Uranium Mining and the Navajo Nation

The uranium that fueled the United States nuclear weapons program came, in significant part, from mines on and adjacent to the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona. The mining began during and immediately after World War Two, accelerated through the nineteen fifties, and continued through the seventies. For roughly three decades, Navajo men dug the ore that made the weapons.

The companies that operated the mines and the federal agencies that contracted with them knew, from studies conducted as early as the nineteen fifty-five period, that uranium mining without adequate ventilation and protective equipment produced lung cancer at dramatically elevated rates. The studies had been conducted on European uranium miners decades earlier. The knowledge existed.

Navajo miners working in the Southwest were not provided with the information or the protective equipment. The ore came out. The weapons were built. The men went home at the end of their shifts to eat lunch in the mine entrances, in the uranium-dust air, because there was no other place to eat.

By the nineteen seventies, Navajo miners were dying of lung cancer at rates that could not be explained by any other cause. The federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, passed in nineteen ninety, provided limited compensation to miners and their survivors. The act did not cover all affected individuals. Many families who applied were denied on technical grounds relating to documentation requirements that did not account for the conditions in which the mining occurred.

The Church Rock spill in nineteen seventy-nine, covered elsewhere in this region's story, was not an isolated event. It was the catastrophic punctuation at the end of thirty years of contamination accumulation, on a landscape and among a people who had supplied the fuel for weapons they had not built, for a war whose benefits they did not disproportionately share, and whose environmental costs they disproportionately paid.

The contamination is still there. Some mines have been remediated. Many have not. The Navajo Nation has been documenting the public health crisis since before it was called a crisis.