Native Nations and the Nuclear Cycle
A talk by Professor Karl Grossman, State University of New York/College at Old Westbury

Given at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico
November, 29, 2006

This is an auspicious day to be with you here at the Institute of American Indian Arts because tomorrow, just a few miles away, at the capital of the Navajo Nation in Window Rock, Arizona, the Indigenous World Uranium Summit will begin.

The summit is very much an extension of the World Uranium Hearing held in 1992 in
Salzburg, Austria where people from all over the world came to tell of how deadly nuclear technology is including when it comes to mining the fuel for the enterprise: uranium.

Anna Rondon of the Navajo Nation spoke at the World Uranium Hearing of how "the Creator told us that we have a choice, a choice to use the corn pollen, which is a yellow substance that we use. It contains the positiveness of life. We were also given a choice to use the yellow cake dirt which we were told by the Creator contained the negative particles of life. So we had a choice and we chose the corn pollen, which is the beauty
way."

But those who came from Europe had another idea: to make use of that yellow cake dirt which they named uranium.

She said: "I extend my hand to all the indigenous peoples here today that we all work
together to rise above from this hearing, that we show the Europeans the way.The Navajo people join the indigenous populations of the countries all over the world and sound the alarm. Not only are we and our precious Mother Earth in danger, but all life faces the threat of extinction by radiation" because of "the folly of man that has unleashed the dark power of uranium."

Anna Rondon went on: "The harmony of all mankind is disturbed by uranium mining. This substance lies within the Earth, away from the living beings, and there it is meant to stay. To dig up and distribute this substance into the air and across the land is fundamentally wrong. The number of human beings who have died from the effects of uranium testifies to the truth of this statement."

Native Americans and indigenous people from around the world have been especially
hard-hit by uranium mining and other aspects of the so-called nuclear fuel cycle.

As the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission defines the nuclear fuel cycle, it
"consists of uranium recovery mining and milling; fuel production conversion of uranium concentrates to uranium hexafluoride, uranium enrichment and nuclear fuel fabrication; use in nuclear reactors. and disposal of. radioactive wastes."

Radioactive waste. Radioactive uranium after it is put through fission, the splitting of
the atom, fission, turns into 200 "fission products," hotly radioactive isotopes like
Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 and Iodine-131, deadly poisons, cancer-causing, needing to be isolated from living beings, as Anna Rondon said, from life (or it will destroy it). Some of the poisons remain hotly radioactive for millions of years and longer. That's radioactive waste.

I've long written about Kerr McGee's Sequoyah Nuclear Fuel Corporation' s facility in
Gore, Oklahoma that for decades affected Native Americans.

My story in E, The Environmental Magazine, shortly before the facility was, at long
last, closed, reported Native Americans "concentrated in northeast Oklahoma are heavily impacted by [the] Sequoyah Fuel Corporation facility that produces nuclear plant fuel" and its releases of radioactivity. I noted that with U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval, Sequoyah Fuel Corporation deliberately channels out 8 million gallons annually of its radioactive waste as a liquid fertilizer it calls 'raffinate.' The company sells the fertilizer, and also uses it on 10,000 surrounding acres where cattle graze and where hay and corn are grown for feed."

I wrote about interviewing Lance Hughes, director of Native Americans for a Clean
Environment in Talequah, Oklahoma, and he speaking of "unusual cancers" and birth defects from "genetic mutation" in the area.

Hughes said: "It's pretty sad babies born without eyes, with brain cancers." Wildlife
is also born deformed. Said Hughes: "We found a nine-legged frog, a two-headed fish and a four-legged chicken."

I also reported Hughes declaring: "The name of the game has been changed, but I would call it the same genocide. " And the article spoke of his group "fighting back with litigation, education and political action."

My piece was on environmental racism now also termed environmental justice: how
African-Americans, Native-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans all are the biggest victims of environmental contamination.

As for the last stage of the nuclear fuel cycle somehow safeguarding nuclear waste endlessly as Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwe (who ran for vice president of the U.S. in 1996 and 2000 on the Green Party ticket), who lives and works on the White Earth Nation in Minnesota, has said: "The greatest minds in the nuclear establishment have been searching for an answer to the radioactive waste problem for 50 years and they've finally got one: haul it down a dirt road and dump it on an Indian reservation. "

Most recently, the U.S. government and nuclear industry have targeted the tiny Skull
Valley Band at the Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah for a huge nuclear waste dump40,000 tons of high level radioactive waste.

Just two months ago, in September, the Interior Department blocked the effort. But the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering an appeal.

Some 60 Indian communities have been "directly targeted by the nuclear power
establishment" to be waste dumps, notes the Washington-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service. NIRS has joined with allies including the Indigenous Environmental Network and Honor the Earth to assist tribal members in opposing these dumps and, says NIRS, 59 have "fended off the threat." But the U.S. government and nuclear industry will keep trying counting on influencing (guess how?) a few so sovereign Indian nations can be designated nuclear waste dumps and thus U.S. environmental laws need not apply.

Incidentally, I've long been a member of the board of NIRS along with, for many years, that great Native American anti-nuclear and safe, clean energy activist Grace Thorpe, Jim Thorpe's mother. Although Native Americans have been and are major victims of the nuclear fuel cycle, the assault on indigenous people by nuclear technology is far-reaching, global.

This was made clear at the World Uranium Hearing and will be in coming days at the
Indigenous World Uranium Summit. Among those who testified at the World Uranium Summit were:

· * Strongman Mpanagana, health and safety officer of the National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa, who told of the suffering his people in the uranium mines of that country. "More and more workers are being killed by different kinds of diseases including leukemia," he testified. His fellow blacks "are compelled to work in a very dangerous situation."

· * Cleophas Mutjavikua, secretary general of the Mineworkers' Union of Nambia, where the world's largest open pit uranium mine is located, who told of lung disease being widespread among workers.

· * Allio Fiorella, ethnologist and activist for the Yami, the aboriginal people of
Taiwan, who told "a beautiful place" called Botel Tobago, a volcanic island where thousands of Yami live, turned by Taiwan into "a place for storing highly radioactive atomic waste" for the nuclear power plants of Taiwan. "The complex is only 50
meters away from the traditional fishing place," he said. This "also is a holy place," he noted.

· * Larissa Abrjutina of the Chukchi Nation of Siberia spoke of widespread cancer among her people and linked it to a uranium mine and a nuclear power plant nearby.

And the horror stories go on.

In fact, people are color are the biggest victims but it's everybody's soup.

A person can be as white as a sheet as were the people of the Ukraine but when the
Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in the Ukraine in 1986, spreading atomic poisons through the Ukraine, many thousands of very white Ukrainians were irradiated. Many have been left with cancer and there have been numerous deaths.

The Indigenous World Uranium Summit is being held at the Navajo Nation because last year the Navajo Nation Council took a courageous step: it passed a law banning mining and processing of uranium in the vast Navajo Nation.

The U.S. government and the nuclear industry are most upset about this because, with
the Bush administration and nuclear industry seeking a so-called "revival" of nuclear power in the United States no new nuclear plant has been ordered and built in the U.S. since well before the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident in 1979they want to reopen uranium mines within Navajo borders, mines that have killed many already with lung cancer.

The Navajo Nation action has been called "probably one of the most important laws in Indian law."

Also this week in Window Rock, on Friday evening, a Special Recognition Nuclear-Free Future Award will be given to Phillip Harrison, Jr. of the Navajo Nation

Last year, at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway, Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley,
Jr., who signed the Dine Resources Protection Act of 2005the prohibition on uranium mining in the Navajo Nation received a Nuclear-Free Future Award along with the Navajo Nation Council and Council Delegate George Arthur.

I am honored to be a judge for the Nuclear-Free Future Award.

The life and work of Phillip Harrison, founder and president of the Uranium Radiation
Victims Committee and co-founder of the Four Corners Navajo Millers Association, encapsulates the struggle of the Navajos and uranium.

As he told the World Uranium Hearing: "I'll share with you as much as I can, of our suffering and humiliation that was put upon us. We live, work and play in the Four Corners Area. The region contains one of the largest reserves of uranium. Uranium was mined and milled for weapons and nuclear development. The Red Valley Area was the center of the mining activity. This is where hundreds of Navajo men have been
enslaved."

"My father was one of these men who have worked in this area. This was also the
introduction to America's industrialized system. The unemployment was high back then and there were no jobs available."

"There was no ventilation of these mines, no safety equipment, no respirators, no
gloves were provided. They were constantly exposed to radiation and other gases and smoke from the blasting. The mine water was used for public consumption and often taken home and used for baby-formulas. I have heard all kinds of stories the men have faced. Like, for example, a miner would pass out in the mine, they would be dragged
out of the mine and given smelling salts and they were driven back to go back to work, for 24 hour shifts, seven days a week. Most of them were not told of the dangers of mining, nor of the exposure of radiation. The households were also contaminated when the miners would go home with their clothes dirty."

Phil Harrison's father died at just 43. "It was very, very hard for me to see him die a
painful death," he testified. "He weighed only 90 pounds when he left us. I have never witnessed anything like the way he died. My young brother and two sisters were too young and hardly knew their father. Today, they ask why and how he died, and why the uranium company and the U.S. government treated them like guinea-pigs. Many other
questions remain unanswered."

Hundreds of Navajo miners have "died now of similar patterns mostly from lung cancer and respiratory problems." The average age of death: 43.

"Based on the physical evidence and devastation left behind by the uranium companies, lawsuits were drawn up and they went nowhere. The uranium companies said they were never responsible for the dying of miners nor the radioactive wastes they left behind."

"This left us no alternatives but to resort to Congress. Finally, after so many years,
the U.S. Congress. passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in October of 1990. We did not realize that the eligibility criteria were very strict. To make the long story short, you had to be on the death bed to qualify for the compensation. I personally had asked the Department of Justice why. that law was so strict."

"Not only were the miners victims," Harrison went on, "but the Navajo mill workers
were all showing symptoms of this very exposure to uranium and the other elements when they were processing uranium. The miners and millers were not the only victims of exposure. There are land, water, air and livestock, and our young generations were severely impacted. Birth defects are very high by this poisoning."

Left behind on the Navajo land have been 1,200 mines abandoned mines, he said.
With the price of uranium having shot up seven-fold in the last two years, these are the
mines the U.S. government and the nuclear industry want to reopen.

Harrison told the World Uranium Hearing that "the radioactive wastes are still very hot
and range 50 to 100 times over the natural background..

One of these mines that leak water, the livestock feed on it. We are left with the waste, the sickness and sometimes no alternatives to restore what was the original. The genocide will never be forgotten."

The program for the Nuclear-Free Future Award ceremony says: "Phil Harrison, born on June 11, 1950, on his mother's side from the Red-House Clan, and on his father's side from the Red-Sand-Run- Into-The- Water Clan, cannot talk about what uranium mining has meant to the Dine without becoming emotional. The man has witnessed too much."

Also to be honored Friday evening with a Nuclear-Free Future Award is Sun Xioadi. He is from the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in China. He probably will not be present because earlier this year, he was "disappeared" grabbed by the authorities after speaking out against the large uranium mining and milling installations in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. A whistleblower, he used to work in the uranium operations there. As the Nuclear-Free Future Award program says of him:

"One man who has constantly spoken out despite state repression is Sun Xiadoi. The Chinese have taken no preventative measures to protect local human and animal life from uranium contamination. Tibetan medical workers report that an assortment of radioactivity- related cancers and immune system diseases account for nearly half of
the deaths in the region." It quotes Tensin Tsultrium, spokesman for the Central Tibetan Administration, which is in exile in India, as saying: "Tibetans have no say on such projects since natural resources are the property of the state and protests relating to environmental issues by Tibetans have led to persecutions. "

The horror is, indeed, now all over the world.

And it is very close to where we are now: Los Alamos National Laboratory where, in fact, the nuclear monster began.

Another honest person to be honored with a Nuclear-Free Future Friday evening will be Ed Grothus who quit his job at Los Alamos back in 1969 to be become an anti-nuclear activist. Ed, says the program for the Nuclear Free-Future Award, currently has plans to install two stone obelisks at the entrance to the town of Los Alamos.

They will read: "Welcome to Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States of America, the city of fire. Our fires are brighter than a thousand suns. It was once believed that only God could destroy the world, but scientists working in Los Alamos first harnessed the power of the atom. The power released through fission and fusion gives men the ability to commence the destruction of all life on earth."

It is ironic and outrageous that Los Alamos National Laboratory, just a few miles away, sits amid some of the most spiritual people and places in the world.

It is ironic and outrageous that native people are especially victimized, people who, as
an American Indian Movement activist said years ago, "share, in essence, the worldview that all of nature is sacred and alive and that our role as human beings is to help preserve the balance by living in tune with the spirit that infuses all things."

"This is the wisdom," says the program for this week's Nuclear-Free Future Award, "that must be transfused to today's centers of decision-making before it's too late."

Let me close with some words from a member of my tribe, a Jew like me, the late Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was for years on the wrong path he was the "father" of the U.S. nuclear navy, the person in charge of construction of the first nuclear power plant built in the United States, in Shippingport in Pennsylvania but in the end he regretted very much what he did. In a farewell address upon his retirement, Rickover told a committee of Congress in 1982: "I'll be philosophical. Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on earth: that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn't have any life fish or anything. Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the entire system reduced and made it possible for some for some form of life to begin."

"Now," Rickover went on, "when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible. Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has life” he was speaking of the "negative particles of life" that as Anna Rondon related, the Creator warned about” in some cases for billions of years, and I think there the human race is going to wreck itself, and it's far more important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it." As for nuclear weaponry, the "lesson of history," said the retiring admiral, is that in war nations "will use" whatever weaponry they have."

Thank you. Let's talk.

***

Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at the State University of New York who has
pioneered the combining of investigative reporting and environmental journalism in a variety of media. He coordinates the Media & Communications Program at the State University of New York's College at Old Westbury. Among the six books he has authored are: Power Crazy; The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat To Our Planet; and Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed To Know About Nuclear Power. He has given speeches on energy and environmental issues around the world.
He has long been active in television and is program director and vice president of
EnviroVideo, a New York-based TV company that produces environmental documentaries and interview and news programs. He narrated and wrote EnviroVideo' s award-winning documentaries The Push To Revive Nuclear Power; Nukes In Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens and Three Mile Island Revisited. He is host of EnviroVideo' s Enviro Close-Up aired nationally on Free Speech TV, the Dish Satellite Network and on cable TV systems across the country. His magazine and newspaper articles have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Miami Herald, The Village Voice, Extra!, E, The Environmental Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The Nation, The Progressive, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, The Christian Science Monitor, The Crisis, Mother Jones and The Ecologist. He is an associate and a member of the board of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. He is also a member of the board of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. Honors he has received for his journalism include the George Polk, James Aronson and John Peter Zenger Awards.