- CUDEI, New Mexico -- Gilbert
Badoni remembers how Navajo uranium miners took their water bottles into
the mines and filled those bottles with radioactive water for their wives
to prepare formulas for their babies.
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- ìThe United States government knew all along the
uranium mining would kill Navajos, the government got away with it,î
said Badoni, among Navajos organizing opposition to further uranium mining
on the Navajo Nation.
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- As a child, Badoni and his family lived in a summer shade
house in a western Colorado uranium mining camp, where Navajos were used
as guinea pigs during the Cold War.
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- Badoni's father, Harry Badoni, died of cancer after working
in the uranium mine at Slit Rock, Colorado. Now, Gilbertís mother,
sister and two brothers who lived at the camp have cancer. Gilbert has
lung disease.
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- "Of course they used us as guinea pigs, all in the
name of national defense," Gilbert Badoni said of the Navajo men who
worked in the uranium mines without protective clothing or masks to keep
the radioactive dust out of their lungs.
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- Badoni remembers playing in the runoff, the water that
washed over the radioactive tailings, in the puddles of the mining camp.
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- Manuel Pino, Acoma Pueblo and professor at Scottsdale
Community College in Arizona, has been struggling for justice for 25 years
for the uranium miners at Acoma and Laguna Pueblos.
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- During a recent conference opposing uranium mining in
Shiprock, New Mexico, organized by grassroots Navajo, Pino quoted the late
Fred Johnson, Navajo councilman from Shiprock, N.M., who died mysteriously
in a plane crash.
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- "The basic concept - to destroy the land - is to
destroy the people."
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- Pino has taken his message to the United Nations, revealing
that Indigenous people were used as human guinea pigs, as Cold War experiments
without regard for human life.
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- Leaving behind a trail of death and disease, Pino said
cancer clusters are now found in the communities of the Dene in Canada
and Dineh (Navajo) and Pueblo in the United States.
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- Indian nations have long been targeted as expendable
for weapons production.
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- Pino said the first atomic bomb used uranium from Dene
in Canada. It was tested within 60 miles of the Mescalero Apache reservation
in New Mexico and was built on Pueblo land. Now they want to store it on
Western Shoshone land in Nevada, he said.
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- In the Southwest United States, there were about 15,000
miners and about one-quarter were Native Americans, working for the United
States Vanadium Corporation, a subsidiary of Union Carbide, Kerr-McGee
and others.
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- The health risks were known as early as 1949 and Navajos
were never told, according to "If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native
Americans," by Peter H. Eichstaedt.
-
- Badoni said the depleted uranium being used in the Middle
East is a repeat of the deception of Navajos, the abuse of the innocent.
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- It is a path leading to cancer and death.
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- When Kerr McGee and others began mining in the Four Corners
region, Navajos were unaware of the health dangers and desperate for jobs
to survive. "At that time it was survival, we didn't know any better,"
Badoni said.
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- "The sad part is the government knew all along how
it would destroy human nations. Still they dug it up for weapons. You don't
mess with Mother Nature. You just thank Mother Nature for what it allows
you to have."
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- Now Navajos know words like silicosis and fibrosis.
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- So do their relatives to the north, the Dene in Canada,
who carried the "money rock" on their backs, marking the death
march, a slow procession to their graves.
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- In the Northwest Territories, the Dene carried 100-pound
ore bags on their backs. Cindy Kenny-Gilday, daughter of a Dene ore carrier,
said Deline, like Navajo towns in the Southwest, is now "a village
of widows."
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- Kenny-Gilday said the Dene had a prophet who long ago
warned the people of the power of this substance. "Under this rock
is a matter so powerful no man can survive it," he told the people.
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- When a Dene man named Beyonnie found the black rock east
of Great Bear Lake in the 1930s, he was rewarded with bags of flour, baking
powder and lard by a white trapper. The Canadian Crown established the
Eldorado Mine and dumped uranium waste rock and tailings into the waters
of the lake where the Dene fished and their meat source, the caribou, migrated.
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- Kinney-Gilday said the mine hired all able-bodied Dene
men to carry the ore bags to the barges for $5 a day. Families went with
their husbands and fathers and inhaled the dust, absorbed the radioactive
waste.
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- Remembering 12-hour days of grinding work, 84-year-old
Dene ore carrier Paul Baton said, "The dust coated you like flour,
it covered our clothes, our heads, our hands. We would sleep on the sacks.
No one told us anything about it being dangerous. No one told us about
cancer."
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- Although white miners at Eldorado mine wore protective
clothing and were required to shower off the uranium dust after every shift,
Native laborers referred to as "coolies," were never told of
the dangers.
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- Kinney-Gilday said, "They never told the Dene. The
government knew the dust of the ore would kill the Dene. "In the '70s,
the men began to die of all kinds of cancers.
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- It was the first time the people of Great Bear Lake ever
heard of cancer," Kenny-Gilday said in an earlier interview while
visiting Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico.
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- "How many ore carriers died?" "The only
way to tell is by counting the graves," she said.
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- Dene uncovered documents revealing that the Canadian
Ministry of Health knew of the risks and failed to inform Native laborers.
While she carried out her research in Ottawa, Kenny-Gilday said evidence
was destroyed. "A lot of documentation was shredded." She returned
home to tell the story of the widows.
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- "Now, there are only five survivors." The Dene
of Great Bear Lake were never told that they were transporting a secret
weapon - uranium - which the United States would use to produce the first
atomic bomb.
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- Canada confirmed that uranium from Eldorado was used
to make the world's first atomic bombs, dropped by warplanes of the United
States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
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- Declassified documents in the United States reveal that
both the buyer, the United States government, and Ottawa, then the world's
largest supplier, withheld information from Native miners that could have
saved their health and their lives.
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- In all, about 7,000 tons of radioactive material was
shipped from the mine at Port Radium, now called Echo Bay. Canadian documents
reveal that another 1.7 million tons of uranium waste was either left exposed
at the mine site or simply dumped into Great Bear Lake.
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- Dene elders visited Hiroshima in August, 1998 - the 53rd
anniversary of the atomic attack - and expressed their sorrow and desire
for world peace.
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- They said the Dene are a peaceful people and would never
have been involved in production of a weapon of mass destruction, had they
been told.
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- The story is repeated for all of the Aboriginal people
who worked along the Saskatchewan transportation route. Besides lugging
the heavy ore bags, Dene swept the radioactive dust from the floor of barges
for $3 or $4 a day, and slept on the ore bags. They died of cancers of
the lung, kidney, stomach and colon.
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- Dene fear that their fish, caribou and moose at Great
Bear Lake are contaminated by radioactive waste and tailings.
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- But, Kenny-Gilday says, the spirit is strong and regenerates
itself. "Our spirits can survive." Opening her documents, she
reveals a favorite passage, "There can be no peace or harmony without
justice.î
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- When Navajos struggled for justice, a federal court dismissed
a suit filed on behalf of the Navajo by Stewart Udall, former U.S. Secretary
of the Interior and Arizona member of Congress.
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- Finally, Congress, over the opposition of the Bush administration,
passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which established
a $100 million trust fund to be administered by the Justice Department.
Still, Navajos struggle desperately to gain the monetary compensation.
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- There was an apology, but the apology came far too late
for the Navajos now dead from cancer and lung disease. The bill's formal
apology to miners and their families was only the second time Congress
apologized for past actions. The other apology was issued to Japanese-Americans
imprisoned in the United States during World War II.
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- Standing in his back yard on the Navajo Nation, where
his children play, Badoni points out foundation rocks from his childhood
home in Cudei, now strewn.
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- Recently the rocks were tested and found to be radioactive,
hauled here as building stones during the Cold War from the nearby Navajo
uranium mine in Cove, Arizona.
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- Badoni said, "We should have never had to deal with
this pain. It not only harmed our people, but it scarred our Mother Earth,
poisoned our land and our water."
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- brendanorrell@yahoo.com
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