Word: navajos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Since 1974, conditions have not improved for Navajo and other Indian uranium miners. As of today, 25 Navajo uranium miners have died and an additional 25 have radiation-induced lung cancer. Since the dosage of radiation is relatively low, the effects do not appear for many years, yet they do surface eventually. Doctors at the Shiprock Indian Hospital treating the miners have found that neither radiation therapy nor surgery arrests the cancers' development. This rare type of small-cell carcinoma is diagnosed usually less than a year before the time it claims its victim...
...uranium miner deaths are not enough, Kerr McGee's abandoned uranium mine amounts to something more than an eyesore for the Navajo people. The uranium mill at one time processed raw uranium ore into "yellowcake," discarding tons of low-grade uranium ore called tailings in the process. For every ton of uranium mined, only 2.24 ounces of processed ore results. Although the company is long gone, the 71 acres of uranium mill tailings remain, untreated and exposed in the city of Shiprock. The U.S. Department of Energy now estimates that those persons residing within a half-mile radius of uranium...
Last year, the TVA, Mobil Oil, and United Nuclear Corporation submitted an environmental impact statement for a proposed uranium mine and mill complex in the eastern portion of the Navajo reservation. The BIA made arrangements for the lease in 1970, although Navajos living in the area never heard anything about the proposal until 1978. Mary C. Largo, a Navajo woman of the Dalton Pass Chapter (an area under lease), signed up as a plaintiff in the December 1978 lawsuit after drilling began on her land allotment without her permission. "I never saw any contract papers, I never put my thumbprint...