Blue Ridge Folklife Book

A penetrating study of what happened to the Navajo people when they started to mine Uranium in the early 1940's.

This occurred on the Navajo reservation that is located in Arizona and Utah. A great deal of the mining was in Monument Valley. The initial reason for extracting the Uranium was the real fear that the enemies of democracy, particularly Nazi Germany, would also start to process Uranium for the purposes of making a nuclear explosion. In the early 1940's little was known of the affects of radiation from exposure to Uranium. There was no effort to protect the Navajo workers. The debris from the mines was dumped pell-mell all over the reservation. Some of the debris was utilized to build homes on the reserve. The water sources were also becoming contaminated by the dynamiting at the mine sites.

After the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the affects of radiation became very obvious. But on Navajo land nothing at all was done to protect the workers. With the advent of the Cold War and the Korean War Uranium mining kept accelerating in Navajo country.

Eventually workers started dying of cancer (lung cancer, colon cancer, brain tumours). More and more women and children became diagnosed with cancer and died prematurely. Tests and studies were made on people, on the drinking water, and the habitats - some of which showed severe levels of radiation. The radiation was literally spreading more and more across their land. And nothing was done! The companies and the managers got rich. The Navajo's got hardly anything, particularly compared to miners off the reservation.

Both the companies and the various government organizations (and there are many) obfuscated the issues and "Passed the Buck" as people continued to get sick and die. This was certainly not "Government of the people, by the people, for the people…".

To extract this Uranium, haste and utility were used; to compensate and aid the victims and to clean up the radioactive environment, only a withering and inept bureaucracy was encountered. It took over sixty years for a real cleanup to begin in earnest. Some parts of this book make one want to scream in frustration at the intransigence of government and the immorality of companies who put profits ahead of protection of workers.

Ms. Pasternak's book is very well written and frightfully convincing. There is no scientific jargon on radiation to deter readability. We are left saddened once again at the plight of a dispossessed people in North America. A highly recommended read.