Indigenous Spiritual Walk to White Mesa Uranium Mill -- Unicorn Riot's Four Part Video Series

Yolanda Badback, organizer of the White Mesa Spiritual Walk: “I will always do this spiritual walk annually until I get my goal achieved of  cleaning up the mill or closing the mill down.”

White Mesa Ute Spiritual Walk 2024 Photo Unicorn Riot

"This is about the human race. We are all one people," says Sylvia Clahchischilli, Dine'.  "We need the natural world to survive."

Indigenous Spiritual Walk in Utah Protests Last Conventional Uranium Mill

By Alex Binder, Unicorn Riot November 1, 2024

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White Mesa, Utah — The White Mesa Mill was built in 1979 with plans to process uranium ore for 15 years. With the facility now well past its initial operational lifespan, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, other Indigenous tribes and allies continue their call for it to be shut down and cleaned up. On October 12, over 75 people participated in an annual spiritual walk in opposition to the mill, which is the last conventional uranium processing plant in operation in the United States.

Participants of the White Mesa Spiritual Walk arrive at the White Mesa Mill on October 12, which they say harms the neighboring Indigenous communities and environment, after traveling five miles north on U.S. Highway 191. Photo by Sean Summers.

Participants met at the White Mesa Community Center in southern Utah at 11 a.m., then walked five miles north on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 191 to rally outside the mill. Throughout the hours-long walk, Unicorn Riot spoke with attendees about their opposition to the 45-year-old mill owned by Energy Fuels Inc.

Raymus Vijil, White Mesa Ute, said a lot of the young people now have asthma, and they are losing many of their Ute elders. "We don't know what could happen one day."

Local resident and organizer Raymus Vijil has helped with the annual walk for about five years. He spoke to Unicorn Riot about the health impacts of the mill. “We’re losing a lot of elders due to health issues,” said Vijil.

Vijil also mentioned the impact on Indigenous youth: “A lot of our younger tribal members now have asthma.” Vijil added that “none of the younger generations my age had asthma growing up, so it’s fairly new to each and every one of us.”

There have been multiple studies showing the correlation between human exposure to uranium and health effects such as asthma. In one study published in January 2024, urine samples were taken from over 13,000 participants and the findings “demonstrated that the uranium level was positively correlated with asthma prevalence in the whole population of the US.”

“The results of this study not only confirmed the association between urinary U levels and the incidence of asthma in adults but also were the first to reveal that asthma prevalence in adolescents and children (<18 years) positively correlated with urinary U levels.”“Association between urine uranium and asthma prevalence” study by Dongdong Huang and Saibin Wang

The White Mesa Mill takes up hundreds of acres, including its toxic tailings ponds, which take up 275 acres total. Photo by Alex Binder.

According to a review of scientific journal studies about health risks of uranium contamination, published in Environment International in December 2020, “Uranium can accumulate in the human body through the inhalation of gaseous and aerosol uranium, ingesting water or food, and dermal contact, and the acute or chronic overexposure of uranium can damage, for example, kidney, bone, liver, brain, and lungs.”

White Mesa Council Representative Malcolm Lehi

During the rally outside the mill, Malcolm Lehi, the White Mesa Council Representative, told the crowd about a community member who told Lehi that he has cancer. “It’s heartbreaking,” said Lehi. The community member added that the first thought from the doctors was that it could be because of the mill. “So that thought, you know, haunts me since the day he told me that. And then he tells me, I don’t know how long I’m gonna live,” Lehi shared with the crowd.

Massive piles of uranium and other materials prior to being processed at the White Mesa Mill on October 12. Photo by Sean Summers.

During a rally at the Utah State Capitol on October 4, Scott Clow, the environmental programs director for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, said, according to his research, “The shallower aquifer underneath the mill that’s about 100 feet deep is being polluted by the uranium mill.”

In addition to the health effects and pollution, when the mill was constructed, hundreds of sacred sites were destroyed and desecrated, including pithouses, kivas, and burial sites.

Lori Goodman, a retired board member of Diné CARE, spoke to Unicorn Riot about how Indigenous communities are seen by some as “disposable.”

“This whole misinformation of nuclear being clean only because of where they get the uranium and where they dump it — where the community people are not seen.”Lori Goodman

"We're standing in solidarity with Ute Mountain Ute community," said Carl Moore. "Not just the community of human beings, but also in solidarity with all living around here."

Carl Moore spoke with Unicorn Riot during the spiritual walk about Indigenous sovereignty: “If Indigenous people say ‘no,’ that should be the end of the conversation, but that’s not what happens here in Turtle Island and the so-called United States of America.”

Yolanda Badback, lead organizer of the annual White Mesa Spiritual Walk and White Mesa Concerned Community cofounder, spoke at the rally outside the White Mesa Mill: “I will always do this spiritual walk annually until I get my goal achieved of  cleaning up the mill or closing the mill down.”

Right now, members of the White Mesa community are seeing and feeling effects of an almost 50-year legacy that they never agreed to bear the brunt of, and the industry that continues to hurt them seems to only be growing.

Insurmountable or not, Yolanda Badback and the other members of White Mesa Concerned Community won’t stop actively opposing the mill.

“Some days I feel like giving up, but I know giving up isn’t the option of what I want because I want to achieve my goal," Yolanda Badback said.

White Mesa Ute at Utah State Capitol. Photo by Unicorn Riot.

Unicorn Riot covered a press conference and rally on October 4 at the Utah State Capitol, where members of the White Mesa community said that since the uranium mill’s presence in their area, they’ve seen higher rates of cancer, devastation of plant and animal life, and severe pollution of their air, water and land.

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