2010 Think Outside the Bomb march to Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory/Gloria Williams

The natural landscape of what is now New Mexico is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Being from the U.S. South via the Midwest, I had never before been to the desert. The vastness of undeveloped space on all sides outside of the major cities is breathtaking and somewhat terrifying. As an organizer with the War Resisters League, I visited the area to connect with local organizers working in Native/indigenous communities whose homelands bore little resemblance to state borders. I traveled to the Grants area of New Mexico known as Mt. Taylor to speak with members of the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment (MASE).

People say that if New Mexico were to secede from the U.S., it would be the third most powerful nuclear nation in the world. The first nuclear weapons test took place in southern New Mexico in in 1945, three weeks before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, 3000 nuclear warheads are stored near the Albuquerque International Airport. All of this has contributed to a particular kind of legacy: that of sickness and irreversible contamination of the land.

Indigenous activists in the uranium-impacted communities and reservations of New Mexico are organizing their people to hold companies and the U.S. government accountable. In spite of nuclear power’s increasing unpopularity following the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima plant in Japan, there continues to be a baseline demand for uranium. Because of this there remains the horrific possibility of new mines in the area. MASE and other local groups have been steadfast in turning out their people to every meeting during the permitting process for these potential new mines. Like the higher-profile indigenous-led movement Idle No More, the antinuclear movement on the Native lands of New Mexico is building unity and looking for a spotlight.

MASE is a multicultural coalition of local indigenous and non-indigenous grassroots groups based in the Grants Mineral Belt of northwestern New Mexico. The coalition works together to clean up areas contaminated by past uranium mining. MASE is working to prevent future contamination from new uranium activities, to protect the sacred sites of local indigenous peoples, and their community rights to clean drinking water and a healthy environment.

The practice of taking over Native lands in the area for U.S. military purposes began soon after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, part and parcel of the U.S. settler colonial mission. Built in 1862 on Navajo land, Fort Wingate is a perfect example: a U.S. military installation created for the express purpose of housing military units aiming to control the Diné and ultimately displace them from their land. The Navajo resisted the removal from their lands for years until the infamous U.S. Colonel Kit Carson initiated a “scorched earth” policy on those lands. Fort Wingate was also a stopping point on the “Long Walk” of the Navajo, the forced march in 1864 of the Diné over 300 miles to a concentration camp in current-day New Mexico that was the temporary
home of some 9,500 Diné and 500 Apache prisoners.

Over a century later, the Diné are trying to reclaim the land that makes up Fort Wingate and incorporate it into Navajo Nation, the largest Indian reservation in the U.S. The recovery has been difficult, even though the fort has been closed to the military for some time. According to Winona LaDuke in The Militarization of Indian Country, tribal leaders are finding that the U.S. government doesn’t put the clean-up of sites like Fort Wingate at the top of their priority list because “of the low population densities that exist on many reservations.” According to this logic — that of settler colonialism — the U.S. only values Native peoples for their land and once it has access to their land through genocide and forced removal, the only role remaining for the Diné and other Native peoples is to continue to disappear. In Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy, Andrea Smith underscores the position of Native peoples in the U.S. today as one facing constant erasure: “The logic [of genocide] holds that indigenous peoples must disappear. In fact, they must always be disappearing, in order to allow non-indigenous peoples rightful claim over this land.”

The relationship between the history of genocide of Native peoples at the hands of the U.S. government and this enforced “disappearing act” plays out in disturbing ways on the lands of the U.S. Southwest that have been home to uranium mining. During my trip I visited Grants, a small town outside of Albuquerque, near the border of Navajo Nation and home to the second largest uranium ore reserve in the U.S., the Grants Mineral Belt. While there, I interviewed residents about their experiences with uranium and spoke with a person who grew up in the mineral belt. I asked her questions about the local and federal government’s response to the health problems, including kidney and lung disease, birth defects, and cancer, that have spread like an epidemic among people who lived in the area during the years of heavy uranium mining between the 1940s and the early 1980s. She seemed to dance around the topic at first. Finally, she opened up. The words she spoke next have stuck with me ever since: “I think they’re just waiting for us all to die.”

Challenges to the Nuclear Status Quo

Newcomers often express some amount of angry confusion at the lack of alarm bells sounded at a public health crisis in the Southwest, the paltry media coverage of uranium mining’s disastrous legacy, and the comparable shortage of government-initiated public health studies on what is happening in the communities surrounding the hundreds of abandoned mines that litter Native lands.

In a 2007 issue of the American Journal for Public Health, two researchers call attention to one of the most heinous oversights of this avoidance pattern, the uranium “spill” at United Nuclear Corporation’s Church Rock uranium mill in New Mexico on July 16, 1979. This occurred less than four months after the infamous partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, making the neglect of the spill particularly poignant. On that day, the dam at the uranium mill that held the tailings from the processing of uranium ore broke down and 95 million gallons of radioactive materials made their way into the nearby Puerco River. In comparison, the disaster at Three Mile Island released 440,000 gallons into the Susquehanna. Reading the article, you can register a tone of justified shock from the researchers who wrote their article in part because it was 2007 and they were disturbed that no one had beat them to it. In fact, in the days following the spill, the few non-local newspapers that reported on it noted that the area was “sparsely populated” and that the spill “poses no immediate health hazard.”

Despite the ways in which the U.S. continues to ignore the nuclear legacy still facing the indigenous peoples of the Southwest every day, the struggle for reclamation and nuclear-free land continues. In 2005, the Navajo Nation banned the practice of uranium mining and milling on Diné land, stating that “certain substances in the Earth that are harmful to the people should not be disturbed, and that the people now know that uranium is one such substance, and therefore, that its extraction should be avoided as traditional practice and prohibited by Navajo law.” This is significant because of the history of how mining companies originally gained access to Native land that wasn’t already state or federally owned — the government appealed to individual Diné landowners in the Eastern Navajo Nation who owned private land on what is called the “checkerboard” area of the reservation. This is similar to what people in the Western parts of the U.S. that have been poisoned by the practice of hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. “fracking”) have been saying about how they ended up leasing their land to natural gas companies. The Native people who live on top of thousands of tons of uranium ore were offered money and jobs and took the leap before they knew what the long-term health and environmental effects would be.

Groups like MASE have been doing the hard work of building unity and strength among people in the area to oppose any new mining projects. In 2012, with support from War Resisters League, MASE brought together its member groups to declare the mineral belt a “Nuclear Free Zone.” Their declaration calls for public funds to be put into the development of clean energy sources, which would bring jobs to local people and sends a clear message to mining companies currently prospecting in the area. It also takes a stand against the Mining Act of 1872, the outdated law that continues to allow mining operations on “public lands” in the U.S. The local activists behind the free-zone declaration assert that government subsidies and loan guarantees for the nuclear industry amount to “corporate welfare” programs that continue to put their communities at risk.

MASE member groups, including the Laguna-Acoma Coalition for a Safe Environment are opposing the potential reopening of a mine owned by Rio Grande Resources on Mt. Taylor in the Grants Mining Belt. Mt. Taylor is on part of the Cibola National Forest, on public land subject to the 1872 Mining Act. Mt. Taylor is a sacred mountain in the spiritual traditions of the Diné, Hopi, Zuni, and Pueblo peoples. The Diné believe that their Creator gave them the land between four sacred mountains in the North, South, East, and West, which they should spend their lives protecting. Mt. Taylor or Tsoodzil/Turquoise Mountain is the sacred mountain of the South. None of these sacred mountains fall within the territory of current-day Indian reservations, meaning that under the Mining Act, they are on “public land.”

Other MASE member groups, including the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM), are working on opposing two proposed mining projects at Churchrock and Crownpoint in the Navajo Nation. The company, Uranium Resources, Inc., has had a permit to mine this land since 1989, but needs the Environmental Protection Agency to renew their “aquifer exemption,” which permits them to drill into the sensitive aquifer that provides water to surrounding communities in order to extract the uranium ore through the holes it bores into the ground. ENDAUM and other groups continue to organize local people for each of the meetings that representatives from the mining company have with state and federal officials and regulators to show them that they haven’t forgotten about the uranium mining waste that continues to poison them, their lands, and communities. They demand not to be forgotten or brushed aside.

 When it comes to uranium and other nuclear substances, you only get one chance to protect the land and its people. What the Environmental Protection Agency, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Department of Energy don’t want to admit when they talk about the “clean-up” of currently existing uranium mines and mills or supposedly “safer” uranium mining practices for future mines is that once uranium is extracted from the ground, you can never put things back the way they were — the radioactivity that destroys the land and people’s health stays dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s the reason why the people in the Grants Mineral Belt and the Navajo Nation keep on fighting and organizing, even though they’re sick. As best they can, they’re protecting their descendants from the legacy of uranium.

Kimber Heinz is the National Organizer for the War Resisters League.