Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed
by Judy Pasternak
Free Press, 336 pp.

hings 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 girls 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 girls 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 payments (many of which never panned out), as well as appeals to the Navajos’ wartime sense of patriotism, to convince the tribe to open their land to uranium exploration—thus turning the reservation into a key cog in the wheel of the Manhattan Project, headquartered about 200 miles away at Los Alamos. Soon, the struggle against the Axis powers was supplanted by the nuclear race with the Soviets, for which the Navajo mines continued to pump out uranium through much of the 1950s.

From the start, Navajos worked in the mines without protective equipment as basic as leather gloves and coveralls. And as early as 1948, a health and safety official with the Atomic Energy Commission named Ralph Batie had raised the alarm about mineworkers’ exposure to radiation. But higher-ups at the commission—apparently wary of opening a can of worms they might have trouble closing again—made an affirmative decision to ignore Batie, leaving the problem to state-level regulators who had no experience in radiation issues. Several other efforts to protect the miners from the effects of radiation met similar fates.

Years later, after hundreds of miners had died of lung cancer, a medical expert consulting on a lawsuit brought by the Navajos against the federal government would conclude that the miners had averaged cumulative exposures forty-four times higher than the levels at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One study from the 1980s found that cancer rates among Navajo uranium miners were fifty-six times higher than those of the general population.

But it wasn’t the miners alone who were put at massive risk. When the pace of weapons production slowed and the mines closed down in the 1960s, the federal government allowed VCA and other companies to leave the reservation without conducting serious cleanup or decontamination efforts. In the ensuing years, Navajos grazed their livestock—which they then ate—on uranium-contaminated ground; drank, like Lois Neztsosie, from uranium-riddled watering holes; let their kids play on massive uranium waste piles; and even in some cases constructed new houses using uranium tailings as a cheap cement. No one told them not to.

From the early 1970s to the late 1990s, the cancer death rate among the tribe doubled, while the U.S. rate as a whole declined slightly. One study released in 1981 by a medical researcher found that rates of reproductive, breast, and bone cancers among Navajo teens were seventeen times higher than expected. A rash of Navajo babies was born with fingers that fused together as they grew, or, like the Neztsosie children, with other developmental defects.

It wasn’t that no one knew the waste was dangerous by this point. In 1966, it was discovered that residents of Grand Junction, Colorado, a white town 200 miles north of the reservation, had used uranium tailings from a nearby mill in the construction of homes, churches, and schools. The local congressman, Democrat Wayne Aspinall, had clout—he chaired the Interior Committee and sat on the joint House-Senate Atomic Energy Committee—and he pressed the issue. The chair of the AEC noted in his diary that the U.S. had a “moral obligation” to act, and the federal government quickly spent $250 million to remove Grand Junction’s contaminated material.

Meanwhile, that same government appeared not to feel a similar moral obligation to the Navajos, offering the tribe only bureaucratic buck passing and foot dragging. When, in 1982, Congress tried to get the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct an official government study of the Navajos’ exposure, HHS resisted, insisting that “the adverse health effects of radiation exposure have been extensively studied.” Congress didn’t push the issue.

As the years passed and the evidence of what had happened to the Navajos became increasingly hard to deny, Washington haltingly began to try to make things right. In 1990, Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, and Orrin Hatch of Utah, got a bill passed that won modest payments for the families of the miners and an official government apology for the “hardships” endured—which Pasternak calls “one of the least gracious expressions of regret in history.” But it wasn’t until November 2006, when Pasternak herself, then a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times, published a prize-winning four-part series on the scandal (from which this book grew) that Congress began to focus on the full scope of the problem, including those Navajos who were exposed to radiation long after the mines had shut down. Finally, in 2007—after Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman harangued senior government officials at a hearing on the issue that he’d convened after reading Pasternak’s reporting—a comprehensive five-year cleanup plan was drawn up, in which the EPA pledged among other things to pay to replace contaminated homes and to truck in bottled water to areas on the reservation that needed it.

Pasternak tells much of this infuriating tale from the perspective of the individual people involved—mostly the Navajos themselves. That may help further elicit the reader’s sympathy, but it also leads to some cringe-inducing passages.  “Adakai, as a traditional Navajo, thought it only right that the would-be pillagers were frustrated by the fates,” Pasternak writes. “How could they be rewarded for piercing deep into Mother Earth … ?”  When Adakai’s son—who, decades earlier, had ignored his wise father’s advice by tipping off white prospectors to the presence of carnotite (uranium ore) on the reservation, in the hope of profiting—dies of lung cancer, Pasternak renders the event thus: “Then the founder slipped away, a victim of his own betrayal. The mesa had exacted its revenge.”

It’s not just that this is flabby prose, tinged with the kind of well-meaning magical thinking, and clichés about wisdom, fate, and Mother Earth, that too often characterize writing about Native Americans. It’s also that this leads to an odd lack of analytical rigor and context. Pasternak devotes much of a chapter to the making of a Navajo high school documentary about the saga called Hear Our Voices, but gives short shrift to—or ignores completely—several crucial big-picture questions that the reader finds himself asking. Among them: Could significant numbers of miners have been protected through the use of basic safety equipment, or was uranium mining in the middle of the twentieth century an inherently deadly activity? How much money did the jobs and royalty payments from uranium mining ultimately bring onto the reservation?  How many total Navajos—estimating, if necessary, from the best information available—are thought to have died as a result of uranium exposure, and how many children are thought to have been born with defects?

Still, this feels like quibbling, if only because the basic facts of the narrative that Pasternak has done so much to uncover and weave together form such a compelling indictment of governmental neglect. Pasternak implicitly contrasts the speed and effectiveness with which the U.S. can mobilize its resources to address an issue deemed to be a national priority, with the bureaucratic inertia and delay that too often characterize government efforts on behalf of our society’s least powerful members.

That’s a classic function of a certain kind of investigative journalism. As newspaper and magazine budgets for ambitious, deeply researched, morally alert reporting like Pasternak’s continue to dwindle, we should celebrate the examples we have.