Word: navajoized
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...American speakers, Chicano representatives who live near the mine site, and Anglo representatives Helen Caldicott, the Australian author of Nuclear Madness, and George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology Emeritus. The gathering provided the basis for ongoing resistance to uranium and coal mining slated for Lakota, Spokane, Ojibwa, Dine and Navajo reservations, along with the land of many other native Americans. Local Chicano residents have been significantly affected by the national nuclear waste isolation pilot project located on a Chicano land grant in the southern part of the state. For these reasons and many others, people of all races have banded...
...government--the Departments of Energy, Interior and Agriculture, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and the Environmental Protection Agency. The plaintiffs contend that the country's ongoing uranium policy has not been approved by the public. This uranium policy has included the leasing of large areas of Navajo, Pueblo and other Indian lands for uranium exploration and development...
...second big company to move into the area was Kerr McGee. In the mid-1950s, Kerr McGee discovered the uranium reserves of the Navajo Nation. Within a few years, the company had developed a series of underground uranium mines and a uranium mill at Shiprock, the major population center of the Navajo reservation. According to provisions of the BIA-negotiated lease, Kerr McGee held rights to the land "for as long as the ore is producing in payable quantities." The BIA viewed the mines as a welcome boost to the Navajo economy, providing jobs for a people plagued with unemployment...
...prohibited union organizing on the reservation. Consequently, while union uranium miners were paid $2.01 per hour in 1963, Navajo miners earned only $1.25; in 1968, hourly union wages rose as high as $3.42, while Navajo miners got $2.26. Former miner Terry Light recalled. "The company came around and said there were mining jobs opening up, but they didn't tell us a thing about the dangers of uranium mining." The Navajo man continues, "The mining came cheap back then. The white men really took advantage of the Navajos who needed jobs...
...Kerr McGee began to move out of Shiprock, abandoning uranium mine shafts and the uranium mill in favor of awaiting ore bodies found elsewhere on the reservation. In the early 1970s, the long-term effects of low-level radiation began to take their toll among the Navajo miner workforce. By 1974, 18 Navajo uranium miners had died from radiation-induced lung cancer, with many more near the hospitalization stage. Kerr McGee refused to take any responsibility or to pay medical expenses. As Kerr McGee spokesman Bill Phillips told one reporter in Washington, "I couldn't tell you what happened...