Facebook Twitter Email
TUESDAY, MAY 13, 2003

"The Diné (pronounced dee-NAY) or "the People," as the Navajo call themselves, have many stories about their origins. One says that as they emerged from the fourth world into the fifth and present world, they were given the choice of two yellow powders. One yellow powder was corn pollen, and that was the one they chose.

The other was the color of the dust that seems to give this land its golden hue, dust the color of yellowcake, the uranium oxide that fueled the nuclear age. So much yellowcake lies below the surface that a mining executive called this place the Saudi Arabia of uranium.

The Spirits said it had to be left alone. But from the late 1940's through the mid-80's, yellowcake was picked and shoveled and blasted and hauled in open-bed trucks, and then dried in mountainous piles at multiple sites in the American West. The Navajo, whose lands extend over western New Mexico, eastern Arizona and southern Utah, were at the epicenter of the uranium-mining boom, and thousands of Navajos worked in the mines. More than 1,000 abandoned mine shafts remain on Navajo land.

The consequences are measured today, decades after the mines closed, in continuing health problems and degraded land."

Get the Story:
A Doctor's Journal: Navajo Miners Battle a Deadly Legacy of Yellow Dust (The New York Times 5/13)
Username: indianzcom, Password: indianzcom

Related Stories:
Cleanup of uranium mines on reservation sought (02/03)
N.M. ruling affects uranium cleanup (09/12)
Mine defended against Navajo complaints (10/29)
Fund for uranium victims approved (10/3)
Uranium compensation being paid (8/31)
Bush delaying uranium payments (8/29)
Money approved for radiation victims (7/20)
House defeats uranium compensation (7/13)
Senate approves radiation compensation (7/12)
Senate panel approves uranium fund (6/22)
Bill would compensate radiation victims (6/21)
Uranium IOUs not funded by Bush (6/4)
Uranium still leading to death (4/2)
Compensation for radiation urged (3/02)
Uranium compensation slow to come (1/29)
Uranium poisons Navajo miners (7/31)
Law compensates Navajo miners (7/25)