Navajo Uranium: The Mine the Road Didn't Show You

The nuclear arsenal the United States built during the Cold War was made partly from uranium mined on and near Navajo Nation land in the Four Corners region. The miners who dug it out were Diné men who worked in unventilated shafts and breathed air that federal health scientists already suspected was lethally contaminated.

The uranium mining era on and adjacent to Navajo Nation land ran from approximately nineteen forty-four to nineteen eighty-six. The Atomic Energy Commission was the primary buyer; the Cold War nuclear program created the demand. Diné men who took the mining jobs were not told about radon gas, the radioactive decay product that accumulates in enclosed mines and causes lung cancer. The shafts were not ventilated. The miners drank water that ran through the ore deposits. Some ate lunch underground, sitting on the uranium they were digging.

The United States Public Health Service began conducting health studies on Navajo miners in nineteen fifty. By the mid-nineteen fifties, the data showed elevated cancer rates in the mining communities. The findings were not shared with Diné miners or tribal leadership for more than a decade. The mines continued operating. This is documented in federal public health records: a government agency conducted health research on a population it was simultaneously allowing to be poisoned.

By the time the Indian Health Service documented the full extent of radiation-related illness in Navajo mining communities in the nineteen eighties, the damage had accumulated across a generation. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was passed in nineteen ninety. Many Diné families received nothing; exclusions from the initial program, a narrower two thousand two amendment, and the act's expiration in two thousand twenty-four without a broader expansion passing have left contested claims unresolved.

Abandoned mines continue to contaminate drinking water on the reservation today. This is not historical. It is ongoing.