dark banded lumps that characterized the region's unique
otherworldly landscape. She spoke of the reclamation program with mild contempt:
Melinda: They're covering it up so that when you cause the exposure,
patching it up, once they patch it up they try . . . but they try to
reclaim it by blending into the environment ... They bring those dirt
over - they cover it - or they'll cover it with gravel. And they try to
blend it in and make vegetation re-grow in those areas.
MH: Because they got - you mean on purpose they got dirt that didn't
have radiation in it so that vegetation would grow?
Melinda: And then they covered it over the area where they re-
claimed
MH: So no one would notice that there was a bald vegetation?
Melinda: Yes. Right.
Melinda believes that some supposed clean-up efforts make these areas "safe" by
covering them with dirt so that vegetation will grow and give them the appearance of
being normal. In this case, reclaiming becomes a means of disguising. This process
lowers the emission of radiation, but is not a permanent or curative way to restore the
The House that Uranium Built
land - especially when the region's characteristically strong winds constantly erode
away the topsoil.
The most disturbing part of this treatment is that once these areas are
reclaimed, they gain the appearance of being radiation-free. People living around
these areas can no longer use the few available visual clues to determine where waste
piles or former pit mines exist. As a result, the entire environment becomes a
minefield in another sense - danger zones now lie buried in what appears to be a
somewhat natural landscape. This creates a situation in which everything does not
suddenly seem improved, but one in which nothing can be definitively labeled as safe.
The entire system becomes tainted.
Without proper information in communities about where contaminated areas
exist and where reclamation will take place, reclamation itself can camouflage
dangerous areas and create confusion about where people should and should not go.
This, compounded with the fact that delineating certain places as "dangerous" - or off-
limits, and "safe" - or useable, poses a problem for people who depend upon being
able to occupy and utilize vast areas. Such areas include remote places that outside
officials may consider disposable.
Social Disruption
Uranium penneates not only physical landscapes, but social ones as well.
Certain communities have come to form their identities through uranium
contamination: one previous example being Lane Gerald's visit to the doctor. Other
social ramifications include residents feeling that the overall quality of life has
declined, continually worrying about how people will be affected in the future, and
enduring the legacy of burden on families and those left behind.
Janice Calvin laughed and recounted a conversation she once had with her
sisters. She said:
One time we were talking about it at home. Ahhh it was we were
saying, "Yeah different communities have their own problems. These
people in the Midwest - they have tornadoes. Others have flooding -
those floods. And then they've got volcanoes out here. Ours is the
uranium. [Smiling] ... Ours is the worst one.
In her comparison of disasters (uranium being the only un-natural one), lies the humor
of someone resigned to a horrible fate. This is how many people living with uranium
view their situation. It also reveals that uranium - "the worst one" - has become a
form of identity for Janice's community. It is difficult to argue that people are
minimally affected by uranium when they, their neighbors, and family define
themselves by it. Lane's exclamation, "I mean we've lived around uranium and
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Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers
vanadium all our lives," reinforces the fact that once someone has lived around it for
his or her entire life, it eventually becomes a part of life - and of a community.
In perceiving uranium in this way, people feel that it has marred their lives
and lowered their quality of life. The environmental and physical pollution have
become so all-encompassing that they have caused social pollution as well. James
Garnet makes an association between covering up the contaminated earth and
improving the quality of living:
But if they cover it up, don't fool around digging gold anymore, then I
think in a hundred years we could do-have a better life. Its going to
take many years to come out of it.
Even once the radiation has been covered up, he recognizes that it will still take a long
time to recover because the damage has reached far beyond the boundaries of open
mines. James continues:
Well in time that when I was younger, before the real hit of the
radiation, before any kind of environmental uh impact of coal mining
or other things that are - in those younger days, we don't have any
people that were limping. We didn't have any problem in alcoholism
. . . and not very many people, uh, had any other um, um, def&ts in
their lives. They didn't have retardation, mental problems.
His list goes on to include suicide and domestic violence before he says, "and I think
the effects of that is from uh, the mixture of all-all the pollution and radiation."
Here, James's speech powerfully links the environmental pollution with a wide array
of social ills and degenerated aspects of modem society. It reveals the strong
connection he and other participants maintain between their society and natural
environment.
The loss of elders and care for the sick contributes to the despair of those left
to pick up the pieces. Betty Ray says, "well its really sad. I mean all our parents are
gone and now we're the only ones and it - it really bothers us now." During a trip with
Melinda to the western part of the Navajo Nation, we visited the home of a woman
whose father-in-law had been a miner. Melinda asked the woman how uranium had
affected her family. The woman began by talking about her father-in-law's blindness
and the fact that she becomes unexplainably ill every few months for long periods of
time. Neither she nor her father-in-law knows what is wrong with them. She
described dealing with his alcoholism that further incapacitates him because he has
lost hope. She began to cry. She said "I sometimes ask myself Is a life like this
worth living?"' The fallout from mining includes experiences like these. Even those
who appear to live several degrees removed from uranium still find themselves
intimately connected with it.
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The House that Uranium Built
Finally, knowledge of the delayed effects of radiation, compounded with the
sight of sick and dying people, fosters continual worry about who will be next.
Because radiation exposure does not guarantee certain death, people are left with
questions of whether they will get sick later in life, how they will be affected, and how
or whether they are currently being exposed. Janice says:
Well, we, like my family, my mom, its eeeaaaah in back of their
mind. They try to think positive - positively every day. Just taking it
one day at a time. Make sure we don't get wiped out one day ...
[Slightly laughs].
She also mentions that she keeps a list of symptoms from uranium-related illness in
her truck that she consults when she hears that someone in her community has gotten
sick. This is an effect of uranium that not many outsiders have given much attention,
yet it is a significant aspect of how people live with uranium today.
Discussion of Interview Data
The narrators suggest that people living in uranium-impacted communities
understand it as something that affects them in all aspects of life. While health studies
have confirmed some of their physical trauma, there has not been enough information
published to allow people to extensively analyze the bulk of their experiences. Works
like "Memories Come to us in the Rain and the Wind," begin to form a base from
which to conceptualize the impact of uranium mining in a multi dimensional way.
This publication provides actual statements from victims and corresponding
illustration, but leaves the interpretation of these powerful testimonies to its reader.
While such work is infmiitely valuable, the time has come to move one step further in
this endeavor.
In many cases, people found it almost impossible to answer questions about
how uranium had affected their communities in ways other than by listing health
problems or talking about how things were back in the mining days. People are
simply not used to thinking about uranium in terms of their own personal frame of
reference. They related their experiences through anecdotes and stories, but almost
never attached any broader meaning to these accounts. As Ken Silver (1996) and
Valerie Kuletz (1998) note, people need to be able to legitimize and understand the
collective truth in their stories.
Ethnographic interviews demonstrate the existence of a complex set of issues
surrounding uranium. They raise the need to continue asking these kinds of questions,
and reveal some of the main un-addressed avenues of concern for both community
members and professionals. This is where anthropology and ethnographic analysis
can elicit the deeper meaning and issues in the way people live with uranium.
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Scientific and Local Perceptions of Uranium Impact Differ
Because radiation is invisible and its detrimental effects usually appear many
years after exposure, scientists and laypeople alike have had great difficulty
determining how much a person can tolerate without being harmed. Beginning in the
early 1950s and continuing through the late 1960s, scientists and doctors argued
before the Atomic Energy Commission about the amount of radiation a miner could
safely tolerate in working conditions. Eventually a standard was agreed upon, but this
still did not address the extent to which family members, people living near mines, or
people using contaminated resources could be harmed. The federal government
currently uses the standard formula of two hundred "Working Level Months" - a
calculation based on measurements of radon gas in mines and the amount of time a
worker spent in the mine - to compensate miners for lung disease. This standard only
applies to situations in which people were exposed to radiation in mines whose air
quality has been sampled. Second, it is only based on measurements of radon gas in
the air and does not include radiation exposure from breathing or eating other
radioactive elements in the mines. Working level months apply to radon's effects on
the lungs, but not to the effects of other radioactive emissions on other parts of the
body. They can not measure how much radiation a child in the womb was exposed to
by her mother's consumption of contaminated water. Nor can they measure any other
such indirect but significant exposure.
The working level month standard, upon which RECA compensation is based,
is part of a larger belief that under a designated measurable limit, radiation has a
negligible effect on people. On one side of the number is safety and on the other side
is harm. Officials measure other potential radiation sources, such as homes or waste
piles, in a similar way, using working level months as a basic guide to determine
exposure.
In his book, If You Poison Us, Peter Eichstaedt demonstrates the inadequacies
of using such methods to test for radiation exposure once it has become a part of the
surrounding environment. One example he gives is from 1975, when the
Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") became aware of homes in the Cane
Valley area of the Navajo Reservation that had been built with uranium ore from the
mines. The EPA itself recognized the shortcomings of the ensuing study. While
home radon levels measured a low .04 Working Level, the tests were conducted in the
summer when doors and windows were left open often around the clock. Readings
taken during the winter when ventilation is poor might have revealed much higher
radon levels. In addition, samples were not taken over several days but were one-time
"grab" samples (Eichstaedt 1994:142).
Two years later in the same place, the engineering firm Ford, Bacon, Davis
Utah took several readings from the local mill tailings pile. They concluded that, in
general, radiation from the mill tailing pile presents very little danger to local
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The House that Uranium Built
residents. As Eichstaedt points out, however, "the study did not take into account that
most of the residents spent a lot of time on the pile, not a mile or less from it." He
continues stating that:
[the study] is generally accurate as far as it goes but it is based only
on short-term measurements of radiation near the pile. It does not
include the potential long term effects on the children and families
who live in dwellings that are contaminated with mill tailings.
[Eichstaedt 1994:143]
This study exemplifies the way in which scientific testing does not
comprehensively provide conclusive results for such an amorphous and long-term
phenomenon as exposure from radiation and its subsequent effects. "Prolonged
exposure to gamma radiation can result in genetic defects that can be as subtle as
general ill health. . ." (Eichstaedt 1994: 136). Health studies have no way of relating
radiation exposure to "general ill health" in a direct enough causal relationship to
convince any one except the people who live with it. In addition, there has been no
analysis of the long-term effects of exposure to waste piles on humans or animals.
Waste piles pose one, if not the single most important source of contamination,
according to local residents.
Another reason that scientific research does not accurately convey the effects
of radiation in communities is that it relies upon large numbers of people in order to
produce statistically significant results. In groups with low populations, like most
Indian or rural communities, studies showing a strong correlation between radiation
and a particular health problem may not convince experts for the simple reason that
their sample size is too small. The one well-known health study demonstrated the
correlation between fetal birth defects and uranium but proved inconclusive for this
reason. The paper's conclusion states:
It was unlikely that our small study population would have
demonstrated a real effect in terms of statistical significance.
[Shields, et al. 1992:550]
While Navajo people today still speak the name of Dr. Laura Shields with
admiration for her help in establishing the danger of uranium, her study does not
statistically prove anything. Because of their size, small communities like reservation
chapters and rural towns do not show up well in surveys or research on the effects of
radiation. This means that scientific tests in the most impacted areas are deeply
flawed:
Thus inadequate funding and the shortcomings of statistical analyses
for small populations can result not only in a lack of 'official'
documentation to support the 'preliminary' and 'anecdotal'
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knowledge of health risks, but in the production of official
documentation that is contrary to the preliminary studies. [Kuletz
1998:29]
Such research typifies the fundamental philosophies upon which uranium
industry practices are conducted. Industrial safety standards and compensation laws
are based upon similar studies. In Naked Science, Dr. Laura Nader questions,
"whether a narrowly demarcated science - one restricted to contemporary Western
ways of knowing - provides us with the greatest source of truth" (Nader 1996:3).
Local residents' different observations of radiation indicate the potential harm in
basing decisions upon a single infallible kind of information. Residents do not
experience the effects of radiation in terms of doses, picocuries, or milliroentgens.
While scientific rhetoric demands mathematical addition of hours and doses of
exposure to determine whether a person will be affected, local residents believe any
radiation exposure accumulates and incurs some kind of effect, no matter how mild.
Melinda Marquez, a Navajo uranium educator, describes a conversation she
had with her friend, a doctor at the University of New Mexico. Melinda's recollection
of their exchange represents the gap in perception of radiation's impact between local
health workers and outside medical professionals:
And I says "Look, Cynthia." I said, "You know you go on and say
Yeah, radiation will kill you of the exposure depending on the
potency of it," you know. "It don't make any difference," I said,
"how long of an exposure you had of radiation. You're exposed. I
don't know what level of exposure was given but you're exposed.
But through your - your life span, somewhere along that life span,
you are gonna be affected in some way.
Here, Marquez disagrees with Dr. Cynthia's assertion that radiation only kills
or harms people above certain doses. Marquez continued to explain that she, herself,
believes that radiation affects people irrespective of dosage.
The tension between these beliefs plays out between local and outside
officials in other arenas. In regards to cleaning up damaged sites, local organizations -
including the Navajo EPA - often hold different ideas than federal agencies such as
the federal EPA. A 1983 study by the federal EPA pronounced that there were almost
1,000 nuclear waste piles scattered across the Navajo Nation. They were pronounced
"too remote" to produce "sufficient national concern" (EPA 1983). As Ward
Churchill points out in Struggle for the Land, no law today requires the clean up of
these piles, though the Navajo EPA sees them as a significant enough concern to
divert funds designated for coal mining clean-up to reclaim the worst of these uranium
piles (Churchill 1993: 271). Eichstaedt confirms the Navajo position towards these
The House that Uranium Built
tailing piles in his interviews with Perry Charley and Ray Tsingine, two Navajo
Uranium Mine Reclamation Managers. He writes:
Even though the precise health effects of exposure to these piles have
never been determined and most likely never will be determined,
concerned people like Charley and Tsingine operate largely on
instinct and common sense that tell them that prolonged exposure is
not good for anyone or anything. [Eichstaedt 1994: 136]
These examples do not simply portray a conflict between superficial dichotomies like
local and outsider, native and Euro-American, scientific and holistic, but reveal a
deeper rift between local residential sense of exposure and its public scientific
depiction.
Giovanna Di Chiro acknowledges this division in her work on women's
grassroots environmentalism. "The different valuation and knowledge possessed by
local communities versus those held by environmental scientists," (Di Chiro
1997:203), applies to her work among women environmentalists in the same way that
it does local Navajos. Both groups possess knowledge and perspective that have been
cast away as being overly subjective, non-technical, and irrelevant, by a more
powerful science.
Scientific and local perspectives represent culturally constructed and
politically situated belief systems, each with their particular logic, flaws, and
discrepancies.  Proponents of scientific superiority dismiss local ethnographic
accounts as being biased. They attack ethnographers for attempting and feigning
unattainable objectivity. Anthropologist James Clifford responds by agreeing that,
"even the best ethnographic texts -serious, true fictions- are systems, or economies, of
truth" (Clifford 1986:7). However, implicit in his essay, is the understanding that no
kind of truth can escape being "inherently partial - committed and incomplete" (Ibid
1986:7).
'There is no picture that can be 'filled in,' since the perception and filling of a
gap leads to the awareness of other gaps," (Ibid 1986:25), and Clifford argues that the
"truest" accounts are those that claim the particular viewpoints from which they
emerge. Laura Nader notes, "we live at a time when science proponents consider it
outrageous to allow that there are different science traditions" (Nader 1996:11).
Because many powerful institutions subscribe to and support the idea of infallible
scientific truth, its essential shortcomings remain unchallenged, while other forms of
knowledge remain at the wayside because they are "biased."
In uranium's case, the scientific depiction of its impact greatly pales in
comparison with the vivid depiction of those who live with it. The scientific method
of research does not clarify the means and extent of exposure. It leaves many aspects
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of how radiation acts on the body and land unanswered. Because the results of
scientific research studies are considered fact-as opposed to "instinct and common
sense"-local claims of radiation as definitively more harmful have no audience
besides amongst the residents themselves.
Need for Legitimization of Anecdotal Evidence
A new species of expert has emerged - one that is constructed from
the everyday struggles of people striving to understand and negotiate
their needs and desires in efforts to live a decent life. [Di Chiro
1997:210]
Individual case studies and personal experiences of suffering provide the
strongest case for the cessation of mining and production of nuclear material.
Unfortunately, such accounts have yet to be legitimized in any type of official arena.
Scientific evidence holds the only true weight in congressional hearings and court
cases, while its shortcomings in producing clear results within small communities
(particularly regarding uranium) have not been recognized. Anecdotal evidence and
ethnographic research will have to be accepted as valid evidence of the nuclear
industry's impact if meaningful debate is to occur.
If knowledge is born of experience and reason, as Malinowski argues,
and if science is a phenomenon universally characterized (after
insight) by rationality, then are not indigenous systems of knowledge
part of the scientific knowledge of mankind? [Nader 1996:7]
Eyewitness accounts of suffering and damage illuminate areas in need of further
investigation. The act of recounting, of bearing witness, also empowers victims to
believe in their own observations and voice their suffering.
Due to the many venues of exposure that develop in a contaminated area, it is
impossible to measure quantitatively how much people are exposed to and affected by
radiation. Courts of law and expert panels recognize statistics as the strongest
testimony, but they do not effectively convey the impact of radiation in a community.
In regards to nuclear waste negotiations, Jay Ou notes the "significant implications of
the storage process such as public health and safety are not examined in the
discussions. They are simply mentioned in relation to the word 'standards"' (Ou
1996:40). He confirms the way that technical scientific language can obscure the
danger and risk involved with nuclear waste. The colloquial language of laypeoples'
accounts returns these factors to the debate.
Anecdotal evidence consists of the observations people make about their
condition and their environment. Observation is the first step in the scientific method.
However, anecdotal statements
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The House that Uranium Built
about the health risks associated with un-reclaimed uranium mines
and tailings piles are gathered in preliminary studies or as testimony
in open-hearings ... but do not constitute scientific evidence. They
are simply reported ... diminished by the overwhelming weight of
contrary 'scientific' evidence. [Kuletz 1998:28]
The use of anecdotal evidence as part of scientific research has been ignored and
underrated. While it is accepted in initial reports as indication of a problem, it is not
then allowed to prove that the problem actually exists. Di Chiro argues that "common
sense," or lay, constructions of environmental damage maintain the authority of
having been created by "the experiential realities of those communities most directly
affected." She uses the term "popular epidemiology" to refer to local knowledge
"about the physical, bodily effects of toxins in their lives," which "develops a form of
popular science" (Di Chiro 1997:213). While this "popular science" constitutes fact
enough to justify spending money and time researching a problem; in comparison
with "real science," it is not objective enough to become part of the evidence.
This pattern appears in other toxic waste issues as well. In the Love Canal
neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York, homes and a school were built over the
site of a 1940s toxic waste dump. When residents complained of miscarriage and
problems with their older children and pets, researchers began to study the area. Later
studies also revealed that the children from the area were significantly shorter than
children in a control group (Levine 1982). Without the observations of the residents,
no action may have been taken. However the physical elements of such cases - like
radioactive isotopes or harnful chemicals - ultimately become the focus of attention.
This is because measurable, quantitative scientific calculations reign as the dominant
method of data collection. However, what officials fail to recognize is the intensely
qualitative and un-measurable nature of these environmental waste cases.
Besides the fact that local residents constitute the only first-hand accounts of
the effects of radiation in their community, they also need to voice their suffering for
their own sakes. In 1984 toxic gasses leaked from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal,
India. By the time the case reached the courts five years later, the toll of injuries had
reached 300,000 people. Incomplete medical tests were administered and a hasty
settlement was reached. Anthropologist Veena Das showed that the court case
silenced victims and enhanced their suffering by giving sole authority to medical and
legal professionals while ignoring their experiential testimonies (Das 1995).
Anecdotal evidence is often ignored precisely because of its potency. In the
case of the Navajo, while cultural and educational factors contribute to the hesitancy
to discuss uranium, so do the power of their stories. As Janice Calvin says:
And then other people say 'don't mention that. Don't say it. Don't
say the name 'uranium,' or its gone come back on, its gone come on
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us. So they - they don't want to talk about it ... In some areas, like
different families, they all have different stories [about uranium].
For the people to whom Janice refers, voicing their experiences brings them to life so
completely that people in her community prefer not to talk about them.
Because their stories hold no official weight, those who live them begin to
doubt the legitimacy of their experience. The disempowerment that comes from not
being able to validate one's own senses emerges in conversations with Navajo
participants. Many informants expressed a desire for someone from a foreign place to
come to the reservation to conduct a study of the effects of radiation. This wish
reveals the understanding that their stories do not count in the eyes of the law, and as a
result, they feel incapable of proving their experience by any means. For example,
James Garnet mentions wanting someone to study the long-term effects of radiation in
the atmosphere. He says, "Which should we credit to do this? You know, Japanese,
or Hawaiian, or Navajo, or Englishman, or somebody" (Garnet 1999). Even though
the Navajo people alone experienced the firsthand effects of uranium, Garnet still
feels compelled to list several other possible nationalities of researcher. Janice Calvin
says, "Maybe we need two or three Japanese that will do studies out here" (Calvin
1999). These offhand remarks reveal insecurity about the validity of their own
anecdotes and subsequently, about their ability to solve the problem. Kuletz correctly
labeled scientific discourse as a "mechanism of exclusion" (Kuletz 1998:28), in that it
excludes plaintiffs from their own cases, but it also encourages residents to exclude
themselves from activism or problem-solving .
Particular Navajo Issues Concerning Uranium
The politics of a situation can not be isolated from the cultural elements of the
community in which they occur. The same applies to the policies regarding uranium
mining and clean-up in the Four Corners area. Communities of Euro-American
uranium workers possess their own particular characteristics, as do those on the
Navajo Nation. They share many attributes like their rural locations, lifestyles, and
greater dependence on local resources.  However, since this study focuses
predominantly on members of the Navajo Nation, it will address some of the Navajo-
specific aftereffects of uranium mining. Again, the issue of land use pertains also to
rural Euro-American populations, but for the purposes of this paper, it will be
presented in reference to the Navajo communities.
Two of the greatest problems in the aftermath of uranium mining on the
Navajo reservation concern cultural land-use patterns and language. As a large,
geographically dispersed rural population, Navajo people use their land differently
than people in urban areas. They frequent remote areas and still practice elements of a
transhumance adaptive strategy in which they obtain resources from a wide vicinity.
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The second problem - of language - stems from the fact that Navajo people
maintain their native language to such an extent that elder members generally speak
little or no English, while middle-aged people in their 30's through 50's are mostly
completely bilingual. Younger Navajo in their twenties and younger usually speak
English, but use a version that anthropologist Leighton Peterson (personal
communication, June 20, 1999) described as "Navajo English," because of its use of
Navajo words and unique adaptations of English words. In other words, older Navajo
do not tend to speak English well, if at all. Those who do speak English, do not
necessarily speak the same version being taught in off-reservation schools and
universities. This has meant that explaining the dangers and implications of all
aspects of uranium have been difficult to relay to communities who lack a functional
vocabulary for such concepts as radon, uranium, and radiation.
When driving through the Navajo Nation, one often sees signs with names on
them pointing to what appears to be an empty stretch of desert or a mountain. On the
smaller highways, an intersection may point to three different community names
while the only visible landmarks are sagebrush and perhaps a grazing horse. It can
give the illusion that nobody inhabits the land for miles around. However, by tuming
onto a dirt road and driving for several miles, it is likely that a cluster of hogans and
houses will appear, followed by another, and another one past that. While the federal
government has installed a small housing development somewhere in almost every
community, the majority of people on the reservation live in small groups of homes
some distance from the designated housing complex. Extended families not only live
together; they also use the same camping spots, sheep-herding areas, and hiking trails.
Several other families usually share the same ones. These areas include mountains,
canyons, and arroyos that are often impassible to vehicles.
Caves that lie at the bottom of an empty canyon, an hour's climb away from
the roadside, often contain candy wrappers and soda cans from frequent visits and
stays. The tiny weed-like yellow flowers that grow on the side of the road provide
attractive scenery-a splash of color in an otherwise insignificant stretch of highway
for the tourist passing by. However, the pick-up truck behind that car is likely to pull
over and release three passengers with bags to collect the plants which make a
common drink called Navajo tea. These sketches attempt to convey the fact that life
on the reservation prescribes a very different knowledge of and use of the surrounding
environment.
The Navajos still use local resources from a relatively large land base,
practicing a modernized version of their traditional transhumance lifestyle. Livestock
grazing provides a large portion of the Navajo population with food and money.
People hunt deer in the winter, occasionally kill and eat prairie dog in the summer,
and collect local plants for use as food and medicine. Anthropologist Richard Stoffle
observed the same types of hunting and gathering activities practiced by the Indians
living around Yucca Mountain, Nevada (Stoffle 1984). Before the military took over
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the region for nuclear testing, Indians "made full use of this wasteland region" (Kuletz
1998:199), gathering pinon nuts, rye grass, and hunting rabbits (Stoffle 1984). The
Oasis Valley people, like the Navajo today, used these resources to supplement the
low wages they received as laborers for Euro-Americans.
On the Navajo Nation, these "wasteland" areas have not been declared off-
limits, meaning that Navajos gather and use contaminated resources. Because of this,
the Navajo people have been exposed to greater amounts of radioactivity than people
who consume resources imported from other areas. This basic equation was
recognized in the late 1950s by scientist Eugene Odum, who studied concentrations of
radioactive elements in ecosystems. He writes,
we see that if man were forced to obtain all his food from a restricted
contaminated area, he might easily be obtaining at least temporary
levels which he would not want to risk . . . Thus, we see that while
there seems to be little to worry about radiation in the average
worldwide levels, local situations could change the picture drastically.
[Odum 1959:479-480]
Odum's observation highlights the need to emphasize cultural practices, like land use,
as well as local knowledge of contamination into the dialogue of radiation. His own
scientific research reveals the discrepancies between large scale and local
concentrations of radioactivity.
Peter Eichstaedt ties the Navajo use of the terrain to the uranium waste
problem by describing the situations encountered by Navajo Mine Reclamation
managers. According to Perry Charley, Navajo Mine Reclamation Manager - out of
867 mines discovered by his crew, 467 were being used by animals for "temporary or
semi-permanent shelters" and 43 "were found to have been used by people for shelter
during bad weather, perhaps on a regular basis" (Eichstaedt 1994:132-133). The list
of dangers resulting from the casual, but regular, use of such places continues.
Concerning sheltering animals in abandoned mines:
Cows and sheep kept in such places become contaminated by
breathing the residual radon, drinking some of the water that
occasionally flows from or puddles in the mines, and eating the
forage growing in earth that is contaminated with uranium waste and
toxic metals. The contamination permeates the animals' flesh and
bones, including the cows' and goats' milk, and then is consumed by
local ranchers. [Eichstaedt 1994:133]
Human risk from using mines as shelter, hunting camps, and party spots include the
good possibility that "clothes and sleeping bags, food and water become impregnated
with uranium dust and dirt" (Eichstaedt 1994:133). Many of these places appear to
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the outside observer to be too remote to cause concern. No one would think that a
small mine several rough miles into the mountains of Little Valley would pose much
of a health threat to the community below. Yet Janice's son explained that he and his
relatives use the barely perceptible trails for hiking and herding sheep, as do other
nearby residents. On the western side of the Navajo Nation, at the location of a
covered open pit mine beer and soda cans lie in the dirt next to yellow chunks of
uranium ore.
These areas still pose health hazards today because outsiders like EPA and
other government officials do not realize that people regularly utilize these areas.
They would likely be surprised by the existence of trails in the remote mountains, or
beer cans in a completely bare patch of desert. The unawareness of different land-use
system among modern Navajo people, has meant that many of the sites that pose great
radioactive threats to their communities have been left unattended.
As stated earlier, a report made by the EPA in 1983 stated that over 1,000
nuclear waste piles exist on the Navajo reservation. However, these sites do not need
to be cleaned up by law because the EPA designated them "too remote" and not
enough of a "sufficient national concern" to be rehabilitated (EPA 1983). This is also
because statistically few numbers of people are affected; therefore the EPA sees no
reason to do anything. A previous section notes that Navajo EPA officials diverted
federal funds to clean up the worst of these areas, which demonstrates the discrepancy
between what outside federal officials perceive as a potential threat, and what is
actually causing harm in these communities.
When they discuss uranium, some Navajo people mention the lack of
adequate vocabulary for engaging in detailed discussion of radiation. The Navajo
Mine Reclamation manager Perry Charley describes his difficulty in explaining to
local people why they can not keep their animals in abandoned mines. He says: "how
do you explain to them about alpha and beta particles, about ganmma radiation or radon
gas? There is no word for it." Charley likes to use the analogy of steam to describe
radiation, but it is inadequate. "I call it steam but they associate that with the
ceremonial sweat baths which are good" (Eichstaedt 1994:133).
Janice Calvin mentioned the same dilemma. She said:
There's really no words, um, no real good definition for the word
"uranium." Either in Navajo or English. Sounds good ... I mean the
way it looks - the word "uranium." But when you think like beyond
that - like sick people - uuuuuuhhhhh . .. you don't want to think
about it.
Calvin takes the language problem a step further, suggesting that even translating
English words into Navajo does not convey enough information. The translation of
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uranium used most often, "Leetso" or "Yellow dirt," describes the appearance of the
substance, but omits the invisible danger and sickness that accompany it. Her
comment reveals the inadequacy of current vocabulary for accurately conveying the
destructive nature of radioactivity.
Perry Charley's use of steam as a metaphor for radon gas also reflects this
situation. He bases his steam metaphor around the English or scientific definition of
the gas, which includes the fact that it is an odorless, tasteless and colorless gas - as a
way of translating it into Navajo. However, as he explains, it does not convey the
danger of radon. In fact, he says this translation associates radon with the traditional
healing activity of sweat baths.
The danger of lacking the vocabulary and concepts of uranium mining is that
it leaves local residents handicapped to fight against it. If people do not know how to
describe something or explain it, winning a legal argument, for instance, becomes
quite difficult. They may not understand how it affects the body or be able to explain
their symptoms well to a doctor. Without the collectivizing power of a common
vocabulary, people can not organize themselves against future persuasion by mining
companies. Without adequate words to describe what is happening and why, people
lack basic understanding of uranium and radiation. Lack of knowledge, in turn,
breeds fear and avoidance of the topic. Janice Calvin says:
Like when I was growing up, I used to see them one day they just
started dying off. It didn't happen before. I don't think it happened
before. It was only about - mmm, I don't know, maybe ten years
ago. Mhmm. And then other people say "don't mention that. Don't
say it. Don't say the name "uranium" or its gone come back on, its
gone come on us." So they they don't want to talk about it. They say
that if you talk about it it'll affect the people.
Calvin describes this belief as a traditional Navajo understanding that talking about
bad or taboo things will make them come true, like saying the names of the deceased.
She explains that the people who say this are, "Traditional. People that don't read,
had never been to school." While it is hard to say how much of the avoidance of
uranium conversation comes from this cultural belief and how much comes from lack
of vocabulary and subsequent education, the latter enhances and reinforces any pre-
existing apprehension of discussing the topic.
Lane Gerald recognizes that lack of knowledge about radiation concepts also
ensures a pool of eager workers. He says:
I mean education was not a big deal. If you're gonna take somebody
and stick 'em down into a a highly dangerous situation, you think the
son-of-a-bitch with the Ph.D.'s gonna go down there and - you know
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- do what they was asking them to do? I mean stop and think about
it.
Lack of understanding about the concept of radiation creates fear and avoidance of its
harniful aspects as well as an ignorance of the potential harm of working in or living
near the industry. The Navajo case is enhanced by the fact that speaking a different
language establishes yet one more barrier in attempting to convey the danger of
radiation.
These people's testimonies have revealed the need for adequate educational
materials like culturally appropriate scientific dictionaries and picture books. Some of
these materials have already begun to emerge. At a teachers' seminar hosted by Dine
College in the summer of 1999, EPA officials passed out copies of "Gamma Goat."
This cartoon coloring book features a superhero goat that teaches Navajo sheep on the
reservation how to avoid possibly contaminated areas. The book was extremely well
received by both professionals and Navajo teachers.
While communities need this type of education, it reflects a larger social trend
of placing the burden of rehabilitation on the victim. While essential, trying to solve
the uranium problem with culturally appropriate "Do Not Enter" signs is in some
ways analogous to solving the date rape problem by asking women to carry pepper
spray. Both solutions stem from the assumption that the perpetrator - or the
corporation, or the government - is beyond retribution. Simultaneous efforts to
address the larger system that allows dangerous uranium to enter communities must
be made.
Environmental Racism and Nuclear Colonialism
Sixty percent of the uranium deposits in the United States lie on Native-
owned lands, but ninety percent of all American mining and milling have taken place
on or adjacent to Indian lands (Churchill 1993:264). This indicates that decisions
about where to extract resources do not depend solely on their availability or location.
In another context, Jay Ou argues that, "the ideal medium of negotiation was actually
characterized by a coercive, incremental process of consensus building" (Ou
1996:32). Uranium mining companies, in conjunction with the government, practice
what has been described as "environmental racism" (Kuletz 1998:110). This can best
be described as using disenfranchised communities, usually of color, as the location
for environmentally unsound activities, such as toxic waste storage or mining. The
history of the development of the nuclear industry reflects an even more extreme
version of this, moving beyond the boundaries of taking advantage, to specifically
targeting these communities because of their socio-economic status. Kuletz suggests
that the nuclear industry has attempted to transform certain Native communities into
raw materials colonies (Kuletz 1998:36).
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Kuletz's definition of environmental racism provides a good basis for
understanding the relationship between the U.S. nuclear industry and several of the
Native American tribes. She describes it as, "the inequitable burden of environmental
degradation placed on poor communities and communities of color" (Kuletz
1998:1 10). While such a phenomenon does not appear visible to the naked eye, those
who visit these Indian lands become painfully aware of its existence.
While traveling between several western Navajo communities, I stopped at
the home of a family living just off of the major highway. The families lived
approximately a quarter of a mile across the road from a large reclaimed pit mine and
surrounding waste piles. The giant power lines drooped with their own weight,
hanging between equally massive electrical towers over nearby homes. These lines
and piles sit literally in the Navajos' backyards because industries prey on their lack
of funds and offer them money to accept what no one who had enough of a choice
would accept. Kuletz recalls a conversation with a pronuclear Department of Energy
contractor who shared his opinion about housing nuclear storage facilities on the Fort
McDermott Paiute-Shoshone reservation at the border of Oregon and Nevada.
According to Kuletz, the contractor suggested that "making an offer to such an
impoverished tribe was tantamount to environmental racism" (Kuletz 1998:109). One
could argue that if the tribes really valued their land and people they would decline
such an offer no matter what price tag was attached to it. However such a position
relies on the assumption that they have that choice. The underlying reality is that
these offers force people to chose between two life-threatening options - debilitating
poverty or hazardous development.
As representatives of the nuclear industry consistently approach Indian
communities to store its waste and testing sites, opponents have accused them of
practicing internal nuclear colonialism. The United Nations defmes colonialism as
occunring only when the colonizer crosses an ocean to reach their subjects. However,
industrial nations like the United States have exhibited colonizing behavior towards
some of their own citizens. As Kulet writes:
For many indigenous communities historically, as well as in many
cases today, uranium mining is only a form of resource extraction for
export. Because of this, native communities become "raw materials"
colonies for the uranium companies and their home nation states.
[Kuletz 1998:36]
The case of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation demonstrates this principle.
All of the uranium mined on the reservation became either nuclear weapons or
plutonium for use in another region's power supply. The Navajo people did not
benefit from the extraction of the uranium besides the meager wages they received for
mining and the compensation payments they received for being harmed by the related
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radiation. As of 1984, the royalties that the Navajo people receive for uranium,
averaged only 3.4 percent of marketable value (Churchill 1993:262).
Sacrificed Lands and People
Certain rhetoric derived from early American philosophy still contributes to
nuclear policy today. Ideas about property derived from John Locke and the notion of
Manifest Destiny have enabled the U.S. to secure Indian lands even in recent decades
in the interest of national security. In addition, adherence to an economically-based
model of ecology has allowed scientists and the government alike to view deserts as
useless for anything except mineral extraction, waste sites, and war games. The
cultural construction of these paradigms emerges when comparing this desert
wasteland rhetoric with the native inhabitants' view of the desert as a sacred
landscape. This comparison shows how certain landscapes and the people who live
on them become non-places and non-persons in the eyes of the government and
industry.
Proving that no one else owns an area of land is the easiest way to claim its
ownership. When the United States government was still in its infancy, leaders
developed a philosophy to enable them to take control of lands further and further
west. The ideology that emerged stems from John Locke's influential Treatise on
Property. Locke argued that a person could claim land as his own only if he worked
and improved it. To proponents of such a belief, early native peoples did not own
most of their territory because they had apparently left it untouched. Manifest
Destiny, a nineteenth-century American philosophy, was based on this principle.
According to Manifest Destiny, man had a God-given duty to make these empty lands
productive.
Today, this concept still resides in the attitude that the U.S. government and
industry hold towards what they perceive as empty or barren lands. Even now, with
respect to native property:
the lust for their territories and resources within them, is typically
hidden behind a rhetoric extolling the settlement of essentially vacant
and undiscovered lands. [Churchill 1993: 7]
Native people often reside in these "unclaimed" areas as their ancestors did two
hundred years ago. The "barren" lands of today still belong largely to native people
because the government viewed the property as expendable when it outlined
reservation boundaries. Once the government discovered valuable minerals like
uranium in these formerly useless areas, the age-old conflict re-emerged.
Now that mostly non-Indians want these lands ... the United States
once again asserts its God-given right, (its manifest destiny) to
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territories formerly designated 'wilderness' or 'Indian Country' on
early maps of the region. [Kuletz 1998:114]
Because most Indians currently living on these lands want to leave them as
they are, the government persuades them by extolling the virtues of development.
Rather than bribing the Indians with land allotments to farm and improve the land, the
govermnent now "negotiates" with the promise of jobs and money in exchange for
housing nuclear waste or allowing uranium mining. Though the playing pieces have
changed, the rules of the land-tenure game have not.
While manifest destiny rhetoric supports the take over of these regions from
one angle, the use of an economic model of ecology supports it from another. Valerie
Kuletz reveals a socio-economic rendition of nature that defines ecosystems according
to their productivity. In one environmental science textbook published in 1991,
deserts are described as being the second lowest contributors to the "primary
productivity to the biosphere" (Chiras 1991). Organizing ecosystems according to the
goods they produce or their productivity enables them to be ranked according to their
relative economic benefit. This by no means represents an objective or real
construction of nature, yet it is the one used to justify the U.S. politic of landscapes of
nothingness.
Kuletz writes about the history of such rhetoric in relation to the nuclear
industry, remarking that:
the wasteland narrative, the narrative that describes this land as alien
to human life, was and is too powerful to ignore. It has played too
great a role in the depiction of this land as one only fit for bombs and
waste. [Kuletz 1998:187]
She quotes a 1963 publication commemorating the China Lake Naval
Weapons center which begins, "To those who first squinted their eyes at the vast
nothingness which prevailed in 1943, it must have seemed an impossible task . . ."
(Kuletz 1998:186). In the same vein as early American settlers who relied upon the
belief that no one really lived in the wilderness that lay before them, the nuclear
industry assures itself that no one really uses the land, nor can it be used for anything
but nuclear purposes.
In opposition to the portrayal of these desert regions as wastelands, native
versions of the landscape reveal an understanding of the land as sacred, life giving and
sustaining. One Navajo woman pointed to some nearby mountains and said that the
companies wanted to dig for uranium there in the 1940s. Eventually local residents
raised such a fuss that the company backed out. The cause for such turmoil stemmed
from the fact that the mountains were a source of colored rocks that local medicine
men used for sand painting in their ceremonies.
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In Nevada, the nuclear industry took over one of the medicinal hot springs for
use as a testing site. One Moapa Paiute elder recalls:
I remember when my dad took me over there to show me the hot
springs when I had got sick for a whole week ... I had to go in there
and talk [with the springs] so I could get well ... But like I say,
they've taken them all away. [Kuletz 1998:223]
The Navy denies access to these springs to local Native Americans. In both the
Navajo and Paiute cases, the nuclear industry classifies as desert wastelands places
that local residents use for medicine and healing. Some of these locations might be
the very places sought for relief from radiation-related illness.
The sectioning off of these lands for nuclear activity has demonstrated the
process of "deterritoriality" or the loss of commitment by modem nation states to
particular lands or regions (Kuletz 1998:7) that has been occurring in this country.
Once the government and nuclear industry has relinquished responsibility for these
places, the lands themselves and the people on them become subject to limitless
damage without much hope for retribution.
The nuclear spill into the Rio Puerco River near Church Rock, New Mexico
in 1979 exemplifies the results of deterritoriality. The river fed thousands of Navajo
people and their livestock, and irrigated the land along its banks. As a result of the
spill, the land has been rendered unusable for agriculture for at least the next few
thousand years.  People and animals continue to show   signs of radiation
contamination from the water. Officially the accident caused "little or no damage"
(Nuclear Fuel 1983). Such a result can only be determined by a study that has already
excluded the people and land of the region in its assessment of the damage. Peter
Eichstaedt describes the way non-wasteland areas are treated, compared to those that
have been discarded. He compares the frenzy at Three Mile Island to the relative
disregard for Navajo people living in contaminated communities. He writes:
In Red Valley, the Navajos were left to watch their friends and
neighbors die as the rest of the nation panicked over a cloud of
radioactivity drifting high over Pennsylvania. (Eichstaedt 1994:105)
The respective reactions to the ongoing destruction in the Southwest and the accident
at Three Mile Island symbolize the presence of separate, carefully constructed nuclear
zones - some are visible and carefully guarded from nuclear disaster, while others are
hidden and left to decay.
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Removalfrom Time and Space: An Alternate Reality for the Nuclear Industry
Brilliant colors, rocks that glow in the dark, elements that take millions of
years to decay-such is the stuff that science fiction stories are made of. These
fantastic images come not from a paperback book, but from the radioactive world of
the nuclear industry. While they make interesting bedside reading, these otherworldly
elements allow those working with them to detach from ordinary time and space, and
experiment with dangerous ideas that do not have roots in reality.
Because radioactive isotopes have one hundred to several hundred thousand
year half-lives, deciding how to manage them requires a certain way of thinldng. It is
impossible to comprehend the consequences of human actions that far in the future,
yet decision-making about radioactive waste demands that we do so. The waste from
uranium mill tailings contains many radioactive elements that have very long half-
lives. These include the highly toxic, water-soluble radium-226, which has a 1,630
year half-life, and thorium-230. If the half-life of radium-226, at sixteen hundred
years does not seem impressive, it must be understood that only after 77,000 years
does half of the thorium become radium-226 (Eichstaedt 1994:128). Any possible
guard against these elements leaching into groundwater can not prevent this from
happening over the next millennia. Supporting this lack of futuristic perspective is the
recent Y2K situation, which was caused by the oversight of an event only several
decades away.
These problems also emerge in the results of a "blue-ribbon" panel assembled
by the Environmental Protection Agency to warn inhabitants 240,000 years into the
future about the largest accumulation of lethal nuclear waste stored at Yucca
Mountain, Nevada. Two anthropologists, an archaeologist, two astronomers, two
materials scientists, a geologist, a linguist, an artist, and a cognitive psychologist were
hired to come up with an identifiable permanent marker that would warn future
humans of the danger once any currently existing language would be extinct. Their
proposals included:
The Landscape of Thorns-One square mile of randomly spaced
basalt spikes, 80 feet high erupting from the ground at all angles
The Black Hole-A boundless pad of black concrete that would
absorb so much heat it would be impossible to approach
The Menacing Earthworks-An expansive empty square, surrounded
by 50-foot-high earthen berms jolting outward like jagged bolts of
lightning. And at the center of the square, a 2,000 foot long, walk-on,
global map displaying all the world's nuclear dumps, including this
one.... [Kuletz 1998:289]
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The Black Hole bears particular irony because its key ingredient-concrete-
disintegrates in residential driveways after just a few decades. The proposals read like
video game or movie titles, which reveals their basis in fantasy. In reality, nothing
can convey the presence of dangerous radioactive material even fifty years into the
future, as evidenced by the conditions on the Navajo reservation. Finding a way to
warn people who don't even share a common language of danger more than 200,000
years from now is exactly what it sounds like-impossible.
Just as the vast stretches of time characterize the nuclear world, so do the
strange hidden settings of its activity. Miners and millers often mention the beauty of
certain aspects of their workplaces. Lane Gerald described the clear brilliant turquoise
acid slurry as it made its way to the ore mixture. He likened it to the most amazingly
beautiful river one had ever seen, aside from the fact that it was lethal. Growing up
around the mill, Lane collected ore rocks from the back of his uncles' trucks. He
says:
I'd go out and some of the rocks'd be purple, some would be green.
Some would be this, some would be that. I was totally amazed by
them. And I'd go pick the pretty rocks out and I'd go put 'em in my
closet. Sometimes my mom'd get really pissed because she would go
in there and I'd have three hundred pounds of rocks in my closet.
Which I now know that was radioactive rocks . . ..
Navajo miners recall the beauty of the dark underground mine in what one
writer describes as "surreal, almost mythological, in that there were mentions of
yellow, glowing monsters in the deep dark caves" (Crank 1998:1). The remote
geography and otherworldly landscapes of places like the Pacific Islands or
Monument Valley, Utah enhance their appeal to members of the nuclear industry as
good places for test sites, mines, or waste dumps. Officials allow the exotic
appearance of such places to charm them in to pretending that everyday rules about
danger and pollution do not apply.
In this alternate reality people convince themselves that myths like the nuclear
fuel cycle really exist. "This story promised us that we could recycle nuclear waste
back into the system" (Kuletz 1998:281). This principle still operates without much
opposition, as evidenced by the EPA's desperate attempts to keep people away from
Yucca Valley for 240,000 years while the waste becomes a harmless part of the earth
once again. The truth of the matter remains that while the radioactive domain is a
mysterious part of nature, full of special effects and magic, its destructive power
inflicts very real damage on ordinary life.
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The Political Economy of Uranium Mining
Several authors, such as Elliott Leyton, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ann
McElroy and Patricia Townsend, have discussed mining in terms of the political
economy. They have argued that the past and present political economy of industrial
nations emphasizes production of goods as quickly and efficiently as possible. The
one factor these nations have left out of the equation is the expenditure of human lives
in the process. When measured by its human and environmental toll, mining becomes
a highly inefficient practice. Between 1961 and 1973, more than half a million
disabling injuries happened in US mines (Kingsolver 1996:9). This excludes injury,
death to family and community members, and the long-term human damage caused by
radiation. Other problems with uranium mining include the facts that mining often
occurs in places with little economic opportunity and once the mine opens, people
become dependant on it. Mining, by nature, ravages the landscape, reducing
opportunities for alternative development.
The priorities of our political economy have enabled industries, such as
uranium mining and milling operations, to escape relatively free of consequence while
harming the workers and their communities. Elliott Leyton recognizes this essential
concept in his call for a reassessment of the current paradigm of production.
At present, politico-economic forces dictate that resources be
exploited and goods produced at minimum expense and without
serious regard for the hazards encountered by labor. Now that the
true social and personal costs of this system are beginning to be
understood, no civilized society can seriously contemplate its
maintenance. The barest humane response demands a political
economy which prohibits all production which cannot be made safe.
[Leyton 1975:138]
His statement calls attention to the absence of human lives in the calculations of
"minimum expense." He clearly voices the need to invert our current political
economy to make human safety the top priority. The concept of "sustainable
development" proposed by McElroy and Towsend exemplifies this type of
reorganization. It entails:
social and economic change that meets the needs and aspirations of
this generation without jeopardizing the ability of future generations
to do the same. [McElroy and Townsend 1996:338].
This definition suggests a reworking of the political economy, but remains a far cry
from the ways in which the uranium industry has operated. It has preyed upon human
labor as a cheap, expendable, and renewable resource in the exhumation of a valuable
non-renewable resource-uranium.
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Once mining begins, people become dependant upon it for their livelihoods.
Many mines and mills open up in rural or remote areas - meaning that there exist few
other competitive job opportunities. In the first half of the century, mining companies
set up small towns, or camps, for their employees that essentially became breeding
grounds for new employees. Barbara Kingsolver describes this phenomenon in the
small copper-mining towns of Arizona, as does Elliott Leyton, who studied the
flourospar-mining town of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. Kingsolver writes, "In these
isolated towns, the company dictated virtually every physical aspect of life, housing,
schooling, social life" (Kingsolver 1996:14). She goes on to describe them as
"impossibly remote: far from each other and from anything else" (Kingsolver
1996:19). She could very well be describing uranium-mining towns in the fifties and
sixties. Lane Gerald grew up in this type of town until he was in his early twenties.
He says:
And there was several second and third generation people there. You
know, Union Carbide was your life ... They owned the company
store. They owned the drug store. They owned the liquor store.
They owned the gas station. I mean if you wanted a life, and we're
talking about a town of nine hundred people - nine hundred and fifty
people - there was no other work opportunity. Unless you went out
and ranched or farmed or, you know, whatever - you was just always
taught, when you grew up, you was going to work for the company
store.
Here, Gerald describes the types of isolation imposed upon people in mining
towns that seriously limit their decision-making capabilities. These include a)
economic isolation, of having no competing industry for whom to work - besides
traditional manual labor like ranching; b) geographic isolation, of being in an area
where driving to another town for work is almost impossible; c) and finally, social
isolation, of living in a microcosm created by one company's financial motives. Lane
says that he never heard of anything that radiation could do to a person until he
enlisted in the army and "went out and got an education outside of Union Carbide"
(Gerald 1999). One of the informants in Dying Hard describes a similar economic
situation to that described by Kingsolver and Gerald. In Leyton's ethnography,
Alphonse Reilly says:
I was supposed to do light work. But there's no light work here. You
either go in the mine or go fishing and I didn't have nothing to fish
with. [Leyton 1975:50]
The pinholeing of opportunities for people living and working in mining
communities does not stop at the arrival of the uranium industry. The physical
environmental destruction caused by digging up the earth and, in the case of uranium
mining, releasing large amounts of toxic elements into the environment, renders it un-
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useable for many other types of economic development. Kuletz writes, "once a
uranium mining wasteland is created, the options left for alternative development can
be quite limited" (Kuletz 1998:35). The case of the Sami, the indigenous people of
Norway and Sweden, confirms her statement. The fallout from the nuclear meltdown
at Chernobyl in 1986 "dealt a serious blow to the unique reindeer herding culture and
economy of the Sami" who lived many miles away from the plant (McElroy and
Townsend 1996:163). The Sami can no longer use the reindeer or their products for
their own consumption or for sale because the lichen on which the reindeer feed
absorb fission products like Strontium 90 more efficiently than other vegetation. The
Sami have already been exposed to high levels of radiation by eating meat, fish, and
berries contaminated by the fallout (Stephens 1987). Although the Sami never
practiced mining, their tragedy reflects the irreversible damage and socio-economic
limiting power of radioactive contamination in a community.
Compensation
Awarding monetary sums to victims of governmental and industrial
mistreatment not only does not prevent such deeds, but encourages them to continue.
By making compensation payments, the government symbolically recognizes
wrongdoing, pays for it, and closes the door to any further argument. None of the
damage has really been repaired, but it effectively blocks the victims from being able
to continue pleading their cases. People who have invested large amounts of time and
energy m making their voices heard suddenly find themselves slapped with a lump
sum and told, in effect, "You win - you were hanned and now we are paying for the
damages. Case dismissed." Distributing pre-determined allotments silences any of
the victim's input about the types and amount of compensation necessary to repair
their communities.
In his ethnography of Newfoundland flourospar miners, Elliott Leyton writes,
Nowhere is the moral bankruptcy of industrial society better
documented than in its industries' death roll and in its governments'
pitiful attempts at compensation. [Leyton 1975:136]
His statement shows that while industries inflict the harm, they usually do not bear the
responsibility of compensating victims from their own profits. In St. Lawrence, the
town that Leyton studied, the Canadian government compensated miners for their
diseases while the company continued business as usual in the mines.
The situation in the Four Corners area mirrors that of St. Lawrence.
Companies like Kerr-McGee and Union Carbide may have been required to adhere to
stricter safety standards, but the United States Government issued the apology and the
payments. While the mines and mining companies provided uranium "for the primary
use and benefit of the nuclear weapons program of the United States Government"
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(US Congress 1990), the ignorance of safety measures and infliction of damage
remains in the hands of mine and mill operators.  The Radiation Exposure
Compensation Act ("RECA") does not mention these private corporations who played
the instrumental role in mining the Four Corners. Workers who clocked in everyday
with foremen at USVA, and daily inhaled deadly smoke and gas in its mine, are
baffled at the absence of a company voice in the RECA apology: 'The Congress
apologizes on behalf of the Nation to the individuals described ... and their families
for the hardships they have endured" (US Congress 1990).
The absence of mining and milling companies from every part of the
compensation process illuminates the key problem. Each time federal governments
compensate individuals for harm done to them by private industry, they reinforce the
understanding that an emergency exit for industries exists once they have caused
undeniable damage. Even in cases where companies pay for damage out of their own
pockets, compensation provides a safety net for taking unnecessary risks with
people's lives. When the United Nuclear uranium mill spilled over one hundred
million gallons of highly radioactive water in the Rio Puerco, at least 1,700 Navajo
who relied upon the river as their single water source were immediately affected, as
were the livestock which were found to be heavily contaminated from drinldng the
water (Churchill 1993:269). United Nuclear resisted providing any relief until five
years later when they finally agreed to pay $525,000 to the victims in an out-of-court
settlement (Pitman 1985). Paying compensation probably provided a cheaper solution
than repairing the cracks in the dam, which were known about at least two months
before the break (Churchill 1993: 269). The company decided that the possibility of
having to compensate victims was easier than preventing the largest radioactive spill
in U.S. history. While reparations must be made for unintentional acts of harm, the
current institution of monetary compensation for industrial negligence, resembles this
only superficially. In practice, the option of compensation provides industry an
oftentimes cost-effective way to continue hazardous production and relinquish
immediate responsibility for their actions.
Conclusion
As noted earlier, informants name dozens of ways in which they are exposed,
including both direct and indirect means. All of the pathways for exposure lead many
people to forgo trying to extract one strand from the tangled web of possibilities.
They simply perceive their entire surroundings to be a source of contamination.
The effects of exposure pervade every aspect of each community, from
individual physical bodies to collective social bodies. While medical research
conducted as early as the 1950s has confnmned some physical effects, like cancer and
lung problems, the more nebulous effects - such as the grief and burden resulting from
suddenly losing large numbers of loved ones - has yet to be thoughtfully incorporated
into official dialogue about nuclear energy. One study may fmd traces of radioactive
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elements in a certain species of organism, and another may relate lung disease to
mining. What these kinds of results lack is a larger structure that connects these
estranged facts and conveys the implications of simultaneously experiencing all of
these phenomena, as well as those which can not be tested.
Informants do not necessarily convey these "un-testable" effects in the same
way that they might speak about having several successive miscarriages or a bout with
cancer. Just as researchers have trouble concretizing the psychosocial effects,
informants also often find it difficult to label invisible damage resulting from uranium.
Here, the traditional anthropological role of eliciting meaning from an informant's
dialogue and recounted experiences can elucidate such effects.
Several issues emerged through such analysis of the interviews. The way in
which informants discuss contamination in their communities reveals that it has
become a part of them literally and symbolically. Some people's bodies become maps
of human terrain damaged by uranium. Others residents show no external signs of
damage, but demonstrate a belief in themselves as being contaminated because of
their community's radioactive stigma. As a result of this status, of contaminating
loved ones, and of having participated in the mining and milling process, people also
grapple with pervasive guilt and self-blame. The sense of human contamination
combined with a feeling of total environmental contamination profoundly alters the
way these people experience their world. People express the anxiety and heartache of
watching abnormal numbers of friends and family die suffering amidst their own
constant fear of sickness.
The invisibility of such experiences signifies a series of contrasts that emerge
in the preceding text. The glaring power of scientific knowledge renders the
testimonies, practices and experiences of locals invisible. Voices of official experts
silence those that have lived with radiation all of their lives. Anthropologists must
move the spotlight to illuminate those people and ideas that remain in the dark.
Uranium, as these people experience it, does not correspond in many ways to
the way that "official" sources have portrayed it. Because the aforementioned effects
lay outside of the realm of science, they are largely ignored. Even existing testing
methods for radiation are flawed because they assume that exposure is isolated to a
particular venue. The nature of radiation exposure requires compounding the results
of multiple air, water, earth, and organic studies before one can even hope to
accurately measure exposure.  This is why local residents abandon specific
measurements in their notion of risk, in lieu of the attitude that any amount of
radiation presents danger.
The nature of scientific studies usually necessitates their completion in
relatively short amounts of time (a few years at most) and amongst statistically large
enough populations, when examining human phenomena. Under the circumstances of
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uranium in the Four Corners, which involves mostly small communities and the long-
term effects of radiation exposure, accurate results in such studies are difficult, if not
impossible, to achieve. For this reason, as well as for the validation of victims'
personal experience, firsthand anecdotal accounts must hold factual authority in
political debate.
In the Navajo example, local voices also need to be heard because they reveal
important information about the way in which their particular lifestyle pertains to the
impact of uranium. As a rural population dispersed across a large, remote vicinity,
they inhabit their space in a particular way. They frequent areas that urban dwellers
would not recognize as useful. They also utilize more local natural resources because
of their rural location, which puts them at increased risk for contamination. Because
many people speak Navajo as either their only, or first language, accurately conveying
warnings or information about radiation poses a greater challenge than in populations
familiar with the scientific jargon of the English language.
Another unique aspect of the Navajos' situation is their possession of over
half of the uranium deposits in the United States. The U. S. government and uranium
industry has targeted Navajo land and that of other tribes, like the Laguna Pueblo and
Sioux, as prime locations for mining and milling. However, these communities are
also targeted because their low socioeconomic status leaves them vulnerable to offers
of monetary relief, despite the inherent dangers. Because local labor forces mine
uranium solely for export, while shouldering the resulting damage, the relationship
between the government and native communities has been described      as
environmentally racist (Kuletz 1998).
Dominant ideologies in American culture have enabled this colonialist nuclear
alliance to continue. The construction of a desert wasteland rhetoric supported by
economic models of nature represents one such paradigm. The governmental
discourse of stealing land for "national security" has its roots in the 19th century
philosophy of Manifest Destiny.
The nuclear industry itself has given rise to another dogma, which centers
upon a removal from ordinary time and space as a way of avoiding the impossibility
of its mission. Planning thousands of years in advance, worling in underground
glowing caves, and storing waste on remote tropical or desert locations creates a
fantastical stage upon which the activities of the nuclear industry are set. These
elements, however, encourage those working with them to detach from their normal
worlds and engage in dangerous practices that would seem preposterous if seen in the
light of day.
Even without the backdrop of nuclear fantasia, the ordinary political economy
of industrial nations disregards human lives in the race for efficiency. Cost-
effectiveness refers to the goods being produced, not to the people producing the
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goods. If human lives were the standard by which economists judge "minimum
expense," the uranium industry would never have survived. In order to see industrial
practices like uranium mining as destructive, political and economic philosophy must
emphasize human and environmental costs.
A discussion of compensation concludes this paper because it represents what
the government and nuclear industries have hoped will constitute the final definitive
chapter of the uranium scandal - a successful remuneration to their victims. However,
as shown, the individual payments serve the interests of these institutions - not the
victims. In keeping with historic responses to uranium damage, the compensation
process skirts around taking vital reparative measures while leaving an open door for
industry and government to continue their quiet killing. As compensation perpetuates
hazardous industry instead of preventing it, so the cycle of nuclear destruction turns
without end and the legacy of uranium continues.
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