`They never told us it would kill us'
http://www.austin360.com/statesman/editions/today/news_15.html
By Deborah Hastings
Associated Press
September 10, 2000

COVE, Ariz. -- Inside the stifling cinderblock house of Dorothy Joe, nothing moves but waves of grief.

One by one, the old widow and her children begin to sob, as if despair were contagious. The weeping circle begins and ends with her, sitting at the dining room table, staring at weathered hands as if they held answers.

She murmurs in Navajo, describing the white man's prized uranium and how it destroyed her husband.

``They never told us it would kill us,'' says David, 38, choking on his tears. ``I'm sorry,'' the son says, drawing a deep breath. ``I'm sorry.''

They received $100,000 from the government for the death of Raymond Joe, who scraped radioactive rock from surrounding mountains to fuel the Cold War. The conflict never turned hot, but it killed Ray Joe just the same.

He died six years ago, but his family is inconsolable, as if he were just now drawing his last breath from these stagnant rooms.

Lung disease has killed at least 400 uranium miners on this reservation, according to the Uranium Radiation Victims Committee, a Navajo advocacy group.

The Navajo Nation covers 27,000 square miles in the Four Corners area of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico.

Here lies the world's largest deposit of uranium ore, and the Navajo who have lived on it for seven centuries. Neither troubled the other until the 1940s, when mining companies began blasting holes in stippled sandstone cliffs.

Virtually unburdened by health, safety or pollution regulations, the mines ran at least two shifts every day for nearly 40 years. By the 1980s, decreased demand closed the mines. But not until Navajo workers unaware of radiation risks had loaded millions of tons of ore into open rail cars.

They wore no protective masks or clothing. They ate their lunches in holes choked with radioactive dust. They drank mine water that would have triggered a Geiger counter. They staggered home to wives who washed their filthy overalls with the family laundry.

Declassified documents

The dying started in the 1960s. In places such as Cove, there are hardly any old men left. Instead, there are poisonous dumps, contaminated springs and thousands of gaping mines.

Recently declassified documents show the government knew from the start it was playing with poison but concealed the dangers.

In 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act and apologized for failing to protect uranium workers and their families. It ordered payments of as much as $100,000 to miners in Wyoming, Washington state and the Four Corners area, as well as to others who lived in the Nevada Test Site's fallout.

The money did not come easily. To get it, the Navajo had to produce documents that have no place among their people. Marriage certificates. Death certificates. Pieces of paper unable to convey whole truths.

A special tribal court was convened to verify marriages, births and deaths, a process that takes months. Witnesses must appear ``to verify, sometimes, a person's existence,'' said Timothy Benally, a former miner who leads the victims committee. ``We had six people die while their claims were pending.''

On July 12, Congress amended the compensation act, increasing benefits and reducing paperwork.

Still, the Navajo say it is not enough.

``Nothing can equal a human life,'' Dorothy Joe says.

Workers were unaware

For $45 a week, Navajo men worked in the mines run by the Oklahoma company Kerr- McGeen.

Johnny Sam, now 60, worked a hopper for five years beginning in 1975, examining chunks of rock under a special light to identify high-grade uranium. The good stuff was blue. The low-grade was gray.

Most was yellow, meaning average. ``Leetso'' is the Navajo word for uranium. It means ``yellow brown'' or ``yellow dirt.''

``They didn't explain to us what it did to you,'' says Sam, his dark eyes scanning the hillsides of Church Rock. Residents including Benally say there is so much radiation sickness and contamination in Four Corners it is too great to count.

Sam remembers foremen ordering miners into smoky shafts minutes after a TNT blast. The longest tunnels ran 1,800 feet, often with no ventilation. The men trudged in, their hats beaming shafts of light, their lungs filling with radioactive dust.

It's been 20 years since Sam wore a miner's hat. His breath comes hard now and his lungs burn. He's never smoked cigarettes; he blames the mines.

``Nothing bothered us right away,'' he said. ``Fifteen or 20 years later, things bother you.''

Four hours to the west, in Cove Mesa, Donald Ellison Jr., 39, tends to his 89-year-old father who has been diagnosed with lung cancer. Donald Ellison Sr. mined uranium for seven years at 40 cents an hour starting in 1947. He spends his last days herding sheep, walking the land on which he was born.

``The people use these mines to shelter their sheep,'' the younger Ellison says. ``They store hay and grain in there and then feed it to the sheep. Then they eat the sheep.''

Destroyed lives

Dorothy Joe, 66, touches the tip of each finger, ticking off the names of other widows.

``Some remarried,'' she says. ``I married my husband. I still have feelings for him. That is why I am single.''

The widows were the ones who first petitioned the government in 1960 for redress. As their husbands died, they began to talk among themselves and to notice things, like the way death started with not being able to catch a full breath.

The wives remembered other things that seized their hearts: How they used to bring uranium chunks in the house at night so their children could watch them glow in the dark. How their husbands' work clothes, covered in radioactive muck, sometimes sat in the kitchen for a week because running water didn't come to this reservation until the 1980s.

``The government destroyed this community,'' David Joe says. ``They destroyed our lives.''