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day-to-day life,” such as “whether or not families have access to water and whether or not health directives are accessible to their understanding,” are highly consequential.
The Diné have faced significant linguistic obstacles to protecting their health from the harmful effects of uranium. The Diné call the substance leetso and used it in sand paintings and body adornment for many years. But the Dine did not have a word for radiation, which has limited their ability to discuss contamination. As a result, the concept of radiation hasn't been a part of Diné culture despite its impact on Diné bodies.
According to social scientist Susan Dawson, the author of a 1992 study published in Human Organization, Diné miners were never “informed of the dangers of radiation, nor were they informed of their rights under state workers' compensation laws when they became ill.” Most didn’t speak English, the language of their predominantly white managers. In the book, The Navajo People and Uranium Mining, a Diné miner named George Tutt recalled shoveling uranium ore and radioactive waste by hand. He and others, he said, “were not told to wash or anything like that.”
Philipp Harrison, president of the Uranium Radiation Victims Committee in Arizona and himself a Diné, expressed his outrage and grief at the World Uranium Hearings, a global gathering of Indigenous activists, scientists, and environmental groups held in Salzburg, Austria, in September 1992. Harrison witnessed several former miners die from lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses, including his father, who was only 43 years old when he died. “It was very, very hard for me to see him die a painful death. … He weighed only 90 pounds when he left us. I have never witnessed anything like the way he died.”
When mining companies were extracting 30 million tons of uranium from the Navajo Nation, language barriers prevented miners from getting accurate information about the risks of their jobs. Likewise, those barriers have impeded the families of miners who died from conditions linked to working in the uranium mines from seeking compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which will sunset in 2022.
Today most young Diné speak and write English, but older members of the community are not always comfortable in the language. The August report on COVID-19 and Indigenous communities found that just 32 percent of people in the Navajo Nation live in English-only households. When Dawson interviewed a widow whose husband worked in a mine, the researcher wanted to know why her interviewee did not file for occupational illness compensation. The widow responded that, “she felt intimidated by the process because of being told she had to write letters,” while she “had no stationery or stamps and could not write in English, and so decided against it.”
In a testimony at the 1992 World Uranium Hearing, Laurie Goodman, a Diné and member of the non-profit organization Diné Citizens Against Ruining our Environment, said that, “[o]ur lands are chosen [for uranium mining], because our people are isolated and lack access to technical information. Most have only a basic level of formal education and have little organized political opposition. When a society does not have words in their language, translation[s] for ‘hazardous,’ ‘toxic,’ and ‘poison’, it is a clear indication that education is needed for affected people to make informed decisions that determine their destiny.”
Environmental remediation
The Navajo Nation Council banned uranium mining under the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005, but much of the mining contamination remains. While the Environmental Protection Agency says that $1.7 billion has been secured through legal settlements with mining companies and other agreements dating back to at least 2014 for cleanup at 219 of the 523 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation, the Diné say little of the work has been completed. “The biggest thing is that out of the $1.7 billion dollars I think the total amount that has been spent as of today is $116 million on studies. … Out of the 219 that were funded, not one site is 100 percent ready to be cleaned up,” Navajo Council speaker Seth Damon said last year, according to the Navajo Times. The newspaper reported that the Environmental Protection Agency hopes to begin cleaning up the sites by 2024.
Indigenous organizations are doing a tremendous amount of work to address radiation poisoning and water scarcity in the Diné community. These include the Red Water Pond Road Community Association where activists like Terry Keyanna are fighting for environmental justice every day. The Navajo Water Project, a section of the larger non-profit DigDeep, is doing valuable work to address the lack of access to clean water in the Diné community. Since last March, Gavin Noyes and Woody Lee at Utah Diné Bikeyah have provided food and supplies to more than 800 homes, and delivered “175,000 gallons of new water storage capacity to over 600 families without water.” The Navajo and Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund is another grassroots organization, started with a GoFundMe page created by former Navajo Nation Attorney General Ethel Branch that raises money for two weeks’ worth of food for Diné and Hopi families in self-quarantine. Their work is a pivotal lifeline in pandemic times.
In the early days of President Joe Biden’s term, he issued an executive order to establish the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force to ensure an equitable pandemic response and recovery. His administration has officially recognized “systemic and structural racism in many facets of our society” as a driving factor behind the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color. We have reason to hope that help is at hand. Systemic racism, language barriers, mistrust of federal agencies, misinformation about uranium mining, preexisting medical conditions from chronic radiation illnesses, and an acute water scarcity make the Diné uniquely vulnerable to the pandemic. The double public health crises in the Navajo Nation need our urgent attention and immediate assistance.
Acknowledgement: The authors thank Zia Mian and Robert Alvarez for comments on an earlier draft of the essay. A UROP Award from Boston University in fall 2020 facilitated this research.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/02/radiation-illnesses-and-covid-19-in-the-navajo-nation/?fbclid=IwAR0wN6WZZ2_eAqGo0IRNXkkfmDXwhEBSoN9wh3EluN7qNZTn5-iyAM8y22M
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Winona LaDuke
Activist and Founder of the
White Earth Land Recovery Project
In 1996 and 2000, Winona LaDuke ran for Vice President as the nominee of the Green Party of the United States, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader. She is the executive director of Honor the Earth, a Native environmental advocacy organization that played an active role in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. In 1985 she helped found the Indigenous Women’s Network. That same year she also worked with Women of All Red Nations to publicize American forced sterilization of Native American women.
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