It was peaceful.
It was our home.
And we used to have farming down here and up that way.
And I used to play in that perennial stream.
The sheep, the cows and the horses they all drank from there.
Nobody told us not to.
The Navajo tribe, I wonder if they had any idea what was going to happen here.
For over forty years, this Navajo community in Church Rock, New Mexico
has been living with a toxic legacy.
The mining industry poisoned their water, soil, and air...
abandoned hundreds of uranium mines...
and turned its back on the biggest radioactive spill in US history.
Let's go back here.
Of course you see the pile.
Right there that big one that looks like a mesa or a hill.
This isn't a natural hill.
It's a pile of uranium mining waste,
a remnant of the industry that started here during World War II.
"On the New Mexico Desert, allied scientists unleashed its stupendous power."
In the early 1940s, the US developed top-secret plans to build an atomic bomb.
"The greatest secret of the war..."
And for that, they needed a steady, domestic source of a radioactive substance called uranium.
From World War II through the Cold War, the US incentivized uranium mining to build up domestic nuclear power.
By the 1950s, there was a uranium boom in the Southwest.
Navajo Nation the largest Native American territory in the US sits right in the middle.
And it was quickly swept into the uranium mining industry.
"Vast deposits of uranium have been discovered in the Navajo hills..."
The US government hired private mining companies
that often leased land without compensating Navajo Nation fairly.
But the tribal government let them in
because it offered the prospect of economic growth and jobs for its residents.
By the 1950s, there were 750 mines in the area employing thousands of people from Navajo Nation.
This area, along Red Water Pond Road, eventually became one of those hotspots
with two big mining operations setting up shop here.
The only job that was really available in our area was the mines.
And I got a job there in October of 1975 as a surface laborer.
As a single parent I had to find a job.
And they gave me a job as a probe technician.
Mining jobs for Native Americans were often on the frontlines...
building the mines, blasting, digging, and transporting the yellow uranium ore.
But what they didn't know at the time was that decades earlier
studies had already linked uranium mining to lung cancer.
"Many radon daughters are retained in the lungs..."
And the importance of protecting mine workers from radioactivity was well documented.
"It is necessary to have fans capable of providing plenty of fresh air to all..."
Yet many Navajo workers say they had little protective gear,
no ventilation in the mines,
and no warning of how hazardous uranium could be to their health.
I was breathing in dust, mine dust, all that uranium dust.
That smell from the explosives --
you could smell it coming down and give you a headache.
By the 1960s, cases of lung cancer started appearing in Navajo Nation,
where the disease had been nearly nonexistent.
And it wasn't just the mine workers.
Residents near Red Water Pond Road, sandwiched between those two mines, eventually started to get sick, too.
We're right here. And so you can see Kerr-McGee area and then of course UNC.
And these are the local people that have homes in the area.
People, children especially, getting sick with asthma problems,
and people were having cancer.
We didn't know about the, the radiation.
That changed in the summer of 1979.
UNC stored its toxic uranium waste in a pond nearby.
The site was called a tailings pond,
which held several hundred million gallons of radioactive sludge, or tailings.
Early on July 16th the dam on the pond broke,
letting out over one thousand tons of uranium tailings and millions of gallons of wastewater into the Rio Puerco.
It was a creek bed locally known as the Perky,
that was often used as a source of drinking water for locals and livestock.
I started hearing people talking. Did you see that? Did you see the mill? Did you see the dam?
I looked in that direction and
sure enough, there was a huge break.
There was crowds of people out there, but never really knowing
you know, that 94 million gallons of contaminated waste had just gone down the Perky.
The Puerco was radioactive.
One government report showed radioactivity levels in the Puerco at over one thousand times what is allowed in drinking water.
But at the time of the spill, newspapers characterized
the area as "sparsely populated" and that the spill "presents no immediate health hazard."
Many Navajo residents, in a community of about 100,
said they weren't warned about using the river or about the spill...
until several days later.
For the mining company, there had been warning signs.
An Army Corps of Engineers report showed that cracking was identified by the company in 1978...
the year before the spill.
The UNC also knew the dam "did not incorporate all the necessary protective measures.
After the spill, the company, and federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency evaded responsibility,
and just one percent of the solid radioactive waste was cleaned up within three months of the spill.
This was a stark comparison to the US response to another nuclear accident,
which happened less than four months before the Church Rock spill.
It was the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania.
After the accident, President Carter visited the site.
Cleanup began quickly and those affected in the nearby, largely white community...
were compensated by the plant.
Back in Church Rock, where the spill released three times as much radiation as Three Mile Island,
the residents were barely compensated
and the largest radioactive spill in US history was overlooked.
Over here, you know, we're like, treated like a third world.
It's not cleaned up.
It's still here. It's been here 40 years.
They don't see us as human beings. We're like, we're disposable.
While there still hasn't been a comprehensive health study done in the area,
there is a clearer picture of the effects of uranium mining in Navajo Nation.
Various studies have linked mining areas in Navajo Nation to higher rates
of cancer, kidney and cardiovascular disease, and birth defects.
I got lymphoma in my immune system. And for me somehow it became double whammy.
I lived there and I worked there.
I am certain,
that we drank contaminated water all our lives from the very beginning.
The mine spill did not only happen on that one day, July 16th.
It began way back in the early 60s because they were releasing all this untreated mine water.
It flowed 24/7 and on into the Puerco.
In Navajo, they say Bessie Kay, meaning we literally walked in it, you know.
These companies coming in and taking the raw resources
for them it's like money, money, money. They're taking at the sacrifice of people.
People died, sacrificed their life.
In the 1980s, as demand for nuclear energy declined, the mines shut down.
Today, there are more than 500 abandoned sites,
many surrounded by massive piles of uranium waste.
For decades, residents like Edith have been fighting to get them removed.
She helped form an organization called the Red Water Pond Road Community.
This was our very first banner, we left
it up there and we just didn't take down.
And then of course Leetso Doda, means no uranium.
She helped with the community's own research.
Back in 2005, around that time this is what we came up with
when we decided to butcher a sheep.
We opened it up but the fat was like yellow.
She spoke at multiple government hearings.
"We want clean water and clean air for our precious children and grandchildren,
so that they will have the same opportunity to once again
play in the meadows and canyons of my childhood. Thank you."
Eventually, the EPA, and the mining company, now owned by General Electric,
committed to a cleanup plan. But there was a catch.
It could take at least seven more years to clear the radioactive waste at the mine.
As for the Puerco, they never presented a cleanup plan for the water.
In the meantime, the EPA wants the residents
of Red Water Pond Road to move to the nearby city of Gallup, which means they would have
to live outside of Navajo Nation and adjust to an entirely different way of life.
That's like the Trail of Tears. It's like the long walk.
Indian people are being removed and Indian people are being uprooted.
And to me, that's genocide.
The residents of Red Water Pond Road have another solution:
a plan to create an off-grid, solar-powered community in a nearby mesa.
And this is the site where we were hoping that
we would move everybody, but it hasn't happened.
Navajo Tribal Utility Authority said it's gonna cost too much money to run a power line up there.
Without a better solution, dozens of people have already taken the offer to voluntarily relocate.
But for now, Edith and a handful of her neighbors
are staying put and continuing the long fight for their home.
They just came in,
tore up the place,
and left that contamination behind.
And they really don't want to do anything about it. They don't care. The government doesn't care.
But we have connections with the land.
And we have you know, stories of where we're from.
We still live here.
We still call this place home.