quence of drinking contaminated water and eating lichen that
still gets a pretty good buzz from a Geiger counter. And just
o=shore, in the sediment of the second-largest inland lake in
Canada, among other post-mining heavy metals are uraniferous
granites, the coarse, sandy radioactive e<uvia of uranium
extraction. So the Dene are naturally resistant to renewed mining in their area and are vigorously opposing Ur-Energy’s
request to begin prospecting for uranium at Screech Lake, about
two hundred kilometers east of Great Slave. Michael
Vanleeuwan, a thirteen-year-old Screech Lake boy, made a plea
before the Dene Tribal Council. “If the caribou die, we die too,”
he told his elders who are pondering the project. “If we eat sick
caribou, we become sick too.”
Vanleeuwan’s elders are aware of big uranium’s trail of broken promises from Australia to Kazakhstan. Dene representatives have attended two international conferences on the subject
of uranium mining on indigenous lands, the >rst in Salzburg,
Austria, in 1992, where delegates exchanged experiences with
uranium mining and issued a declaration opposing it on indigenous lands worldwide. The second meeting, held in December
2006 in Window Rock, Arizona, was hosted by the Dine Navajo
of New Mexico and Arizona, who are close linguistic (and
almost certainly genetic) relatives of the faraway Dene of
northern Canada. At Window Rock, where delegates dedicated
themselves to a nuclear-free future, the Dene witnessed the devastating health and economic injuries su=ered by the Dine as a
result of America’s >rst uranium boom.
From the early 1940s to the late 1970s, during the height of the
Cold War, when arming its nuclear arsenal was a high priority for
American defense, over eleven hundred small uranium mines
were opened on and adjacent to Navajo land in Arizona and New
Mexico. Nearly 4 million tons of uranium were extracted by about
ment to open the mine “was arranged by pushing people, and does
not accurately reflect the wishes of the aboriginal people who own that
country.” In 2005, after a long and heated battle, the Mirrar people
fought off the proposal to open a uranium mine at Jabiluka. But now,
with demand for uranium on the rise, the threat is once again looming
on the horizon.
With some 16 percent of Australian land controlled by aboriginal
people and with many of the mine sites in the aboriginal heartland, the
upcoming pressure on communities to buckle to the largest mining
companies in the world will be daunting. Coinciding with the proposed
ramp-up of the nuclear industry is the negotiation of land settlements
for a number of these aboriginal first nations. If history is any indicator,
many of these land-rights settlements will mirror what happened in
>fteen thousand Navajo miners. Mining was unregulated then,
and mine safety rarely considered. Like the miners of Great
Slave Lake, hundreds of Navajo miners contracted cancer, while
massive spills left huge tracts of land unlivable for centuries.
Today, about >ve hundred unclosed mine shafts, tailing piles,
and storage ponds remain ecodisasters in waiting, and a large
section of the reservation is still a massive Superfund site.
In 2005, when they heard the words nuclear renaissance, the
Navajo Tribal Council, by a vote of sixty-three to nineteen, passed
the Dine Natural Resources Protection Act, forbidding future
uranium prospecting or mining on or adjacent to Navajo land.
But in May 2006, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
granted Hydro Resources Inc. (HRI) of Lewisville, Texas, permission to open four in-situ leach mines near Church Rock, New
Mexico, site of the worst radionuclide spill in American history, a
single event that contaminated every well >fty miles downstream
and left one of every four wells on Navajo land radioactive.
Now the Navajo are suing to stop them. It is the >rst time that
any U.S. community has challenged NRC approval of a uranium
mine. In May 2008, the case went before the U.S. 10th Circuit
Court of Appeals in Denver, where two of the three judges hearing the case expressed open disbelief that a federal agency
would approve a project that seemed almost certain to contaminate the sole source of drinking water for almost >fteen thousand people and could release gaseous radionuclides into air
that already exceeds federal radiation limits. HRI and the NRC
deny the danger. The court is expected to rule on the petition in
December 2008.
HRI President Paul Willmott argues that the proposed in-situ
leach technology “represents an acceptable and safe alternative to
traditional mining methods historically used to recover uranium
in New Mexico.” In-situ leach mining never breaks ground.
Alaska, where the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act—promoted by
oil companies that deemed it necessary to negotiate some agreements
between themselves and aboriginal people—established Alaskan
Native corporations, which today create a complex set of divided loyal-ties and communities. This is perhaps best illustrated by the case of the
Gwich’in people, who find themselves not only opposing oil companies
that want to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but also
Alaskan Native corporations, whose income has derived from the
exploitation of the land and its resources.
There is another prophecy that is relevant to this story, though.
Ojibwe legends speak of a time when our people will have a choice
between two paths: one path is well worn and scorched, but the second
path is not well traveled and it is green.
