Keeping History Alive for Navajo Nation

As she ducks beneath a metal gate into the distribution space, Krystal Curley explains that it was from this location that Indigenous Lifeways, a nonprofit Native advocacy organization in Gallup, New Mexico, moved food boxes stuffed with potatoes, melons, flour, carrots, bananas and other goods to families in need on Navajo Nation throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

The floor is almost empty now, so the eye gravitates to a pallet almost as tall as a full-grown adult stacked with cases of bottled water.

"An issue with the pandemic is clean water," Curley, the executive director of Indigenous Lifeways, says. "[The] Church Rock and Red Water Pond [communities] have to haul water; they have no electricity. We have to provide wood and food."

Curley's organization was established in 1987 as the Southwest Indigenous Uranium Forum by her mother, Anna Rondon, to address systemic inequities surrounding nuclear contamination on Navajo lands. After growing up embedded in the no-nukes movement south of Gallup on Navajo Nation, Curley left her hometown for college to study film in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

After finishing her studies, she felt drawn to return home and give back something she felt lucky to receive: an education on historic inequities against Native tribes, and a sense of how to organize to enact change.

In fact, her focus for the past few years has been on spearheading a Social Justice Fellowship for young women across Navajo Nation to equip them with the tools they need to become community organizers. The goal is to create community dialogues to advocate for quicker clean-up of abandoned uranium mines through collaboration with older generations across the reservation.

"The facts around local uranium contamination, nuclear energy, mining, milling, transportation of radioactive materials — none of that is taught in school," says Curley. "Even in our own community in Gallup, five miles from the largest uranium spill in the nation, there are members of our community who don't know what uranium is."

When Curley launched the fellowship, she anticipated the opportunity would only attract people within the local Gallup area. But the four women who were accepted into the first group of fellows were, surprisingly, scattered all across Navajo Nation, a land mass the size of West Virginia. Even if fellows had to drive hours each way to workshops, they were willing to do it in order to learn how to organize in their own communities.

For many Navajo families in the 1950s, working in uranium mines cropping up on the reservation seemed promising. Though jobs were not well-paid, the mines were close to home. However, few Navajo mining employees were told of the health effects of long-term uranium mining while an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 Navajos worked for the extraction industry. In the mid-1950s, almost 30 million tons of uranium ore were mined from Navajo land in the nuclear arms race.

In July 1979, an embankment on a uranium tailings pond 15 miles outside of Gallup collapsed, releasing 1,000 tons of radioactive waste into the Puerco River near Church Rock, New Mexico. Lands that sustained ranchers and farmers as far as 50 miles downstream in Arizona were contaminated.The spill was the largest radioactive disaster that has ever occurred on North American soil.

As the years went on, illnesses commonly associated with uranium exposure, like bone, lung and kidney cancers, began cropping up among people both in proximity to the spill and the since-abandoned mines. Conservative estimates for deaths associated with uranium exposure to miners hover between 500 to 600 from 1950 to 1990.

But the ramifications of the spill on residents who never worked in the mines are wider — the land remains contaminated and the effects of tainted water and soil on pregnant women and children are still felt to this day.

Wonda Johnson, the first Navajo woman in New Mexico state history elected to the state Legislature, represents District 5, which includes McKinley County, San Juan County and 19 Navajo Nation chapters. She was a child when the Church Rock spill occurred, and remembers seeing her grandmother look out on her land, weeping as it was destroyed by the deluge of tailings.

Johnson says that one of the most notable memorials she raised to raise awareness about the legacy of uranium on tribal lands in New Mexico was House Memorial 32. The Memorial provided funds to study what jobs are necessary to clean an environment contaminated with uranium. It also could train local workers to attain high-paying skilled jobs in cleanup projects instead of settling for unskilled  labor. The final goal would be to create an industry within the state for necessary environmental remediation.

However, the breadth of work is enormous.

"The responsibility lies on the federal government, EPA and the Office of Environmental Justice," says Johnson.

Recent movement has been occurring at the federal level. In February 2021, $220 million worth of contracts were awarded by the EPA to three companies to zero in on cleaning more than 50 abandoned uranium sites. In April 2020, the EPA added abandoned Navajo uranium mines to the Administrator's Emphasis List of Superfund Sites Targeted for Immediate, Intense Action, which is an indicator of priority status.

However, the level of collaboration between the Navajo Nation EPA and the federal EPA is contested, and the tribal government has little say in awarding contracts, which is what Johnson strove to address via House Memorial 32. The conundrum points to the fundamental problem: Often, those directly affected by the country's nuclear legacy do not have a seat at the table to determine solutions.

In 2014, Amber Gaddy, a Navajo member of the Indigenous Lifeways social justice cohort, was visiting Las Vegas when she dropped into the National Atomic Testing Museum. Exhibitions within the museum explained how uranium mined from Navajo Nation was used to create the atom bomb. Gaddy's interest was especially piqued at the end of an exhibit where there was a mention that Indigenous people were removed from atomic testing sites.

This was news to Gaddy, who grew up on the reservation in Navajo Station, Arizona. Church Rock is just over an hour away from where Gaddy and her parents grew up, yet they had never been taught about the largest radioactive spill in American history in school. "We were not taught in public education that this was happening in our own backyards," she says.

Gaddy joined the Indigenous Lifeways' Social Justice Fellowship in June 2019. She was quiet at first, speaking rarely. She loathed walking up to a lectern to talk about her family's connections to atomic legacy. But bonding with other young Native women and listening to them share stories about how nuclear legacy affected their families felt like a drop in a pond, Gaddy says, and she could feel the ripples of impact.

"Going through Krystal's workshops, I could feel myself building confidence," she says.

Prior to the pandemic, Curley's Social Justice Fellows were right on track. All four women hosted uranium forums in their communities. In January 2020, a Fellow held a highly successful forum in Window Rock, Arizona, the capital of the reservation. However, the forums she planned for March and April 2020 went down the drain with the pandemic.

"We were right on it," Curley says. "We were a part of public forums with the tribal government, we were following committees to let them know, this is our story, you have to listen to our problems and what we want you to do in our communities." But the pandemic hit and Indigenous Lifeways became integral for getting food and resources to those who needed it most.

Now, the space to return to those conversations has opened back up. Curley's goal throughout her journey of mentoring young women about environmental justice boils down to a seemingly simple goal: uplift young people to give them a say in solutions.

"Seeing them blossom, it has been incredible," she says. "These programs have given people purpose. There is so much struggle that is unseen that you think people are OK with. But are we all okay? Are we ever OK? I think that's the biggest thing we've all taken away: We need a way to express ourselves."

Karen Fischer is an independent writer. You can find her bylines in CQ Researcher, The Verge, EATER, and other publications on her website at kfischerwrites.com. Read More