Navajo uranium miners faced disproportionate contamination and disease burdens

Evidence

The Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the USA, was home to uranium mining for much of the cold war. Yet the mining companies paid Navajo miners less than the national norm, did not enforce basic safety standards in Navajo mines as they did elsewhere (such as repairing mine-shaft ventilators), left large contaminated tailings piles throughout the reservation, and discharged radioactive water into surface and well water supplies. Other uranium mining operations in the region certainly had problems, but the Navajos were disproportionately impacted; wells on the reservation are still contaminated, studies have shown lung cancer risk is doubled for people living near tailings piles, and organ cancer rates for Navajo teens are seventeen times the national average (see Pasternak 2006). — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice, 213

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds distributive environmental injustice (the reader’s core typology) with concrete disproportionate-burden data applicable across Eco-Justice and Environmental Racism readings. — connects to: Distributive environmental justice requires equal treatment across race, class, and education. — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 211; Navajo uranium legacy produces cancer rates far above the US average. — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 54; Native lands hold two-thirds of US uranium and a third of western low-sulfur coal — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 943 (+1 more)