TIMOTHY BENALLY
May 4th 2006
John LeKay: When did you become aware of the hazardous conditions of
the uranium mines in Nevada and New Mexico?
Timothy Benally: In February 1991, I started working for a program that
was called the Office of Navajo Uranium Workers (ONUW). The office
dealt with identifying the Navajo miners and the uranium mines. This was
when I became aware of the [uranium] sickness that had caused a lot of
deaths. In the course of identifying the miners, we went out to all the
possible areas where these miners lived and we found out a lot of them
had died.
JL: Really.
TB: That first year, yes.
JL: What year was this?
TB: That was in 1992.
JL: Do you know if other people were affected by this contaminated dust
and water, who were not miners?
TB: Well… The funny thing about this whole uranium mining -- I was a
uranium miner myself - is that we were never told that this was a
dangerous ore that we were digging.
At one point we started working in Colorado, my uncle and I, and the
contractor that was operating the mine told us to go to a trailer in
Naturita, Colorado. So we went there and they gave us pulmonary function
testing, and they gave us chest x-rays, and so forth. Then they told us
we were fine, that it was just a medical check up.
We found out in 1994-95 that the Indian
Health Service and the Public Health Service had actually been doing
research on us. We did not know about it before that. This is how I
found out we had been digging out dangerous ore. [Other people found
out at that time also.] When we interviewed the Navajo people who had
worked in the uranium mines, that was what they told us. They told us,
“The government just shut their eyes on us. We have an agreement with
the United States government, through our treaty with them. They
promised they would take care of our heath and provide an education for
us. That is what they said. What happened? That is the big question. Why
didn't they tell us that it was not good to work in the uranium mines?”
JL: A very important question.
TB; Yes, and today it is
still a big question. Even though
Congress apologized, when they passed the Radiation Exposure
Compensation Act (RECA) in 1990, they didn't explain why they did
those things they did to us during those periods. The only thing they
said was that “national security” is what caused all this chaos.
JL: The national security, with regards to not telling you this uranium
was dangerous.
TB: Yes. [Our government was in the middle of the Cold War after WWII,
and that was what put the United States at risk, according to the
government. That was what they told us.]
JL: What about other people that lived near the mines. Were there other
people that got sick from the water or the dust?
TB: Yes, there were family members, wives, children. [This became a
problem] especially when the miners started working outside the
reservation, in other areas [such as] Colorado, Utah, and the Grants
(New Mexico) area. A lot of people moved there and lived right at the
mining areas. When we did the interviews with the family members, they
said they were exposed also and they were not included in the
compensation. And they asked, “Why is that?” That is the question.
JL: Yes, that is the question.
TB: Yes. The only people that were included under RECA were the miners,
the millers, and the haulers, those that hauled uranium.
JL: Did they say why the family members were not included?
TB: Well, the explanation was that these people didn't work, digging
the uranium, so they had no reason to compensate them.
JL: Do you know if these people, the family members, got sick through
the dust, or through the aquifers and underground water?
TB: The families blamed both. The families say when the man, the
husband, was working at the mines, the wife went into the mine and got
water from the mine. This is how they cooked their food. They also drank
this water. Sometimes they used the same water to do their laundry. At
the camp sites, in those days, they didn't have laundry mats like they
do now. If you go into town these days you see a lot of people doing
their laundry. In those days, maybe there was one or two in Farmington.
But at that time the people did their wash at home and they say they
were exposed there. The children were exposed playing in the mines and
playing on the waste that was piled up in the mine area.
JL: Is there any cattle that graze close to the mines. That you got beef
from, meat to cook?
TB: In the earlier years -- 1950s and 60s -- people raised their own
meat. The main source of meat that we had in those days was mutton.
When the government was doing the testing
of the bombs in Nevada and New Mexico, the fallout reached our area.
Also the mines were not very well protected. So when the air blew out of
the mines after they blasted, the Navajo people think the air was
contaminated by the uranium dust that fell where the people lived, and
on their food and water. I don't know if that's true. But the water … We
had a study done by an EPA person, through the Army Corps of Engineers.
The EPA came out and did a water study in our area. Across most of the
Navajo reservation, they did water studies. And they found out that a
lot of the water on the Navajo Nation is contaminated with uranium and
radium and other toxins.
JL: Is this underground water?
TB: Yes, mostly from underground springs.
JL: And it was contaminated?
TB: Yes, some of the wells were contaminated.
JL: Did they do in-situ leach mining?
TB: No, we didn't have leach mining in our area. But the uranium was
disturbed in the mountains, in the hills. And when the water that was
coming off the top of the mountain, from rain and snow, all flowed down
into the mines, the water then ran off the mines into the washes. The
people then used this spring runoff to water their crops. This is how it
works.
JL: And people were drinking this water?
TB: Yes.
JL: How about now. How is the water now?
TB: It's fortunate that we have Indian Health Service. They are really
taking the bull by the horn, I guess, and trying to correct some of the
water problems. They are drilling for water and making sure it is safe
to drink.
Today the water in most of our
reservation communities is purified water and is piped to our homes. So
we have running water, instead of having to haul or carry water
ourselves from the wells. It's
all in the pipe. So now we just turn on the faucet and we get our water
that way.
JL: So you live on the Navajo reservation?
TB: Yes. But there are some communities that still don't have running
water yet.
JL: The uranium mines that were on the
reservations. Did your people get any of that money?
TB: The BIA made a contact, an agreement with the tribal council. We
have a tribal council of eighty-eight members who represent us, one from
each community, more or less. They [the tribal council] are the ones
that get the money. When the money is deposited in our account [the
tribe's account], it is distributed back to all the communities. We have
a chapter form of government. We have 110 chapters on the Navajo Nation
and they all get an equal amount of money from any resources that are
contracted out by the tribe to companies. That way we get some of the
money, yes. But, as individuals, a lot of people don't benefit from
that. Because the money that is appropriated from the tribe to the
community is usually for specific projects that not everybody benefits
from. We have what you call “colonialism.”
JL: Colonialism?
TB: Yes, colonialism. That's what we've
got here, a kind of colonial relationship with the federal government.
JL: It sounds like it.
TB: Yes, but that's the way the [federal] government set it up. In
1922, some contactors discovered oil in the reservation in New Mexico.
So the government, the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs], decided to select
council men who could sign contracts on behalf of the Navajo people. The
BIA first selected three or four council delegates to deal with this new
discovery of oil on the reservation. And for a long time our district,
the Shiprock district, was the main source of revenue for the entire
Navajo Nation. Later the tribe leased coal mines and created other
programs that provide revenue.
JL: Was Kerr McGee one of the coal mining companies?
TB: I don't know if they were a coal mining company. But they were
involved in uranium, and oil and gas. I think in 1960, they took over a
lot of mining operations. They stayed with it until all the uranium had
gone or had been depleted and then they closed up and left.
The Navajo people are not like other
people, because they like to live where they were born. And they stay
there. We stay at the same area we were born. We don't live in big
clusters, like a town, where
they have streets and so forth. We live separately in open country. Our
post office is in the trading post. So when we go to get our mail, we
have to travel out there, anywhere from 10 to 15 miles to get to
the trading post. That's how we live.
JL: How many people live on the reservation?
TB: Around 180,000. There are some towns, some communities like
Shiprock, that draw people from other communities and they work there.
They work there and other places. Shiprock community tries to
accommodate them by building more residential areas.
JL: Going back to the mines. Did they clean up the mines?
TB: Yes, after we hollered for more than 10 years, I think. When the
uranium was exhausted in 1986, the mining companies just left without
even telling the people in our area that they were done. They just
disappeared. We complained that they left all the waste and left the
mines open. We had to get Congress to act on it. And they finally did.
There is the Abandoned Mine Lands (AML) act that the government created
some time ago. The government said, “Work with this group (AML). They
will do the reclamation for you.” The local AML started working on the
reclamation in 1988, 89, 90. They went and evaluated all the mines that
were abandoned and they identified the worst ones, the second worse, and
the least hazardous to human beings. That's how they rated them. Then
the communities - in our case Shiprock AML -- asked for money through
the federal AML for cleanup. AML appropriated money through the
contactor that wanted to do the reclamation in those areas. The
contractors had to be chosen and they did the work. Finally. But there
are still some mines that are not reclaimed yet.
JL: How far are these un-reclaimed mines
from the reservation?
TB: They are on the reservation. Most of the mines we are
talking about are on the reservation. Those in Colorado are off the
reservation. The ones we are talking about are on the Navajo
reservation, in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico.
JL: Did they say why these abandoned
uranium mines on the reservations haven't been reclaimed?
TB: The federal AML has procedures. And they tell the local AML that
things have to be done in a particular way.” All the contractors do in
reclaiming mines is that they close them up. They leave a lot of waste
outside the mines. They reclaim only a certain part around the mine
hole. Do you understand?
JL: Yes.
TB: Then the rest of it, the contractors don't clean up. At the mines up
in Cove (Arizona), near where we live, a lot of low grade waste was
tossed over the side. We have been saying that it needs to be reclaimed,
the waste that was dumped over the mountain. Congress said, "That's
doesn't need to be reclaimed. That's low grade ore." Our contention is
that the waste gets washed down the river, when we have runoff from the
mountain, when it rains and when the snow melts. It causes the waste to
flow down the wash and onto the farmer's lands down below. That's how a
lot of the people were exposed, through their diet, when they eat
something that was contaminated by the water as it was growing. All of
the uranium waste was not reclaimed; that's why we are still
experiencing a lot of heath problems.
JL: What kind of farms do you have? What kind of vegetables do you grow?
TB: We do what the government calls
dry-farming. There is no permanent source of water to do irrigation. So
we irrigate with runoff water in the spring.
We're under the federal government. They
have trust responsibility for the people. The Department of Interior has
a program called the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The BIA are the ones that
send people out here. They give us agents and area directors and so
forth. They are local leaders on behalf of the federal government. They
“look out for us” and we work with them with what we need. A lot of
times we get what we need, but most likely, we get a portion of what we
need.
JL: This is the Bureau of Indian Affairs who is deciding on what you
need?
TB: Yes.
JL: They make that decision?
TB: Yes. Like the highway, we have a highway that runs into our
community that was built in 1986. Right now it's all broken up. When
you get on the high way you hear something like a drum beat, a steady
bucking one right after another. That's because the government doesn't
appropriate enough money to do a good job on building our highway. We
have to live with what we get.
JL: The uranium mines that were on the
reservations. Did your people get any of that money?
TB: The BIA made a contact, an agreement with the tribal council. We
have a tribal council of eighty-eight members who represent us, one from
each community, more or less. They [the tribal council] are the ones
that get the money. When the money is deposited in our account [the
tribe's account], it is distributed back to all the communities. We have
a chapter form of government. We have 110 chapters on the Navajo Nation
and they all get an equal amount of money from any resources that are
contracted out by the tribe to companies. That way we get some of the
money, yes. But, as individuals, a lot of people don't benefit from
that. Because the money that is appropriated from the tribe to the
community is usually for specific projects that not everybody benefits
from. We have what you call “colonialism.”
JL: Colonialism?
TB: Yes, colonialism. That's what we've got here, a kind of colonial
relationship with the federal government.
JL: It sounds like it.
TB: Yes, but that's the way the [federal] government set it up. In
1922, some contactors discovered oil in the reservation in New Mexico.
So the government, the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs], decided to select
council men who could sign contracts on behalf of the Navajo people. The
BIA first selected three or four council delegates to deal with this new
discovery of oil on the reservation. And for a long time our district,
the Shiprock district, was the main source of revenue for the entire
Navajo Nation. Later the tribe leased coal mines and created other
programs that provide revenue.
JL: Was Kerr McGee one of the coal mining companies?
TB: I don't know if they were a coal mining company. But they were
involved in uranium, and oil and gas. I think in 1960, they took over a
lot of mining operations. They stayed with it until all the uranium had
gone or had been depleted and then they closed up and left.
