By Anthony Advincula

Wayne Namingha, a Native American artist, lightly brushed intricate streaks of black and brown paint on a wooden Hopi eagle-dancer doll that he spent weeks carving.

At an Indian market in Santa Fe, NM one recent Friday, he put bird feathers around the doll’s head, a tribute to the Hopi Katchina tribe’s religious connection with land and sky.

Namingha, 27, makes traditional art in a modern time, yet he has no website to promote his collection of carved dolls. There is no Internet access, no electricity and no public water system in Kykotsmovi, where he lives. It is a 403.43 square mile stretch of Navajo Nation, in northeastern Arizona, that has few of the basic necessities that most take for granted.

“We had to dig deep in the ground to get water,” he said.

Like many Native Americans who live on reservations and rely on groundwater sources, Namingha is prone to serious health problems caused by uranium contamination. He may not be aware of it because he can neither feel nor see the radioactivity.

Kykotsmovi is on one of the reservations in the Southwest that has been identified as a site of radioactive decay, a byproduct of more than a century of uranium mining in the West. Despite the known hazards, a cleanup project is nowhere in sight.

In the Navajo Nation alone there are over 1,000 abandoned uranium sites, according to a report from the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining, a community-based organization in Crowpoint, NM. The radioactivity these mining facilities has left behind will continue to pollute the land and groundwater supplies for the next 100 years.

And when the wind blows or when it pours rain, the uranium tailings areblown into the air or washed into the rivers, affecting the neighboring communities.

“Before these uranium mining plants came, there was a zero case of cancer in the reservation areas. Now we see an increasing number of people there who are dying of different kinds of cancer,” said Don Hancock, director of thSouthwest Research and Information Center (SRIC) in Albuquerque, NM.

In Church Rock, near New Mexico Highway 566, where about a thousand new housing developments were constructed during the 1980s, concerns were raised about high levels of radon, a radioactive gas and carcinogen. Validating the claims, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) team placed radon cans and checked for indoor radon. The study found about 45 houses out of 173 tested positive for high levels of radioactivity.

Despite the many studies that revealed the early deaths and illnesses of former uranium mine workers and residents of mining community, as well as the severe damage to the reservation’s cultural and sacred sites, several legislators tried to introduce bills to invite new uranium and coal mining operations to New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest.

Some of these bills may have appeared to clean up abandoned uranium mines, though environmentalists say their primary objective is to impose new costs and responsibilities for regulatory agencies and, therefore, may limit the ability to recover cleanup costs from liable parties.

According to Hancock, about “half a dozen of these bills were introduced in

Arizona and New Mexico over the last two years,” but not one has succeeded thus far. For example, one of the bills — SB 487 (Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fees, introduced by New Mexico Sen. David Ulibarri) passed in the state legislature, but was vetoed by Governor Bill Richardson in 2008.

Aside from legislative bills, Hancock added that a number of private corporations have also attempted to obtain permits to dig on reservations or gain water rights.

“These permits are just a pre-cursor to acquire access to land and water.

Once they have the permit, who knows what these corporations are going to do next?” Hancock added in a separate interview.

There are uranium and coal mining projects proposed in New Mexico, to date, promising that the state would benefit from more than $30 billion in taxes and provide about 250,000 employment opportunities for residents,

according to the private mining companies that have shown increasing interest in New Mexico’s uranium reserves. These projects, however, have been challenged in federal appeals court.

Hydro Resources, Inc.’s (HRI) Crownpoint Solution Mining Project, for example, was given a state license by the New Mexico Environment Department on December 20, 2001. But four years later, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruled that the 160-acre patch of land in southern New Mexico, where the mining project is located, is actually part of a dependent Indian community and, thus, considered to be part of Indian Country.

The EPA decision means that HRI would have to apply for a federal – not a state – permit. HRI appealed, and the case is currently in the 10^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for review.

Environmental advocates and community groups claim these benefits are not real, and believe the focus should be on addressing the pervasive health and environmental impacts of past uranium mining and milling.

“The $30 billion that industry claims would come to the state in a new round of uranium mining is a gross exaggeration built around indefensible economic assumptions,” states a 2008 report conducted by Prof. Thomas Michael of the University of Montana. “It assumes that uranium prices return to the $90 to $100 per pound range and stay there indefinitely,” that almost all of New Mexico’s uranium reserves would be mined, and that all of the value of the uranium extracted and processed accrues to New Mexico workers and citizens.

“Finally the $30 billion is based on adding up assumed benefits over a 30-year period, rather than focusing on the annual benefits. If more defensible assumptions are made, the upper end of the potential annual direct benefit to New Mexico workers will be only about two-tenths of one percent of that $30 billion claimed,” the report added.

The fight by environmental groups and advocates against legislation and industries that support mining in the Southwest has an uphill battle.

Chris Shuey, a former journalist turned community activist, said that some of the Traditional Cultural Property (TCP) hearings, at least in New Mexico, have created an overt racial divide, resulting in physical violence and harassment against minorities.

TCP hearings determine whether a property or place is eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic places because of its significance to the history of a community as well as its traditional beliefs and practices. Once listed under TCP statutes, the areas deemed sacred and inhabited by indigenous Native American peoples are the most likely be protected from environmental damages.

According to Schuey, a man who was actively supporting the protection of sacred properties was seriously beaten this summer. The incident even made headlines in mainstream publications.

“If you attend the hearings, it’s really obvious – you can see it – that on one side, mostly Anglos, are the ones who support these mining industries, and the minorities on the other,” Shuey added.

Hancock, the SRIC director, described that the uranium issue in the Southwest as “very complicated,” and predicted that “it will remain a timely question for a long, long time.”

“There is no solution to an eternal problem, but there are ways to deal with [it],” he said.

But since parts of reservation areas are contaminated with radioactive waste and the cleanup could take many years to finish, some ask If residents should relocate to protect their health.

Roger Clark, air and energy director for the Grand Canyon Trust, A nonprofit conservation group based in Flagstaff, AZ, said that relocation is certainly not an answer. Native Americans own the land, where their ancestors have lived there for hundreds of years, and their cultural heritage is directly attached to it.

“Dislocation could be a short-term solution. While working on the cleanup, water can be brought to these reservation areas. That way, residents will not depend on contaminated groundwater,” Clark said.

State funding for the cleanup projects, he added, should be increased, new mining activity stopped, and those affected by uranium contamination must be compensated.

“But, you know, no amount of money in the world can compensate for the loss of life, loss of homes, and loss of their lands,” Clark said.