Book Review: Navajo Nation poisoned by uranium in 'Yellow Dirt'

Monday, September 20, 2010

"Studded with vivid character sketches and evocative descriptions of the American landscape, journalist Judy Pasternak's scarifying account of uranium mining's disastrous consequences often reads like a novel — though you will wish that the bad guys got punished as effectively as they do in commercial fiction. Real life is complicated, and Pasternak, a veteran of 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, does justice to the historical and ethical ambiguities of her tale while crafting a narrative of exemplary clarity.

The story she tells in "Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed" is every bit as grim as the muckraking subtitle suggests, despite a few heartening developments sparked by Pasternak's prizewinning 2006 series of investigative articles in The Times. Her book expands on that series' exposé of the way private industry mined on Navajo land in the Four Corners region of the West, disregarding worker safety in a rush to meet the U.S. government's aggressive demand for uranium — first to build the atom bombs that ended World War II, then for the Cold War arms race.

When demand slackened in the 1960s, companies like the Vanadium Corporation of America closed the mines and returned the land to the Navajos, but by no means "in as good condition as received," as the tribe's 1943 contract with VCA specified. The corporation left behind piles of radioactive waste and abandoned pit mines that filled with water and became "lakes." The Navajo mixed cement from the sandy waste to build houses; cattle and people, including pregnant women, drank from the contaminated lakes.

By 1960, medical studies indicated that the men who worked in the mines had elevated rates of cancer, especially lung cancer. By 1981, researchers were concerned about increased numbers of miscarriages and birth defects among Navajo women, higher than normal rates of cancer in Navajo teens and a mysterious condition called "Navajo neuropathy." Its young victims suffered liver damage, dimmed vision, fingers and toes that stiffened and fused together; most were dead by the age of 10. The entire community, not just miners, suffered from exposure to leetso (yellow dirt), the Navajo word for uranium."

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Book review: 'Yellow Dirt' (The Los Angeles Times 9/20)