As a child, Arlene Juanico rushed to pick up the clothes before the explosions began.
When the alarms sounded, Juanico hurriedly grabbed the blank clothes on the clothesline before being engulfed in clouds of dust. But Juanico’s piernecitas could not protect her in time.
That’s when the dust with yellow spots, which emerged from the detonations on the sacred table that the Laguna tribe knows as Squirrel Mountain, got stuck with them. That’s when he entered Juanico’s throat, sinking deep into his lungs.
It’s the same thing I would face when, as an adult, I worked for Anaconda Copper Co.
And it’s the dust that would persist in your lungs, kidneys, and bones. There, hidden in the dark corners of her chest, the debris rested until one day, decades later, a CT scan showed Juanico and others like her why they hadn’t done it. I hadn’t been able to breathe fully in decades. They would get a similar diagnosis: idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, one lung mutilated at a time.
Thus, the risks of one of the largest uranium mines in U. S. history diminished when the dust clouds dissipated.
Today, many mines are abandoned on indigenous lands in New Mexico. The same goes for the dozens of eroded radioactive landfills intended to bury waste from uranium mines.
As a result, when COVID-19 hit in 2020, Laguna, who was already affected by ailments that made it difficult to walk, talk or breathe, was prepared for severe COVID-19, said Loretta Anderson, a home caregiver who is Laguna. many of its other people died from the pandemic as the tribe expanded its cemetery.
“Many of those we lost to COVID-19 had underlying conditions,” Anderson said. “This is the explanation for why many of them died. “
Federal rules and state knowledge apply to thousands of Navajos and Acomas who were exposed to uranium before suffering life-threatening cases of COVID-19.
Today, those communities care about what the long term holds for their well-being, their fitness and their culture.
That leaves Juanico, who is 66 years old and can now slightly climb the slope of his ancestral home overlooking the cliffs where the explosions once erupted, out of breath, worried about his own health.
“I pray it doesn’t get worse,” he said. but what do I do
Deep up the sun-scorched slopes of northern Arizona, Bob Begay has been sitting breathless for years.
Everyday life is a struggle. The narrow corners surrounding its circle of turquoise-painted hooghan of relatives, the classic eight-sided dwellings of the Navajo village, do not lend themselves to wheelchair navigation. And the site of the circle of relatives has no electricity, which turned his oxygen device into a glorified clipboard.
Despite all his struggles, Begay knows he’s not alone. The 85-year-old has noticed friends and neighbors dying one after another after years with similar symptoms. Therefore, Begay is afraid of what awaits her.
Things on those shiny white hills haven’t been so dark.
During their childhood, they resonated with ululates and screams: Begay and her 11 siblings enjoyed tending the sheep and farm animals that roamed the bucolic pastures. Other days they shouted and applauded: A transplanted Yankee devotee, Begay lurking in the box like DiMaggio at a time when Joltin’ Joe was beating pitchers in the east.
But their single mother was struggling to make ends meet amid the aftermath of the Great Depression, and the young people were hungry. At the age of 10, Begay was engaged full-time in dyeing, stretching, and tying wool for the carpet weaving business of the circle of relatives. And at 14, he returned home covered in dust containing the radioactive components of the most resistant weapon known to mankind.
As a junior miner for Vanadium Corporation of America, he spent his days wandering the nearby hills: this time, aiming to inflate dynamite into the abdomen of those hills known in Navajo as hal ghai yah nal kiid.
Soon, Begay started her own family. He vowed to make sure they never had problems like him. “I didn’t want the kids to want anything,” she said.
Twenty years after first stepping foot in a mine, Begay began “blowing and blowing” at work. He was in his thirties. Paralyzed by exhaustion a few hours into the day, he had to take one break after another or retire from some jobs at the mine.
It wasn’t until about a century later that he underwent a thorough medical examination and explanation: a terminal lung disease, most likely due to exposure to uranium. Until then, he explained, he had never been informed of the well-documented dangers and his bosses had never given him any hint of protective gear.
These days – no longer to wash or dress, and talking with the usual breaks between phrases to blow quietly – Begay regrets his resolve to paint in the mines.
“It follows me each and every day of my life,” he said.
As clever Begay’s paintings have been for him, his setting is exceptional.
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Through the Navajo Nation, a domain of more than 10 U. S. states. In the U. S. , which touches Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, approximately 30 million tons of uranium were extracted from more than 500 mines between 1944 and 1986. This exploitation replaced the course of history, tilting the army’s dominance westward one atomic bomb at a time.
But this quest for nuclear supremacy has come at the expense of many indigenous peoples like Begay. Calculate how it is a daunting task.
The Indian Health Service estimates that around 4000 Navajo worked in the mines. But advocates say this statistic excludes the vast majority of other people who have suffered, or will suffer, from diseases similar to uranium exposure. That doesn’t count the many other people who inhaled the poisonous dust when it blew on their loved ones’ clothes or stained their clothes or emanated from the clay foundations of their homes.
The IHS statistic also doesn’t come with the effect of uranium mining on other tribes like Laguna, Acoma and Hopi, whose relatives worked in mines like Jackpile on Squirrel Mountain, which provided 25 million tons of uranium over 30 years.
This is partly because there was no universal screening program for uranium personnel, such as miners, millers and transporters, until 2002, nearly six decades after the opening of the first mine.
Even with this program, which is only available at two sites in New Mexico, other people’s ability to access care depends on their ability to travel, said Loretta Christensen, IHS medical director. This is a big barrier to a network where one in 3 people lives in poverty and occasionally has limited access to transportation while facing tight fuel budgets. It is also an environment where fierce weather makes bumpy and occasionally flooded roads impassable.
In addition, Christensen said, even when other people can stop at those sites, the facilities are not well equipped to diagnose and treat diseases caused by uranium, and lack the equipment they would need to make that diagnosis.
And, beyond the program, according to Christensen, doctors don’t mention exposure to mining or uranium.
Garrett Vallo, an Acoma member of an intertribal coalition advocating for uranium victims, said gaps in the medical knowledge and fitness systems of other people who worked in the mines mean they go years without the care they need.
That is, Vallo explained, if they ever care.
“I know a lot of other people who were miners who died,” he said, “and we never knew anything else. “
The risks do not prevent those who worked in the mine.
They come with other people like Begay’s daughter, Rita, who lived near the mines. People who inhaled the dust while playing outdoors or hugging a younger parent returning from work.
These cases are what Christensen calls “secondary exposures,” referring to the ailments that citizens developed despite never having worked in the mines. Cases like those go undiagnosed and untreated, Christensen added.
“We’re telling our suppliers that you want to ask if
There are also “intergenerational” consequences, Christensen said: IHS studies have found high levels of uranium in babies born to exposed mothers, suggesting that uranium can be transmitted through placental blood, breast milk or other sources.
In total, across New Mexico, the number of secondary survivors filing health care claims due to uranium exposure is 53 percent greater than the amount of uranium that registered an application.
Finally, there are the tertiary survivors, Christensen said: those who continue to live on the poisonous earth, breathing dust and drinking water 40 years after the last block of uranium ore left the earth.
“There are young people who are still exposed,” Begay said. “When will it end?”
However, given the lack of a comprehensive assessment, the lack of knowledge about primary, secondary and tertiary patients means that the true burden of uranium-related diseases, while enormous, is unknown. This means that when other people like Begay’s friends and colleagues die: or when her children and grandchildren do, no one can definitively determine whether uranium played a role.
Without this information, other people tend to characterize those deaths from old age or natural causes, Vallo said.
“They don’t think twice. “
By the late 1870s, Friedrich Harting and Walther Hesse had noticed enough.
After seeing one miner after another in the Viennese Alps spitting blood while working day and night in the pits, the two Austrian doctors sent a snow-covered manuscript of Schwartzenberg to the city of Berlin. Its Schneeberg mines found that 75% of lung cancer cases were “at the expense” of uranium mines.
Since that study, doctors have established the link between fluorescence-stained corn-colored rock and the life-threatening disease.
In 1959, decades before universal protections were implemented for uranium workers, the U. S. Public Health Service established its own link between nuclear ore and lung cancer. Years of study since then have shown how poisonous steel and the radioactive fireballs it releases (alpha waste and gamma rays) can cause everything from widespread lung scarring to kidney failure and mutations in cancer-causing DNA.
Fast to March 2020.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a list of situations that make other people vulnerable to hospitalization and death from the virus. On this list? Lung scars. Renal insufficiency. Cancer.
However, when COVID-19 shattered the Navajo Nation and other Indigenous lands in the spring of 2020, the legacy of decades of uranium poisoning did figure in public conversations about fitness.
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As of March 2022, indigenous people were hospitalized for COVID-19 up to six times more than any other demographic, and up to five times more likely to have underlying kidney and lung disease. They were also up to nine times more likely to end up on ventilators, and up to seven times more likely to die, than any other group.
Anderson, in Laguna, knew dozens of former miners who died from the virus. At one point, he said, so many other people were dying of COVID-19 that the village had to expand the cemetery.
Vallo, in Acoma, witnessed a phenomenon. ” These other people had physical disorders that, when covid-19 hit them, they were taken away so quickly,” he said.
“They had nothing to fight with. “
When Dariel Yazzie looks through the mound-dotted views of Monument Valley, he sees two things: the majestic home of his shinali, or paternal grandfather, who is receding as the stories of his other parents tell, and the lingering shadow of uranium.
Yazzie has a long history with this kind of thing.
His paternal grandfather, Luke Yazzie, subcontracted his land for mining, for which he is widely credited with introducing uranium mining into the region, the first domino to fall in the decades of mining and exploitation through the Anglo-Saxons that followed.
Yazzie spent his adult life running for the Navajo Environmental Protection Agency, seeking to perceive the balance of uranium in the lands of his Shinali and his tribe. And seeking to cover up the mess that the white men, or bilagaana, left in their wake. A disaster of deserted mines, poisonous runoff, and infected waterways that left one family member after another weakened or dead from a uranium-related disease. A disaster that made the valley shaded by the poplars of his formative years uninhabitable.
“The fact that I’m dating and I don’t have a circle of relatives to whom
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It turns out that the same is true elsewhere. In Valleda Pueblo, the company got rid of soils, renovated foundations, reduced radioactive waste and demolished dozens of uranium-contaminated homes. Sean Hogan, an EPA official who oversees those territories, described the current contamination as “widespread and significant. “
In addition to sites awaiting cleanup, there are considerations that even sites supposedly secured through tailings piles, in which radioactive ore is collected and buried, such as a coffin, mounds of earth, are no longer safe.
For example, there is the tailings pile that is located a few meters from the pavilions located in a valley between two red rock ridges where Perry and Henry Tso grew up in Tse Tah, Arizona.
Although the EPA doesn’t read about the integrity of tailings piles in those days, Hogan said erosion continues to uncover highly radioactive material.
When the Tso brothers roam the pile with a Geiger counter, more than half a century after the last uranium mine in the region, it detects degrees of radiation well above EPA protection thresholds. Whether it’s due to years of dust storms and flash floods, or faulty structure in the first place, the brothers say the result is the same: they’re exposed, their enjoyers are exposed, and their soil is toxic.
“There were so many costume jobs,” Henry said. We are suffering here. “
Federal officials also recognize the continued effect of uranium exposure on public health. Pollution is “certainly a challenge today,” said Christopher Hanson, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal oversight framework tasked with protecting public health in a similar way. to radioactive materials. ” You can’t escape this story. “
The cumulative exposure suggests that long-term generations would possibly be suffering with crippling physical conditions that may also make them equally vulnerable to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Or the next pandemic.
“Unless we have mitigated each and every mine and cleared each and every tailings pile, [the exposure] will continue,” Christensen said.
“If you put your hand on a flame,” he added, “your hand will continue to burn unless you turn it off or extinguish the flame. “
But until those cleanups take place, families like the Yazzies will face continued displacement from their ancestral lands.
Meanwhile, they maintain their once prolific herds, nor domesticate their corn fields, nor harvest corn pollen for prayer. This means a loss of culture, culture and identity.
“I hear my grandparents say
Meanwhile, as his other parents get sick every day, Anderson worries about the legacy he has fought so hard to protect.
Today’s Lagoon, whose roots date back to 6500 BC. C. , proudly carries the torch of generations of skilled farmers, subtle ceramists and fierce warriors. the legacy has faded.
“We are our people,” Anderson said.
Eli Cahan is a freelance journalist. This article produced through Capital