Going to the Shiprock Fair, Klee Benally Remembered the Uranium Dump on the Banks of the San Juan River

Photo courtesy Klee Benally

Going to the Shiprock Fair, Klee Benally Remembered the Uranium Dump on the Banks of the San Juan River

By Brenda Norrell, Censored News, August 29, 2024

Translated into French by Christine Prat

SHIPROCK, Navajo Nation -- In his book published shortly before his passing, Klee Benally writes of going to the Northern Navajo Fair and the uranium dump in Shiprock that no one talks about. It is along the San Juan River, the same river that flooded here this week, now eight months after Klee's passing.

"The Northern Navajo Fair at Tsé Bit A'í (Shiprock, New Mexico) has been held for more than one hundred years," Klee writes in 'No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred.'

Klee describes how the fair each fall marks the changing of the seasons and the harvest. He describes the neon glow of the carnival in the cold, dusty nights, and the juniper fires that burn.

"All of this revelry is held right on Uranium Boulevard just a couple miles from a massive 105-acre radioactive dump containing 2.5 million tons of radioactive waste on a site that was a former uranium mill (which is just 600 feet from the San Juan River.)"

                                     Shiprock Disposal Cell photo credit: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University

The Shiprock Uranium Disposal Cell studies showed that more than 1.8 million liters of groundwater were contaminated with uranium, selenium, radium, cadmium, sulfate, and nitrate.

Now the Navajo Nation again is targeted by the nuclear industry and Deb Haaland's radioactive agenda is being ignored. 

Speaking in Farmington, Interior Sec. Haaland said the transition to green energy in the Four Corners region will be led by the atomic bomb industry, Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has already poisoned Pueblo lands in northern New Mexico.

There is no mention of the fact that there is no safe way to store nuclear waste.

Now, adding to the layers of deception, the U.S. EPA is deceiving the public. The EPA doesn't actually clean up the uranium dumps and strewn radioactive tailings from Cold War uranium mining on the Navajo Nation -- it only announces plans and promises to do it.

Eric Jantz, legal director of the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, told the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in March that the EPA has not completed any of the cleanups.

There are 524 uranium mine sites waiting to be cleaned up on the Navajo Nation. Zero -- none of these -- have been fully cleaned up, Jantz told the international commission.

The truth is people seldom talk about the uranium dump at Shiprock because there is so much strewn radioactive waste, and so many unreclaimed uranium mines, with radioactive waste strewn from Cameron to Monument Valley, and across the Four Corners region.

During the 1990s, on assignment for USA Today, I talked with Dine' in Red Valley and Cove, south of Shiprock, down the mountain from where I lived. In every family, there was cancer. In every family, someone was dying of cancer, or had already died, from cancer because of the uranium mining.

One Dine' grandmother in her 80s was living in a stone home built of radioactive rock. We had a Gieger counter with us. 

Gilbert Badoni, Navajo from Cudei near Shiprock, shows a poster of his family at a  southwestern Colorado uranium mining camp. All the members of his family developed cancer or lung disease, including his father who died of cancer. Gilbert, as a child, shown in the lower left of the poster, said the U.S. government used Navajos to work in the uranium mines as guinea pigs. Navajos were sent to work in the uranium mines without protective clothing, long after the U.S. knew that the radiation would kill them. The women washed the radioactive dust from the clothes, the families ate the radioactive dust coated foods, and ate the sheep who ate from the contaminated fields. -- Photo by Brenda Norrell

Today -- after the radioactive haul trucks from the Grand Canyon uranium mine on Havasupai ancestral land have already raced across the Navajo Nation to the deadly uranium mill on Ute land in Utah, as Klee warned -- we remember Klee, and the life and legacy he leaves for us.

Klee ends his chapter on going to the Northern Navajo Fair with this caution:

"It wasn't frybread or settler politics that brought our ancestors back to walk among the sacred mountains from Hwéeldi, it was ceremony and action. As my elders caution, "The Long Walk has never ended for us."

Photo courtesy Klee Benally 2023

Order Klee's book

The French translation has been completed by Christine Prat in France and is now available.

SUMMARY, EXCERPTS, LIST OF AFFILIATED BOOKSTORES (Including Belgium, Switzerland, Canada), ADDRESS TO ORDER.

https://chrisp.lautre.net/wpblog/?p=8421

Image courtesy Christine Prat

In English 'No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred'

https://detritusbooks.com/products/no-spiritual-surrender-indigenous-anarchy-in-defense-of-the-sacred

Read more:

Supai, Dine', Ute, Lakota testify before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, by Censored News
https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2024/02/navajo-ute-lakota-to-testify-on-uranium.html

Interior Sec. Haaland: Atomic Bomb Industry to Lead Energy Transition in Four Corners, by Censored News
https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2022/08/energy-transition-in-four-corners-led.html

Gilbert Badoni revisits uranium mining camp at Slick Rock, Colorado, by Washington Times

Although historical milling operations have contaminated the alluvial groundwater at Slick Rock West with benzene, manganese, molybdenum, nitrate, radium-226, radium-228, selenium, toluene, and uranium, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Legacy Management said past milling operations have had “no detectable effect” on water quality of the Dolores River.”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/26/mining-camp-alive-in-memories-of-navajo-uranium-vi/