The Navajo People and Uranium Mining (review)

The story of the Navajo Nation and uranium mining is, at its heart, a tale of environmental justice. From the late 1940s until the 1960s, uranium mining by private corporations whose sole purchaser was the federal government, employed Navajos to work the mines in the Four Corners area. When the uranium boom ended, the miners and their families were left with huge piles of uranium tailings, compromised health, and a scarred landscape. The Navajo People and Uranium Mining fills a crucial chapter of this story in a short, yet powerful work that illuminates the ongoing social, psychological, and environmental problems related to uranium mining. By focusing on the oral histories of the miners, as well as their families and widows, this book carves out a niche in nuclear history. It also examines the quotidian experiences of the people who worked with radioactive materials. This work complements Peter Eichstaedt’s more journalistic account, If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans (Peter H. Eichstaedt and Murrae Haynes [Santa Fe, NM: Red Crane Books, 1994]), but goes beyond a linear historical approach, and instead privileges the voices of the miners above those of the industry and bureaucracy that manipulated the miners’ trust for profit.

The information in The Navajo People and Uranium Mining is presented in a fairly straightforward manner. The work is divided into twelve chapters, seven of which are interviews or oral histories from Navajos who worked in the mines, are widows of the miners, or who were part of a grassroots movement to (1) find explanations for the health effects plaguing the Nation, (2) receive federal recognition and restitution for their physical and environmental ills, and (3) ensure that no uranium mining would ever occur on Navajo land again. The oral history chapters are especially moving as they are translated directly from the Navajo language. Questions are included in these chapters, translated from Navajo but keeping the syntax of the language in the questions even in the translated English, which may seem unfamiliar to most readers. What becomes obvious very quickly in these chapters is that no one ever told the miners and their families the dangers that dealing with radioactive materials held for them. They were even less prepared to deal with the myriad bureaucracies, definitions, and restrictions of gaining restitution for their ills.

The miners comment in their oral histories that they were simply grateful to find work close to home, rather than leaving their families and the Nation to travel further into Colorado and Utah for work in the railroad industry. However, the lives they describe in the mines of the Four Corners area are horrendous as they worked with no safety precautions, no ventilation in the mines, absent mine bosses, and no sanitation. Miners would go home after work with uranium dust on their clothing. Wives would bring their children to the mines, to bring lunch or say hello, and their children would play in the mine tailings. None was ever told that the uranium could be dangerous to their health, even though the government, and the uranium mining companies knew the truth. Quick profits and national need took precedence over the lives and safety of this continually marginalized group, who also received some of the worst public health care in the nation. The oral histories of the miners reveal this continual lack of care, and the long distances and huge financial expense it took just to receive basic health care, much less specialized health care for diseases and illnesses relating to their substandard working conditions and radiation exposure.

The other five chapters interspersed amongst the oral histories are more academic in tone, although they still incorporate direct quotes from the interviewees. The authors have previously published many of these, but collected here with the miners’ oral histories, these chapters serve as a useful contextual complement, highlighting the psychological, legal, and environmental challenges that faced miners and their families. They also explore the reasons...