BURY MY LUNGS AT RED ROCK

...So far the funds have not been forthcoming...

...Though the AEC was the sole purchaser of uranium in the United States from 1946 through the mid-1960s, the Commission willingly relinquished its authority to regulate uranium mining...

...It stays in the lungs and continues emitting radiation — sort of like walking around with an atom bomb in your lungs...

...Speaking slowly, angrily, the old governor continues, "We have lived here for many years, and a lot has changed...

...In fact, many communities — never warned of the dangers of the wastes — have constructed their hogans (homes) and their schools from the gray, cement-like, radioactive material...

...Some, like Phillips Petroleum, have already begun to haul the ore out of the underground shafts, and most plan to begin operations by 1980...

...Although its first responsibility is to protect Indian interests, the BIA has cited "the national energy shortage" as its prime consideration in approving mining plans and leases...

...But Betty Yazzie, the twenty-five other Navajo widows of uranium miners, and the many retired miners now dying of cancer in the hills of Red Rock, Arizona, have been ignored by the state and Federal governments as well as by the uranium companies...

...I don't want to live in this house any more, but I have no place else to stay, no place else to go...

...Sloan recalls, "Some white men came here a couple of years ago, and said we shouldn't live in our houses...

...They chased us in there like we were slaves," recalls another miner...

...Red Rock was one of the first spots where the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the post-war uranium companies began prospecting for the radioactive fuel...

...Ben Lorenzo, a former governor of the Laguna Pueblo, sitting in his kitchen immediately after one of the routine explosions at the enormous Jackpile Mine, says, "I have many complaints about Anaconda and their mine here...

...The Department of Energy has estimated that it will cost $20 million to clean up the ten million tons of radioactive mess left on the Navajo reservation by Kerr McGee and other companies...

...And you can go around and see the walls and windows broken by the blasts...

...When Congress created the AEC in 1946, the Commission's authority included the licensing of "source materials" containing uranium...

...The company came around and said there were mining jobs opening up, but they didn't tell us a thing about the dangers of uranium mining," former miner Terry Light recalls...

...It made us sick to go into those mines," Lee remembers...

...In the amount of ore produced, the quantity of reserves, and the magnitude of operations, it is the largest open-pit uranium mine in the United States...

...They said the Government would get us new houses because our homes are radioactive, but they never did...

...My husband has been disabled for six years," says Elsie Benally, "and we have never got compensation...

...Potential ecological catastrophe from nuclear reactors threatens the future of many Americans, and in the last few years an anti-nuclear movement has risen to block that threat...

...The radioactive air and water pollution are threatening their livestock and the health of their entire communities...

...In the new uranium boom, fueled not by the military but by the private nuclear power industry, the BIA and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have routinely approved uranium leases and mining plans without preparing environmental impact statements or soliciting the opinions of area Navajos about the proposed development...

...The companies bring outsiders — non-Indians — into the mines as bosses even though our men have worked in the mines longer," Lorenzo says...

...Hard for me to manage alone, to pay the bills, to haul the water, to chop the wood...

...All the BIA has been doing is brokering for the big companies.'' Northwestern New Mexico is the largest uranium producing region in the world, supplying about half of the country's mined and milled uranium...

...Harry Tome, Red Rock's representative to the Navajo Tribal Council, says he has become frustrated because of the lack of support his constituents received from the tribal council, state politicians, and state compensation boards...

...I used to be able to breathe here, but I now can breathe better when I'm somewhere else...

...In Laguna, as in the Red Rock area, Lucy Lorenzo and other residents are complaining about the dangers of uranium development and the lack of responsibility on the part of Federal agencies and the energy companies...

...We need funds to support our eight children...

...It wasn't until 1972 that Federal radiation standards were enforced in the uranium mines...

...Victor Archer, who has been concerned with deaths of uranium miners since 1954, "because of the several reports from European uranium mines in which a high percentage of workers developed lung cancer prior to 1940...

...Fifteen uranium companies have expressed interest in mining uranium in the Crownpoint area...

...Then suddenly they saw the animal for as large as it really is, and started to realize there was a problem...

...The Government and the energy companies were willing to take advantage of that underdevelopment...

...A Department of Energy study reported that the Navajo and eighteen other abandoned uranium tailing piles in the western states are contributing to increased lung cancer among nearby residents through gamma radiation, ingestion of radioactive particles, and inhalation of radon gas that rises from the piles...

...We didn't know all that was coming...

...It was during this period that Kerr McGee opened several shallow mines near Red Rock and set up a mill to process the uranium ore in nearby Shiprock, New Mexico...

...They looked at the foot and said it was not much of a creature...

...While the Government moved quickly a few years ago to clean up the scandal of off-reservation radioactive housing in Grand Junction, Colorado, no such help has come for the Navajos...

...The white men really took advantage of the Navajos who needed jobs...

...It's like we have been having a war or something like that here — with so many of our men dead and dying or sick...

...Lucy Lorenzo is a Laguna Indian whose Pueblo community has been all but swallowed by the sprawling Jackpile uranium mine owned by Anaconda...

...When the mines' uranium supply was exhausted in 1968, they were abandoned, leaving contaminated build-up and more than seventy acres of uranium wastes...

...And we don't get a thing from the companies...

...I now feel sick all during the day so I just sit back in the chair and rest," Lee says, noting that he has seen most of his co-workers die...

...In northwestern New Mexico, close to three-quarters of a million acres of Indian land are leased for uranium exploration and development...

...On the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, Anaconda established the Jackpile Mine in the early 1950s...

...And there is no doctor to check up on the miners...

...A San Juan Basin Regional Uranium Study was begun by the BIA last year — about ten years too late — to examine the impact of uranium development on Indian land in northwestern New Mexico...

...We try to keep the dust and sand out of our house...

...Even the anti-nuclear movement has been slow in challenging the dangers of radioactivity to the people living and working under the uranium boom...

...According to environmental impact studies done on this new "hot" uranium boom, the population of Crownpoint will soar to 15,000 in five to ten years — a 500 per cent increase...

...The politicians listen to us," he says, "promise us things, but really never do anything...

...The cart came before the horse on the uranium projects," says Howard Zeutzius, BIA environmental officer for the Navajo area...

...John H. Lee, who lives with his wife in a one-room unplastered home near the Red Rock area, worked as a miner for more than twenty years...

...Gerald Buker reported in a monograph entitled "Uranium Mining and Lung Cancer Among Navajo Indians" that the risk of lung cancer increases by a factor of at least eighty-five among Navajo uranium miners...

...Harold Tso, director of the Navajo Environmental Protection Commission, comments that "the BIA had an idea it was coming, but they didn't know how big the elephant was...

...More and more non-Indians are around the Pueblo, and now I think the uranium companies and the outsiders are ruling this place...

...Indians in this uranium-rich region are beginning to object to the practices of the energy companies and the Federal agencies which so carelessly opened up the reservations to uranium development...

...On the reservation, there were no taxes, little regulation, and cheap labor...

...Both men worked as uranium miners...

...Joseph Wagoner, director of epidemiological research at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), observes, "The deaths of these uranium miners present serious medical and ethical questions about the responsibility — and the lack of response to that responsibility — of the Federal Government, which was the sole purchaser of uranium during the early uranium period...

...It's pretty hard here," comments Ray Joe, a former uranium miner in the Red Rock area...

...It blows all over my land...

...It has also failed to monitor the uranium leases or enforce their provisions for environmental safety and Indian employment preference...

...She receives a small monthly Social Security check, but it is not enough to pay the bills and feed her children...

...About 47 per cent of that uranium comes from Indian land...

...Three years later, the newly formed AEC began authorizing purchases of uranium to stockpile for its nuclear weapons arsenal and providing incentives to mining companies to find high-grade uranium deposits...

...But sickness, death, and destruction caused at the front end of nuclear energy development is already a reality, and the Indians of the Southwest are among the first to face it...

...sort of like walking around with an atom bomb in your lungs' four separate sites on the Navajo Nation — lie unattended less than a stone's throw from Navajo homes...

...I heard the tailings are dangerous," says Yazzie...

...Those mines had 100 times the levels of radioactivity allowed today," says LaVerne Husen, director of the Public Health Service in Shiprock...

...It's been real hard without a husband," says Betty Yazzie in Navajo...

...The BIA in New Mexico has gone so far as to put land up for lease and approve mining plans without notifying the Navajo landowners...

...Then, as now, the reservation offered a profitable opportunity for companies like Kerr McGee...

...The company never told us they were dangerous...

...Husen says the two main problems caused by uranium mining were lung cancer and pulmonary fibrosis, where silica dust particles become embedded in lung tissue, eventually making it difficult to breathe...

...Former miner Tony Yazzie and his family live in a house in Monument Valley built from the fine grain wastes that piled up in a gray mountain less than seventy-five yards from his house...

...The AEC interpreted this to mean it would exert no control over the mining of uranium...

...Like countless other tragedies in the history of Native Americans, this one remains lost in the dust of the vast, dry stretches of the reservations...

...She says the blastings and the radioactive dust from the open pit mine have cast a shadow over her village...

...Uranium mines and mills are pushing Navajos off their land...

...Because of their proximity to Navajo communities, the radioactive tailing piles are a serious threat to the health of the Navajos...

...Oscar Sloan, a former miner living in an isolated community near Monument Valley, Arizona, says that "all the people here have used the uranium wastes to build our houses...

...They see a new wave of uranium mining and milling overtaking them in the huge Exxon lease while they are still suffering from the energy boom of the late 1940s...

...Both died of lung cancer...

...Ignorance is no excuse," says Dr...

...He has no doubt that his illness comes from his mining work...

...In a seven-year study completed in 1972, no cases of lung cancer were found in a review of 50,000 chest x-rays of Navajos...

...New Mexico's Senator Pete Domenici introduced a Uranium Miners' Compensation Act last year, similar to the legislation providing benefits for coal miners afflicted by black-lung disease, but Tome doubts the measure will be passed...

...Anaconda has promised to do something, but never does...

...The language of the AEC enabling act, however, stated that the AEC's power was limited to "source material after removal from its place of deposit in nature...

...The dangers of radon have been known for at least fifty years, but the AEC refused to admit that danger was present in uranium mining for the first twenty years of nuclear energy development...

...He complains of spitting up blood and stabs of pains through his lungs — the signs of developing lung cancer...

...Investigation into the BIA mineral leasing program has revealed that the BIA has frequently circumvented its own regulations...

...The problem was that back in the 1950s nobody was riding herd on the companies...

...The lung cancer comes from breathing radon gas," Husen adds...

...The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), trustee for the Navajos, has leased their land for uranium mining without regard for adverse environmental effects, royalty rates, or social and economic impact...

...In a 1976 report, the Department of Interior called this region "the hottest uranium exploration area in the United States...

...Frank Aragon, an Anaconda employe, also objects to the blasting, adding that "sometimes you can even smell the nitrates they use for the explosions...

...Paul Frye, a legal services attorney in Crownpoint, the heart of the Grants Uranium Belt in New Mexico, is representing Navajos who feel the BIA did not adequately inform them before leasing the land and approving mining operations...

...Huge piles of radioactive uranium tailings — a total of ten million tons in 'It stays in the lungs...

...Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Fundfor Investigative Journalism...

...The miners who have died and are dying of cancer in the northern tip of the vast Navajo Nation, largest reservation in the United States, are victims of uranium mining — the first step in the nuclear fuel cycle...

...There's a whole lot of people out here that are bothered about what's going on and they want help with their complaints," Frye says...

...For the last ten years, wind and water erosion have spread the radioactivity far outside the original perimeter of the uranium mills...

...Fourteen energy companies have holdings on Indian land in northwestern New Mexico: Continental Oil, Anaconda, Grace, Gulf Minerals, Homestake, Humble Oil, Hydro Nuclear, Kerr McGee, Mobil Oil, Pioneer Nuclear, Western Nuclear, Phillips Petroleum, Marathon Oil, and the world's largest corporation, Exxon...

...Inside the mines were like radiation chambers, giving off unmeasured and unregulated amounts of radon...

...As exploration continues on the Navajo Nation and the Rio Grande Pueblos, that percentage will rise...

...They're sure to give them a physical checkup before they hire the men, but they don't have any doctors to take care of them after they're working...

...Like many of the other problems stemming from industrial and mineral development on the reservation, the misfortune of the Red Rock people had its origins in the community's poverty and lack of education...

...For five years, Betty Yazzie has been trying, in the courts and through appeals to politicians, to get workmen's compensation for her husbands' occupational deaths...

...It was a get-rich scheme that took advantage of Navajo miners who didn't know what radioactivity was or anything about its hazards...

...Lung cancer was formerly a rare disease among Navajos...

...The major killer in uranium mines is the radioactive radon gas that escapes from the uranium ore...

...Also left behind were several hundred Navajo miners who had been exposed to deadly doses of radioactive gas and particulates...

...When they blast, sometimes two or three times a day, the dust goes all over the village...

...Strangers are invading their towns...

...The AEC's contention that it lacked information about the health problems of uranium miners has been challenged 'I used to be able to breathe here, but now I can breathe better when I'm somewhere else' by physicians in the Public Health Service...

...Wagoner, in studying the occupational hazards of uranium mining since the early 1960s, found that "far too many Navajos have needlessly died" of lung cancer...

...The projects we approved were individually insignificant, but collectively significant...

...Red Rock residents have been trying since 1971 to obtain compensation for the tragic aftereffects of uranium mining...

...We wonder what happened to the reports we made to Washington about our problem...

...The labor came cheap back then...

...But the rates of lung cancer among Navajos have soared because of exposure to radiation...

...We don't know what it's doing to our health, especially to our kids and later on their babies...

...They weren't really mines, just holes and tunnels dug outside into the cliffs...

...Dr...

...Farther north, in the Navajo Nation near the Four Corners area, Betty Yazzie and other Indians are demanding compensation for problems stemming from early uranium development...

...Tom Barry is a reporter for the Navajo Times in Window Rock, Arizona...

...The cards belonged to her first and second husbands, Kee Yazzie and Robert Yazzie...

...She believes the companies that employed her two husbands in their death-dealing jobs should be responsible for helping her...

...In New Mexico, the nuclear story began with the 1945 Trinity Site Test, which confirmed the success of the atom bomb...

...Much of this land has already been committed by mining leases...

...And according to the Geological Survey, the new uranium mines will seriously deplete the area's water supply...

...I remember that it used to be so dusty that we were always spitting up black stuff and how when we went home we all had headaches from breathing all that contamination...

...The white men sat outside the mines and pushed us Navajos into those dusty mines right after dynamiting...

...My son works in the mines and he doesn't look so good...

...Exxon also has a 400,000-acre exploration lease in the area surrounding Red Rock...