Death by Toxic Exposure: The Othering of Natives in the American Southwest
In the film, The Return of the Navajo Boy, there is a poignant image of a Diné woman sitting on her knees attending to a loom that hangs from a pair of makeshift wooden boards behind the picturesque landscape of her home in the Monument Valley of Northern Arizona. Her arms are outstretched toward the loom in which she weaves a traditional pattern, called the Moqui stripe. The image may seem innocuous: simply the portrait of a woman knitting her “world-famous rug,” as it is deemed in the film, but a much more foreboding scene lies in its periphery (Weisiger, 2012). A premonition that tells the story of the invisible violence that has engulfed Elsie Mae and the Diné for the better part of a century rendering a once thriving Native community lying on the periphery of society, gasping for air. The story of Elsie Mae Begay is not one that fills this community with a sense of glimmering hope. Within a matter of decades, the family would become engulfed by leetso – the Diné word for uranium or yellow dirt, the same substance they slid down on the mountainside as children.
The story of the community of Diné, living in the Southwest, is one of injustice that should implore individuals to act. However, the Diné take on the form of monstrous others. Their very existence informs slacktivist policymaking and allows for widespread denial and negligence. This slacktivism has informed American-Native relations for centuries, staking claim in the lives of the Diné decade after decade beginning in the summer of 1540, when the first settlers arrived in Dinetah, to the employment of Diné men in mines that were slowly killing them, and it also informs its clean-up in the present day, an effort that has been all but disregarded both in mind and legislative policy (Weisiger, 2012). Just as the uranium erodes the foundation of the Navajo community, the predilection towards ‘otherization’ that mainstream society holds so dear is embedded into its very foundation.
The story of Elsie Mae Begay and her family is not an isolated incident within this community. Settled in the Southwestern United States along the present-day Utah-Arizona border, almost one thousand years ago, the community has lived amongst the invisible force of violence for most of their existence, overlooked and disregarded by those with the power to protect them (Weisiger, 2012). In 1943, the Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory designated the establishment of the “Manhattan Project” northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, with the exceptional task of creating nuclear weaponry. Uranium was the key element isolated in experiments in Los Alamos, essential in the process of nuclear fission. Nearly 3 million pounds of uranium oxide from Monument Valley were extracted for use in the Manhattan Project (Weisiger, 2012). As a result of Los Alamos, the operation of uranium mines throughout the Southwest grew exponentially, attracting Navajo men, searching for positional stability in a so-called occupational dead zone. For these men, the uranium mining operations in the region located in proximity to governmentally allocated reservation lands provided relative stability and allowed for contact with the broader wage economy of the United States (Brugge & Goble, 2002).
In 1948, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) announced its seizure of all the uranium ore produced in the United States and by 1958, because of this designation, 750 uranium mines were in operation in the American Southwest, employing over 5,000 Diné men and women (Arnold, 2014). Uranium dust, released as exhaust from the operating mines, produced radon, a gas widely recognized as one of the seven most potent carcinogens on the planet. Upon their atmospheric release, these particles, containing radioactive components embed themselves into bodily tissue, including the bone marrow creating cancerous lesions in the lungs, kidneys, and liver. With a half-life of 4.5 billion years, uranium-238 was here to stay (Weisiger, 2012). One by one the miners fell ill. A scientific review of medical records conducted by researchers at the University of New Mexico concluded that death from lung cancer was three times the expected rate from 1950 to 1960. (Weisiger, 2012). The yellow rock was depicted as a resource of the future, one that would catapult the ‘uncivilized’ members of the Navajo nation into modernity, all made possible with the isolation of uranium. Instead, its radioactivity eroded away a thriving site of cultural heritage and preservation.
Traveling downwind from the mines, uranium dust fell like ash on the communities of Diné living mere miles away, contaminating the soil and aquifers they used as a source of subsistence and potable drinking water. There was no warning. The Diné had no way of knowing that this dust was uranium, or that its release into the atmosphere of nearby settlements exposed them to harmful gamma rays, fifty times the amount found in a standard x-ray machine. They had no way of knowing that upon the smallest consumption, the radioactive radon laced in its atomic makeup penetrated the skin, deep into body tissue. The very floors of the hogans, these community members walked on each day were laced with uranium, releasing thousands of becquerels (Bq) – the standard international unit used in the measurement of radioactivity – into their homes as they decayed (Weisiger, 2012). The deaths did not stop with those in closest proximity to the mines, they consumed the very foundation of the community, the Diné children. Women in this area, surveyed in a longitudinal study conducted out of the University of New Mexico were more than 1.83 times more likely to birth children with congenital disorders linked directly to the radiation released from the mines: including a slew of chromosomal disorders, single gene mutations, and obstetrical complications (Arnold, 2014).
As demand for nuclear energy waned as the Cold War ended, most of the uranium mines in the American Southwest were shut by the United Nuclear Corporation, rendering more than 500 mining sites abandoned and over 5,000 Diné men and women without employment. No formal government remittance was allocated to the Diné despite research that corroborated the accusations that the conditions of the mine and the chemical composition of uranium yielded adverse health effects. Protective safeguards were seldom implemented upon the closure of these mines and radioactive waste was instead piled into tailing ponds, most within a five-mile proximity to Navajo reservation lands. In New Mexico, toxic uranium waste was amassed and subsequently stored in a pond near the To'hajiilee Indian Reservation with a population of approximately 1,649 people (Weisiger, 2012).
On July 16, 1979, during the Northeast Church Rock Mine’s final years of operation, over one hundred tons of toxic uranium waste stored in a pond near Church Rock, New Mexico, was released into the Rio Puerco River. “The Perky,” as the river is often referred to locally, served the populations that lived in proximity as one of the only sources of reliably clean drinking water in the region. Radioactivity in the area, immediately following the accident, was measured at 26,300 pCI/1, over twenty times the maximum allowance for sources of drinking water designated by the EPA (Keane, 1988). To date, the uranium spill at Church Rock is the largest nuclear reactivity spill recorded in United States history, releasing three times as much radiation as was emitted during the Three Mile Island spill in the Londonderry Township of Pennsylvania. Once more, no remittance was made to those affected in the vicinity of the spill. Cracking identified in 1978 and subsequent reporting that the uranium tailing pond did not contain the necessary protective measures to bar the populations living in its proximity from adverse effects were repeatedly ignored by officials at the Kerr-McGee Corporation, the corporation that owned the mine (Vox Media, 2020). By 1979, a mere one percent of the uranium released into the Rio Puerco had been removed.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the federal government allocated millions of dollars in the clean-up efforts to mitigate the effects of the radioactive contaminant release. This included financial compensation after a cooling malfunction caused a portion of the second reactor core to melt down at Three Mile Island (Vox Media, 2020). The spill in Church Rock reaped none of the same attention, an obvious oversight by the federal government that speaks volumes to the repeated disproportionate treatment the Navajo have faced since their extermination to governmentally allocated reservation lands. In this way, environmental activism at the time extended the notion of the “monstrous other” by separating and thus distinguishing vulnerability based on the falsification of class, race, and gender differences that rendered these populations invisible and excluded them from discussion in the wider discourse of environmental justice (Ryder, 2017).
For a large facet of mainstream society, excluded from the “warm hearth,” the Diné take on the form of monstrous others, threatening the very existence of what is deemed as “typical” and are thus conscribed as “others” to the “outer wilderness” and shielded form gaze. This “otherization” revealed itself unequivocally in the proceedings of the federal government in the years immediately following the 1979 radioactivity spill in Church Rock. Despite the designation of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments into law in 1972 that sought that all fishable and swimmable waters in the nation be measured as releasing zero pollutants by 1985, no official undertaking was implemented to protect the Rio Puerco (Lazarus, 2001). Minimal reporting on local stations in the region suggested that the area of the spill was “sparsely populated” and no immediate admonition of danger was given (Brugge & Goble, 2002). The only warning heeded, was a sign designated by the EPA, that warned against the use of the Rio Puerco as a source of adequate, clean drinking water, reading: “Water from this well is not safe to drink,” making no formal gesture to outlaw its use for livestock (Moore-Nall, 2015). The United Nuclear Corporation – now owned and operated by General Electric – has recently designated a plan to rid the waters of the Rio Puerco of contaminants at the expense of relocating the citizens of Church Rock to the nearby city of Gallup, located off designated Navajo lands and progress has been exceptionally slow. The project, if continuing as projected, is not set to halt operations until 2030 leaving the population uprooted from their homes for another seven years, if not longer (EPA, 2023).
In the present day, the Diné are advocating for action. They continue to use the waters of the Rio Puerco as their main source of potable drinking water, both for their own populations and to sustain the subsistence of their agricultural yields, which have been all but decimated by the presence of uranium in the region. Yet no undertaking within the medical field has been made to designate the symptomatology of uranium poisoning in this region nor has an allocation of funds been directed to the Indian Health Services for research on the medical legacy of uranium (Jantz, 2018). As most individuals within this community are unable to seek treatment off reservation lands, in terms of financial and/or insurance extension, the burden falls on the Indian Health Services, a severely underfunded and resource-stressed organization. And thus, the cycle of injustice continues.
At its core, the story of the Navajo reflects the extension of imperialist medical practices that exist in the United States, one that addresses “multiple forms of resistance” and “the stubborn persistence of sheer existence,” by othering these communities in the peripheries of our society (Gurr, 2015). The continued stagnation and deferral of action despite the considerable evidence that has amounted to suggest the existence of a relationship between morbidity in the Navajo community and the presence of uranium in the American Southwest reflects a fallacy within our society. It leaves those that mainstream society deems as monstrous, yet again, gasping for air.
References
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Vox Media (2020). How the US Poisoned the Navajo Nation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETPogv1zq08&t=636s.
Weisiger, M. (2012). Happy Cly and the Unhappy History of Uranium Mining on the Navajo Reservation. Environmental History, 17 (1), 146-59.
