A family passes by muttering Russian to each other as they take in the picturesque view of the valley. We, Reed and I, take a picture for a couple who just jumped off a bus that carries passengers, their buses took on the mileage rather than their own personal cars. My Prius’s mileage gained an extra 300.
“Protect this land, protect the water, because it is going to protect you,” Malcom Lehi, Ute Mountain Ute councilman, shares the words of his ancestors. Disruption on the Navajo Nation is not new, but for years the aquifer’s safety has consumed the residents that depend on it. A drier climate threatens the livelihood of many residents, due to less water availability and no access to electricity. As climate change continues to choke the land with harsher conditions, a transformation is occurring with the people. The prospect of a life on the land is slowly disappearing with a lack of water to maintain their families or agriculture business. With many wells becoming contaminated from nuclear waste, less and less water is available. Felix Nez, a U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service district conservationist, said, “The drought — its severity — can place heavy burdens on the mind. The amount of worry that Navajo people endure is often overlooked. There cannot be dollars and cents associated (with) those daily thoughts of worry.” As sand dunes increase, crawling along the landscape, they threaten to consume homes and rangeland for livestock. Working turned into poisoning. Living has turned into survival.
The red dust swirls itself into my hair as I quickly roll up the windows. The air stagnates and as my car bakes in the sun, I flip on the car’s air conditioning. My car has many gadgets, made to keep me comfortable in any climate, cold or hot. The 17-mile loop wanders carefully around the momentous structures, providing tourists with an extraordinary view they can capture and post on their social media feeds. The cars pacing through the route resemble small ants, led in a row one after the other. I cannot help but feel I am among large giants: fingers, toes, fists, eyelids thrusted in the air among the surface. From this perfectly constructed view it is as if these giants are resting as I, and many other temporary visitors, snap billions of photos of their magnificent sleep.
“The Navajo uranium miners averaged cumulative exposures that were about 44 times
higher than the levels at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” says Judy Pasternak in her book, Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos. Andrew Gulliford, a journalist, explains that by 1957 at the Monticello Mill, 214 workers processed 600 tons of uranium ore daily. Each day, the mill expelled 2,600 pounds of heavy metals, sulfates, carbonates, lead, arsenic, asbestos, selenium, manganese, molybdenum and gases such as hydrogen chloride and vanadium pentoxide. Screen doors took on different hues, white sheets turned yellow, and the air, full of radiation, filled the lungs of the old, young, and everyone in between.
These otherworldly giants are anything but at rest. Exploited and filled with dreams of nuclear waste, they toss and turn in their eternal slumber. The water washing into the land is contaminated with violence, smoldering beneath the surface. Construed by deliberate paths to only offer the pristine view that makes its way on Bing homepages and Facebook cover photos. Tourists do not need to know of the lives lost for a promise of a job.
The Navajo Aquifer is the main source of drinking water for Southeastern Utah and Northern Arizona. It provides water to several towns while also discharging into the San Juan River. A Canadian corporation, Energy Fuels, planted the uranium mill between the red mesas and buttes in the late 1970s. By the early 1990s White Mesa Uranium Mill became the dumping ground for different nuclear waste sites all around the United States and parts of Canada. The mill stored and processed highly radioactive industrial refuse and waste from atomic bomb sites, despite not having the capacity to do so.
The sun bathed us in warmth, fighting with the cool wind, making us thankful for short sleeves and shorts. Monument Valley was a three-hour journey and already our thirst was growing since leaving Flagstaff. Inside the visitor center near the museum and a gift shop which is filled with tourists, two drinking fountains were nestled in a corner. We filled our steel water bottles with cold water, not giving it a second thought.
In 1980, cells were built for White Mesa to hold the radioactive material above the two aquifers, laced with a lining and detection of leakage meant to last for 20 years. Thirty-six years later, the same lining is still the only barrier between the aquifer and cells, holding radioactive tailings. Through the years, the level of acidity and heavy metals has been rising in the aquifer. When Navajos of White Mesa point a finger at the mill, the officials protest, it must be from a different pollutant. They claimed it could not be the uranium mine five miles from the town.
The wind moved through us and inside our flowing clothes, red dust covering my car’s console and leaving red specks on my glasses. The mats on the
car floor decorated with rust colored footprints from
us wandering around. We sat on a boulder posing
and smiling, the monuments East Mitten, West Mitten and Merrick Butte in the background, perfectly situated. Behind us, the loop began slithering around each monument, cars steadily passing by, cameras clicking.
Navajo uranium miners were attracted to working at the mines, a promise of an occupation close to home. They worked with no protection from the radiation seeping through clothes, skin, bones. No thought to the dangers posed, there was no changing facility for work clothes, no safety measures, no ventilation systems, or special suits for protection. The miners sat on radiating rocks, eating their lunches. Dust on their bodies as they came home and held their wives and children, unknowing they were poisoned and bringing the poison into their own home. Radiation does not kill quickly or silently. The miners and their families developed different cancers, tearing their bodies apart.
Signs posted for campers and drivers, clearly marking which route to go on depending on the pass paid for, sitting on the dashboard basking in sunlight and the eyes of employees in the park. We roam around the overlook, facing out toward the three most photographed monuments, East and West Mitten and Merrick Butte. Crowds of people sit staring for a few minutes, breathe deep, and move on to the next. Their tour bus is waiting.
A woman named Elsie Mae Begay, constructed a home with uranium rocks left behind when Skyline Mine shut down in 1944. In the realization that her backyard was a dumping site for these materials, they found the level of radiation to be ten times the limit of what is safe by EPA standards. Her son died at the age of 24 from brain cancer. Her home was soon demolished. “If it can’t be cleaned up at least right away, probably the least that should be done is some fencing placed, as well as some kind of signs indicating the hazards present. So that’s really the very least, and probably isn’t that costly to do and it’s certainly the responsible thing to do,” said Andrew Sowder, EPA uranium expert. In 2011, ten years after the interview, clean up began.
Before entering the park, there is a stretch of highway with the monuments rising high in the distance. When getting closer and closer, there is no sign mentioning uranium or the mine’s infamy. There is no mention to water sources poisoned and dried. On the website there is no declaration of the burdens caused a few miles away, only tribal tours that show the scenes snapped for old western movies. The common “Cowboys against Indians” theme hints at a past injustice that is masked by souvenirs of cowboy hats, authentic dream catchers, and postcards all in one room, hinting at everything being just dandy. Yet the narrative continues, this time extractive industries against the tribes. The rules have changed, disguised by laws and camera-worthy scenes. The current violence is not turned into a tourist escapade, not yet. Radioactive tailings don’t make for fun mementos.
Valentine Sargent is an Arizona native. She is a journalism major, graduating in the winter of 2019. Her next destination is New York City where she hopes to work in publishing before pursuing a master's program in creative writing, specifically in fiction.
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