Yellow Dirt: Uranium poisoning in Navajo country

In her new book “Yellow Dirt,” Judy Pasternak writes of a harrowing tale from Navajo country: how the U.S. government allowed uranium companies to walk away from hundreds of radioactive mines across the reservation. Not told of the danger, Navajos built their homes from the leftover ore and tailings. As Pasternak tells LOE’s Steve Curwood, four generations of people were sickened and are still being buried.
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GELLERMAN: It's Living on Earth. I'm Bruce Gellerman. Judy Pasternak, a former investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times, has written an epic story about US efforts to obtain uranium during the cold war. Her book, Yellow Dirt, chronicles how mining companies walked away, leaving radioactive ore and tailings behind. And 60 years later Americans in the southwest were still being exposed. Judy Pasternak spoke with Living on Earth's Steve Curwood.

CURWOOD: You begin your story in Indian country in Arizona in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and you found that some Navajo suspected that they might have some special rocks that outsiders coveted. What had they noticed?

PASTERNAK: They noticed these yellow stripes in the rock, powder-yellow stripes. And, really, the first people who settled this one valley that's the central setting for my book- thought that this was gold.

CURWOOD: So, this is an area that white people call "Cane Valley," where people noticed, the Navajo noticed these rocks. And, one of your main characters in this story of 'yellow dirt' tells his children, 'Never ever tell any of the white men about these rocks.' But, I guess, temptation eventually overtakes one of them.

PASTERNAK: Yeah, (laughs), his son, in fact, his favorite son. And, that was well before atomic bombs were being developed. But, later, during WWII, one of the Indian traders put some rocks, some samples, out on his counter, and he told the son, who was a customer, that this could be worth a lot of money.

CURWOOD: And, the son immediately goes out and...

PASTERNAK: Yeah...so...yes. So then he gathered up some of these rocks that were on the mason, and then brought them in.

CURWOOD: And it turns out this isn't just any old uranium deposit, Judy, but this is the mother load of powerful uranium. Very rich uranium. What, hundreds of mines are blasted and tunneled across the land as a consequence as this.

PASTERNAK: Yeah, the Navajo reservation as a whole, really has world-class deposits of uranium. And, the mesa that rose above Cane Valley was the hottest, richest, most productive uranium mine on Navajo land.

CURWOOD: We know a fair amount about the miners- the health effects on them- but your book also documents, I think, for the first time...I've read this...maybe it's in other material, about the broad range of suffering that the whole Navajo community suffered as a function of exposure. Tell us about the watering holes that were left from the surface mining, for example.

PASTERNAK: There were huge open-pit uranium mines in the western part of the reservation because the deposit was so shallow- they could just blast it right out of the ground. When the mining companies left, according to their contract, they were supposed to return the land in as good condition as received. But nobody asked them to fill in these pits.

And, what happened was- they collected rain. And, these pits, some of them were half a mile long. They looked like lakes in the desert, they looked like oasis. So, shepherds who were coming by were actually pretty grateful for their presence because all of a sudden here was a water supply in the desert. And, so, they would drink. They would water their herds there and they would drink themselves.

CURWOOD: And, in Navajo culture, the shepherds are often women.

PASTERNAK: That's right, and some of those women were pregnant.

CURWOOD: What happened to them?

PASTERNAK: There is a correlation between women who drank contaminated water while they were pregnant and a syndrome that's known as 'Navajo Neurapathy'. Children who have this, generally the average age of death is ten. Some lived into their thirties. They had fused, stiffened, fingers and toes that were kind of like claws. Many of them had liver damage- also they had problems with the nerves in their corneas, so often it was hard for them to see.

CURWOOD: The average age of death was ten?

PASTERNAK: That's right.

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