Spring 2025
What do you think of when you think of a wasteland? How would you treat land that has been deemed a wasteland? What if those living in said “wasteland” do not view these lands as such—in fact quite the opposite? And what can happen when these contrasting worldviews collide?
Towards the end of World War II, President Roosevelt developed a secret project, the Manhattan Project, aiming to mine uranium in the United States. The most promising locations for this mining were found on the Navajo Reservation—land that until then had been called wastelands (Voyles 2015). From the early 1940s through the end of WWII and on during the Cold War until the mid-1960s, uranium was mined at breakneck speed. Mining companies employed Navajo men, who worked with no safety protections, despite increasing suspicions from various scientists and others involved that mining uranium—and uranium itself—could be dangerous. A group of scientists even examined a group of miners in the 1950s but never shared their findings with the miners or any Navajo people (Pasternak 2010).
After one of the bigger mines closed in 1964, many Navajo people started using the tailings, a yellow-colored dirt they called leetso, to build houses. The dirt got its coloring from uranium (Pasternak 2010). Meanwhile, the majority-white town of Grand Junction was on its way to becoming a painful counterpart to the Navajo reservation. Grand Junction was also a uranium mining town, but as scientists became aware of the radioactivity of uranium, the town got government funding to clean the mine up in 1971 because of all the new environmental and health regulations coming out of Earth Day 1970. In contrast, any and all efforts to do the same on the Navajo reservation died somewhere along the bureaucratic process of getting help (Pasternak 2010).
Additionally, not only were the Navajo people receiving forms of cancer from mining and living in houses built of leetso but their livestock was affected as well. A prominent part of Navajo life involves pastoralism, using lands for grazing and streams for both them and their livestock to drink from (Pasternak 2010). Because some of the mines were pit mines and been dug far enough down to reach the aquifer, ponds formed after these mines closed, bringing (highly contaminated) water closer to where people and their livestock were living. People then used this pit water for both themselves and their livestock, leading to whole new horrors: lambs born without eyes and babies born with hands seized up, staying frozen forever (Pasternak 2010). The lands and waters that had sustained the Navajo people for millennia had been turned inside out and upside down by the U.S. government and mining companies who did nothing to care for the communities they invaded.
Unfortunately, this mining issue is neither limited to uranium nor the Navajo Nation. Uranium has been mined in Spokane, for example, and the Navajo Nation continues to have a big coal industry (Black 2018). For the Navajo Nation, mining has historically been tied to issues relating to tribal sovereignty. In terms of coal mining, a strong argument in favor is that the industry revenue can contribute to the self-sufficiency of the tribe, such as developing tribal programs (Fixico 2011). Additionally, in the 1970s and ‘80s, the Navajo joined other Indigenous nations in forming the Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) that pushed for economic, environmental, and social justice within their respective coal industries (Black 2018). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Navajo Nation did not simply endure the devastation left by uranium mining. For example, in the 1990s a group of high school students interviewed various mining families and eventually created a short film entitled “Hear Our Voices” that won multiple honors in film showings throughout the Western United States (Pasternak 2010). Despite the continuance of extractive practices by energy and mining companies and the lack of actions taken against the terrible health effects of uranium mining and its aftermath, the Navajo people were never passive receivers, continually working to fight for their health and ways of life.
References
Black, Megan. “The Wealth of the Wastelands.” In The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power, 214–44. Harvard University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvckq57s.
Fixico, Donald. “The Demand for Natural Resources on Reservations.” In The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources, Second Edition, 143–58. University Press of Colorado, 2011. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb40271.0001.001.
Pasternak, Judy. Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed. Free Press hardcover ed. New York, NY: Free Press, 2010.
Voyles, Traci Brynne. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt155jmrg.
