Elemental neglect: uranium mining killed and sickened thousands of Navajo Indians. They've barely gotten an apology.

• Author: Roth, Zachary
• Position: 'Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed' - Book review

Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed

by Judy Pasternak

Free Press, 336 pp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Things began to go wrong for Lois Neztsosie and her husband David in the early 1970s. The couple had herded sheep on the western Navajo range for many years, when inexplicably, the birthrate of their flock had started to drop. Of the few new lambs that came along, some were born without eyes, and many had difficulty walking. Meanwhile, the Neztsosies also were worried about their two youngest daughters, born in 1970 and 1971, respectively. One had a weak right eye, and often stumbled. The other had developed ulcers in her corneas, and soon began to walk on the sides of her feet. Doctors at the Indian Health Service believed the gifts must have suffered from a rare genetic disorder.

It didn't occur to anyone at the time that the defects in the sheep and the gifts could have the same cause. For several years, Lois had taken the sheep to drink at large lakes that had recently appeared in the area--unaware that they had formed from abandoned uranium mines. She often drank from the lakes herself, including while she was pregnant. In the 1990s, scientists would calculate that for every three liters of water Lois drank from the lakes, she exposed herself to nearly 100 times the level of uranium that the government considered safe.

The apparent poisoning of the Neztsosie children, as well as countless of their fellow Navajos, could be said to have begun in October 1941, writes former Los Angeles Times reporter Judy Pasternak in Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed, her chilling account of uranium mining on Navajo land. That was when FDR's interior secretary, Harold Ickes, sat down with officials from the Vanadium Corporation of America (VCA) to discuss potential mining on the Navajo reservation, a 27,000-square-mile area that extends into Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, in the "four corners" region of the Southwest.

In the late 1930s, scientists had confirmed that an isotope of uranium could be used to split the atom, and thereby create an atomic weapon. With the U.S. preparing to join the fight against Germany and Japan, the acquisition of uranium had become an urgent national priority--and the Navajo reservation contained some of the few domestic deposits of the metal. And so, the federal government and private mining firms like VCA used the promise of mining jobs and royalty...