Book Review: 'Yellow Dirt' a disturbing look at Navajo uranium

Monday, October 18, 2010

"I first heard about radiation poisoning on the Navajo Reservation in the late 1960s. I was a teenager living on the reservation. My father was one of the white millers employed by the Vanadium Corporation of America (VCA) to run the uranium mill in Shiprock, N.M. News of health disasters came to me as rumors at school: "They say a herd of sheep drank from the river and died. They say miners at Red Mountain are getting sick." Over the next several decades rumor gave way to evidence of serious health problems among uranium miners, their families, the livestock and the land. In her disturbing and illuminating "Yellow Dirt," Judy Pasternak evokes the magnitude of a nuclear disaster that continues to reverberate.

Pasternak locates ground zero in Cane Valley, 30 miles northeast of Arizona's gorgeous red rock country, Monument Valley. Prospectors had been eying the mineral-rich reservation since the early 1920s, but it wasn't until 1938 that Congress passed a law giving the Navajo tribal council authority to issue leases. The following year, Franklin Roosevelt pledged U.S. material support, his "arsenal of democracy," to the allies in the war effort against Germany. Specifically, Roosevelt was interested in developing a domestic supply of carnotite, which yields uranium and vanadium. Vanadium is a steel-hardening agent used for armor-plating in warplanes and weaponry. The VCA immediately took steps to help build the arsenal, contracting with the government and aggressively seeking mining rights on Indian land. In August 1942, the company sealed a deal to mine carnotite in Cane Valley; the agreement stipulated that the VCA must employ Navajo miners.

There's nothing clinical or dry about "Yellow Dirt." While Pasternak cites a wide array of specialists in fields ranging from geology to nuclear physics, the story unfolds like true crime, where real-life heroes and villains play dynamic roles in a drama that escalates page by page. Pasternak briefly traces historical beginnings, from Marie Curie's discovery of radium to the Manhattan Project's work with plutonium, the bombing of Japan and the birth of Harry Truman's postwar baby, the Atomic Energy Commission. She describes how the AEC partnered with U.S. mining companies to fuel the Cold War.

Culling from oral histories and interviews to tell the story of the native people, the author tracks the U.S. nuclear industry as it affected generations in Cane Valley. From the 1920s, Navajo patriarch Adakai presided over the valley. Pasternak beautifully evokes his family's rugged agrarian lifestyle raising sheep in an austere desert. Adakai was only a couple of decades removed from the "Long Walk" generation, which had been subjugated and exiled during the Lincoln administration. Having no reason to trust white people, he refused to cooperate when VCA employees made initial inquiries about yellow rocks in Cane Valley. But his son Luke Yazzie, motivated by patriotism and his family's poverty, was lured by a promised finder's fee and showed them the rocks."

Get the Story:
Judy Pasternak's Navajo uranium study "Yellow Dirt," reviewed by Ann Cummins (The Washington Post 10/17)