New poisons bury old ones.

• Author: Jacklet, Ben
• Position: Dawn Mining Co. uranium mill cleanup, Spokane Indian Reservation, WA - On The Line

Members of the Spokane Indian Tribe are joining environmental activists throughout Washington state in protest of a questionable plan for cleaning up two radioactive waste sites northwest of Spokane. It would allow the Dawn Mining Company to import some thirty-five million cubic feet of radioactive waste into an area already permanently altered from uranium projects.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Debbie Abrahamson, a member of the Spokane Tribe, says that Dawn Mining's proposal takes a deplorable situation and makes it worse. "It's just incredible how much that company has gotten away with and continues to get away with," says Abrahamson. "It's been far too easy for them to come in, strip away what they needed, leave the land completely annihilated, and make their own rules about how to clean up the mess."

"This whole scenario is a lot like a David Lynch movie," adds Cathie Currie of the Washington Wilderness Coalition. "If you look too closely, you see that everything's just coated with slime."

Newmont Mining, the largest producer of gold in North America, took up uranium mining on Spokane land during the 1950s. The Cold War was at its peak, environmental regulations were practically nonexistent, and the Spokane tribe was poor enough to try almost anything. Newmont established the Midnite uranium mine on tribal land and set up the Dawn Mining Company mill site eighteen miles away. For three decades, Dawn extracted earth from a mine on tribal land, transported it to the mill, and processed it into materials useful for the construction of nuclear bombs. A clause in the lease between the tribe and Dawn Mining exempted the company from all liability for environmental damage.

Now that the uranium boom years have passed, tribal members and rural residents are left with two large pits of radioactive waste: one a defunct mine, the other a former mill. Although both disasters were part of the same uranium project and were funded by the same mining giant, the fact that the mine is on Indian...