Uranium Mining
and its Detrimental History of
Environmental Racism on the Navajo Nation: Senior Thesis Project
Church Rock, the Navajo Nation near Gallup, New Mexico.
For hundreds of years, the earth has been used as the personal dump and testing site for humans, and is now forever poisoned with leftover trash and harsh chemicals. Because of large amounts of land seemingly “uninhabited” in the United States, the US government itself along with companies working with it have conducted hundreds of experiments using the land as their testing or dump sites. Though many of these experiments and tests were done by governments who have agreements with Native American tribes regarding land use and territory, indigenous land has seen an incredibly awful amount of chemicals and been the site of many tests. In fact, a primary amount of harsh tests (like nuclear testing) are conducted on or near native lands, impacting indigenous people exponentially. Not only do these tests change the land they are conducted on but they also have a harsh impact on the health of people surrounding the test sites, whose bodies are at high risk from the cruel chemicals released from mine tailings into water, air, and soil. In New Mexico and Arizona on the Navajo Reservation, there are abandoned uranium mines everywhere, exposing a reality of decades of exploitation forced upon both the Navajo land and Navajo people at the hands of American corporations and the US government itself. This is an extreme case of environmental racism, as it both shows environmental exploitation and simultaneously hurts a marginalized group of people. This has developed into a huge human and environmental rights disaster where there are not proper precautions and regulations to monitor the mining and extracting of uranium and thus much of the land belonging to the Navajo nation is riddled with the dangerous effects of exposed and extracted uranium.
Uranium Mining's History on the
Navajo Reservation
In 1944 the American government passed a trading law that was aimed to cut off all dependence on imported uranium. This was during some of the toughests parts of the cold war, meaning not only were imported uranium prices rising extremely fast but the American government was attempting to keep all mining and manufacturing opportunities to be done by American companies in order to bond americans closer together. From 1944 to 1986 almost 4 million tons of uranium ore was extracted from mines on Navajo land to fuel the cold war nuclear arms race. High grade uranium mined was refined to make plutonium which was used to create nuclear weapons for the war. This extraction required an intense amount of labor, and for that, the companies involved turned to the Navajo people who otherwise, due to lack of opportunity, were mostly unemployed or self employed.
Because of tribal work laws, the workers earned hardly a dollar for every hour they worked and were completely unprotected from a lack of health insurance or decent working rules and hours. Once the cold war was over, the uranium companies packed up and left, bringing their business overseas where labor would be even cheaper and laws more relaxed. However, due to underlying racism and intolerance, the American government required no cleanup processing to be conducted by the companies who left the Navajo people’s water poisoned, their air toxic, and their soil unusable. Despite outcry from the Navajo Nation, the government left it be, stating that the companies had determined there was no toxicity left after the closing of the mines and their own departure. Currently however, almost 60% of Navajo people have lung cancer and cancer rates are rising, even among young children.
Why does this matter today?
This is an extreme case of environmental racism, as though the US Government has shut down many of the mines, there have been no organized cleanups or recovery programs conducted by either the companies responsible or the American government. Navajo people and the land the live on has been discriminated against and forgotten about in American life and identity. This has resulted in extreme cases of racism, unseen to the eyes of the American public such as uranium mining, because both companies and the government care for neither Navajo people or the now tainted desert they call home.
My Senior Thesis:
Why does this matter to me?
Both my grandparents died from cancer, my grandfather from lung cancer and my grandmother from bone cancer. They also happened to live less than 30 miles from a Uranium Mine located in Crowne Point on the Navajo Reservation. My grandfather smoked for years before his death yet doctors predicted that it probably wasn’t enough to give him deadly cancer meaning something else killed both of them. This makes this issue personal to me and my family as my entire family on my dad’s side lives on the Reservation in the same house my grandparents died in. My older cousin Jaime is 26 years old and worked for a corporation called COPE that does outreach programs on the reservation regarding education, animal welfare, and health, and it deals quite a bit in the effects of Uranium Mining on public health. She talked with me about her involvement in COPE and their outreach to communities on the reservation. She described how heartbreaking it is to see so many people, old and young, sick from the drastic effects of the abandoned mines. There is an extreme amount of poverty on the reservation just due to lack of opportunities, jobs, and education. Because of this, many people don’t go to hospitals or report their sicknesses. This not only results in many preventable deaths but also is used by the Mining Companies against Navajo people who protest Uranium Mining, as because not many of the cancer cases on the reservation are medically recorded, the companies can immediately go ahead and say that cancer is not a problem and its not their fault from not cleaning up the mines. Overall in general, there are very little public health surveys, leading the government with little option for helping Navajo people due to lack of evidence.
My family and I take many trips to visit our cousins on the reservation each year and on way our we always pass oil refineries, gas company storage facilities, and abandoned uranium mines. Each comes with a forbidding sign used as a warning to any who attempt to cross the barbed wire fences that surround the facilities. In the process of conducting this thesis, I have started to try and understand exactly what it was like to come face to face with a place as threatening as an abandoned uranium mine, so on my most recent trip to New Mexico, I ducked beneath the fence of one of the uranium mines and collected soil samples for future testing.
The Work I Have Done
This paper is one I have been writing for two years, and encompasses all of my research and findings regarding uranium mining on the Navajo Nation. It covers everything stemming from the foundations of environmental racism to the scientific specifics of uranium mining and how they manifest on the Navajo Nation and effect people's lives.
This literature review is one that reviews the work of three scientific organizations and their work on exploring the biological effects of uranium mining on land around the world. It focuses on three environmental subjects: land/soil, air quality, and water resources and takes pieces from things like the EPA's review of uranium mining. At the end, I highlight what needs to be done better in the reviews of organizations like the EPA that cover the environmental damage uranium has on land like the Navajo reservation.
This paper reviews the general scientific pieces of uranium mining, encompassing the scientific properties of the effects uranium has on people's health and the biological effects it has on earth systems.
A policy memo addressed to the UNC (United Nuclear Corporation), covering the necessary steps that the UNC needs to take in order to properly clean up the toxic uranium left in the land and water and to accommodate people who's lives and health have been negatively impacted by the mining and toxicity.
A general consensus on the economics of uranium mining and how engrained corporate activity, like mining, is into the foundation of the the United States economy. It then goes into why this makes breaking trends like uranium mining so difficult.
Two documentary poems that address the ways uranium impacts people's lives on the Navajo Nation and provides a more artistic framework for viewing the tragedies of uranium mining.
A large-scale art installation that provides its audience with an understanding of uranium mining and its effects on Navajo land and people.
Photos taken by me of the scenes surrounding the mines on the reservation.
I have worked very hard over the past few years to create all this work and formulate a synthesis of uranium mining that is accessible for people to view and learn about. I hope that the projects I have created provide people with an overview of the many things that overlap with uranium mining and that impact the future of the Navajo people. I think that generally, one of the main issues today for people not understanding environmental racism is that there firstly isn't enough information about things like uranium mining, because companies like the UNC put so much in into covering it up. And secondly, because of the deep rooted oppression against communities of color and communities with low socioeconomic status from America's governing bodies, there is simply a real lack of care about issues like uranium mining, because they're not effecting the white American population as much. Thus, I felt like it was really important for me to learn more by going out and seeking the information and creating my . own overview of uranium mining and why it is so important . to think about in this day and age.
Resources to Learn More
If you would like to learn more about uranium mining, here are some questions with linked resources to explore that go deeply into the specifics of what uranium mining actually is, how it began, why it manifests in the way it does today, how it impacts people around the world, and what we can do to reverse its negative effects.
- What is uranium mining?
- What does it look like around the world?
- What is its history with Navajo people?
- What does uranium mining look like in the United States today?
- What are the effects of mining uranium?
- How have these effects manifested on Navajo land?
- How do we clean up the abandoned mines?
- How should further resource extraction adapt to climate change?
Questions and Comments
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