Virtual Exhibition
I was raised in the Mormon Church. I was taught to be silent – to not question those in authority – and to sing the anthem, “All is Well.” As a child living in Southern Utah, I became part of a disposable people. Beginning in 1951, the federal government conducted aboveground testing of nuclear weapons in the deserts of Nevada. The nuclear fallout from those tests blew eastward, downwind, falling in Utah. All was well. The Eisenhower administration and the Mormon hierarchy believed that the risk of injury to a few thousand people due to nuclear testing in the name of national security was worth the sacrifice.
In 1956, a fifty-one year old Dutch-American miner from Colorado, Tom Van Arsdale, suffocated of carcinoma of the left lung, after having worked in uranium mines for over a decade. He left a wife and several young children. Van Arsdale had worked for Union Carbide Nuclear, formerly known as the U.S. Vanadium Corporation. His death was just one of hundreds of those who worked in the uranium mining/milling industry. It was caused by a silence, a colluding between the federal government’s Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the uranium industry. Because of profits and national security, they kept their workers in the dark about what was happening inside their bodies. Moreover, the AEC accepted no responsibility for the health, safety and welfare of the miners and mill workers.
And thus a silence pervaded over the landscape of the Four Corners.
One feels that silence today. It is palpable, both geographically and historically, from the slow trudge of the forced Long Walk to Bosque Redondo and the thirty years of uranium exploitation on the Navajo reservation to the radioactive waste left on the land and in the waters of Northern Arizona.
And there was a silence in the dust as it hung in the air inside the mines and in the mills.
And a silence in the cool water the miners drank as it dripped down the sandstone walls of the shafts.
And there was a silence by the scientists and medical teams who monitored the miners, having been told to keep quiet as they tested Navajo and non-Native bodies, collected their urine, took blood samples and chest x-rays, and had them spit into cups.
And for economic reasons, there was a silence by Navajo political leaders.
And the silence continued inside the homes the miners returned to each day to shed their clothes, letting their pants drop to the floor, the yellowcake dust collecting in the air.
And after the mining boom was over, that deadly silence remained, exhaling from the tailings that were crushed and mixed with concrete as new homes were built, foundations, footings and floors were laid, and plaster for stucco walls was applied.
And there was silence in the tailings piles the children played on and in the wells and ponds where they swam.
And there continues to be a silence in the individual families as to what was and is happening, today: the cancers, the suffering, the deaths, because of a strong cultural taboo and the tradition to not speak of the dead and the dying.
And the winds continue to blow across the land and the summer rains continue to wash the uranium laden dust, collecting in the watering holes used for thirsty sheep – flesh into food – and in the flora used for medicinal herbs and dyes for wool blankets.
It is invisible. It has no odor. It is silent. It enters bodies as they breathe the air, as they drink the water, as they eat the mutton, as they sleep on the sheepskins in their hogans.
And what is the responsibility of the artist? To give form to this silence, to become visual storytellers to the silent history of a people, their trauma, their hope.
Shawn Skabelund – Curator
Traveling Between Art and Science
Ann Futterman Collier, PhD with Davona Blackhorse, M. A.
“When our Diné (Navajo) men entered the Uranium mines, they did so to support their families in a changing society. Our Diné men were strong in mind, body, and spirit; our children had an overwhelming majority of healthy Fathers, Grandfathers, Uncles, and Brothers. Generations later, our men are still leaving us but this time through sickness and death. When the men began to disappear, war was waged on our children. Taken from their homes, our children were subjected to severe physical and mental abuse in an effort to ‘assimilate’ them to non-indigenous society. These colonization techniques have caused intergenerational trauma. The women and children long for their once spirited husbands and fathers. The women now struggle to heal the families suffering from a wounded soul. Our medicine and culture has been disrupted because our healing medicine, animals, and homes have been poisoned with the land. This is why we are still here continuing to fight because we are loyal to their suffering.” Davona Blackhorse, M.A.
Hope and Trauma in a Poisoned Land is a community engaged visual narrative that evolved from a series of synchronistic events. Synchronicity, a term defined by Carl Jung, suggests that coincidences are not random. Events that happen in close proximity are connected, albeit in unknown ways. When the seeds of Hope and Trauma were first sown, I was a new faculty member at Northern Arizona University. I previously had enjoyed a long and productive career in cross-cultural and clinical psychology, both in the USA and the Pacific Rim. I was a professional listener who helped indigenous and refugee communities clarify what needed attention (especially with mental health); I then worked with them to develop best practice programs that advanced their mission. As I was new to Northern Arizona, I had little knowledge about the environmental concerns and intergenerational issues facing Diné people.
I had a chance dinner with a group that included the author Doug Brugge, PhD, MS, who wrote The Navajo People and Uranium Mining. As we talked about his work interviewing Navajo families, I learned that there are over one thousand abandoned uranium mines and mills on Navajo Nation, most of these still unmarked. I learned about a little-known legacy of the US nuclear programs: widespread uranium contamination that still exists today. Not only did many miners die as a result of uranium-related illnesses, but their families and communities continued to suffer from cancer and birth defects resulting from contaminated water, food sources and medicinal plants.
I asked Dr. Brugge what had been done to address the psychological implications of these issues. “Nothing,” he said. There was no research and nothing had been written about this topic. Where the story of uranium mining had been kept out of the mainstream, the story about the psychological impact of uranium mining had been kept completely silent.
Then, by chance, I met Davona Blackhorse. She was a young non-traditional Navajo psychology student with four young children who was struggling to finish college. She wanted to get her Ph.D. to make a better life for herself and her children, and to give back to her tribal community. In my course on psychopathology, Davona was frequently outspoken about the intergenerational trauma and abuse that plagued indigenous people and how this was associated with multiple mental health problems including PTSD, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, and depression.
By chance, her uncle Malcolm Benally, a media specialist and research assistant with the Navajo Birth Cohort Study at the University of New Mexico, was a strong ally on the issue. He was an advocate and activist who avidly educated Navajo people about the impact of environmental uranium exposure on the Navajo Nation.
Together, the three of us began to formulate a qualitative research study, hoping to give voices to the stories of indigenous people living in contaminated regions of the Navajo Nation. Our goal was to provide them with mental health assistance. Because I was also a fiber artist and passionate about using the arts, especially textiles, in therapy, we decided to incorporate art making as a way of expression and healing.
Then, by chance, a few months later, I met Shawn Skabelund, an artist and curator focused on incorporating social practice into art. Social practice art is a medium that engages people through interaction and social discourse. Socially engaged, participatory art works through collaborations between individuals, communities, and institutions.
Shawn had a history with social practice art and exhibitions that told stories of devastation to the environment, to people, and to cultures. Shawn and I presented a formal proposal for an art exhibition on the topic of uranium mining contamination to the Flagstaff Arts Council. We met with John Tannous, Executive Director of the Arts Council, who is brilliant as both a visionary and tactical implementer. He had the essential skills to bring all of our ideas to fruition.
Therein, by synchronicity, my four-year journey began with the passionate people behind the Hope and Trauma exhibition. Once our proposal was approved by the Arts Council, we worked with a committee of like-minded professionals to create a training program for artists who wished to participate in the exhibition.
Over four days in October 2016, artists learned about uranium mining, its legacy, and its impact that continues today. The program began with a keynote presentation by Judy Pasternak, author of Yellow Dirt. This was followed by a day of panel discussions and lectures by experts in the field. We were then hosted at the Cameron Chapter House in Cameron, Arizona, by Navajo community members and Milton Tso, Chapter House President. We participated in a traditional sheep butcher, heard stories from families affected by uranium poisoning, and dined together.
On the third day, our group traveled in vans and buses to visit abandoned uranium mines throughout the Cameron area. By the fourth day, our artists were emotionally and mentally exhausted. We attempted to give them space to decompress and process what they had learned, but they were overwhelmed. It was a painful and powerful experience.
Yet, it was essential that our artists understood the issue at a deeper level to create art from an informed place. As a group, our goal has been one of advocacy: to bring to light these horrific issues in the hopes that our larger community can see how uranium mining on Navajo Nation has been associated with ongoing environmental destruction, and how it has contributed to the suffering of many indigenous families, physically, mentally and spiritually.
On this journey, I have been challenged as a mental health provider to stretch out beyond my usual tools of research, program development and evaluation, and psychotherapy. Our tribal communities have seen too many research studies with far too few benefits for them personally.
Yet they have enthusiastically embraced the use of art in Hope and Trauma. The narratives created through art in this exhibition seem to provide a more cohesive, compelling and healing story than my professional writings have in peer-reviewed journals.
I believe our approach engages the very people we want to reach on an intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, and compassionate level. At every step of this journey, we have tried to keep the artists’ focus on listening in order to channel the telling of these heart-wrenching stories. I hope that as you “listen” and take in these visual stories, you are also moved.
The Colorado Plateau has many large naturally occurring deposits of uranium that are easy to access. Uranium has been used to color glass and glaze ceramics, most notably in common bathroom and kitchen tiles. It is best known for its ability to produce electricity, and to create the most destructive weapons ever known.
Beginning in World War II through to 1986, nearly 20 million pounds of uranium was extracted from Navajo Nation lands for use in the development of atomic bombs and nuclear fuel. While this provided jobs in the mining industry for many Navajo people, they often paid a high price.
Today, abandoned uranium mines continue to leak radiation into air and water on the Navajo Nation. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are over 500 abandoned mines on Navajo land, while the Navajo Nation estimates 1,300.
In preparation for Hope and Trauma in a Poisoned Land, artists participated in a four-day training session about uranium mining in October 2016. After hearing from experts and Navajo community members, they visited several abandoned uranium mine sites around Cameron, Arizona. Near the end of a long day of visiting mines, they were taken to one more mine at the top of hill, directly above the Little Colorado River, overlooking Cameron. To get there, they rode in buses through a neighborhood and past a home where residents enjoyed a birthday party for a young Navajo boy, within just one hundred yards of the abandoned mine site.
Loss of Sphincter
Esther Belin
Durango, Colorado
Photographic Prints and Poems
Four prints 21” x 16”
When trying to put words to the topic of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation, the words de-form/mal-form/un-form, a silencing inhalation wanes. The cloud of dust shortly after a blast. The released potent particles and penetrating rays bouncing off and into soft tissue and bone. The groans and gasps of x-ray results. The fruitlessness, the falsity in fiduciary duty, “Whatever we promise to do you can depend upon its being done.”
When trying to put words to the topic of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation, the common definition of “heavy metal,” is not enough. Heavy like the piles of sand spiraling out as silicosis-smeared spittle. Heavy as the ambiguity in defining “war” and “pledge” and “Provided, That…” while the dark pools of ink seeped into parchment the powdery heavy metal melds, a menacing muscle, imitating loss of sphincter.
The work presented is the manifestation of loss of
o_f_ _s_p_h_i_n_c_t_e_r_._ _A_n_ _a_b_s_e_n_c_e_ _– _a_ _s_t_r_a_n_g_l_e_h_o_l_d_(_i_n_g_)_ _p_l_a_c_e_,_ _a_ _d_o_m_e_s_t_i_c_ _d_e_p_e_n_d_e_n_t_ _n_a_t_i_o_n_h_o_o_d_(_l_u_m_)_,_ _a_ _d_e_p_a_r_t_m_e_n_t_ _o_f_ _i_n_t_e_r_i_o_r_(_i_z_i_n_g_)_,_ _m_i_n_i_m_i_z_i_n_g_ _…._ _
h_a_h_a_l_e_e_l_ _c_o_m_e_ _i_n_t_o_ _b_e_i_n_g_;_ _t_o_ _o_r_i_g_i_n_a_t_e_ _
k_w_e_’é _r_i_g_h_t_ _h_e_r_e_ _
it has a border around it;
it is common knowledge; it is a thing known about
there is extension around its edge in a slender line
you can start at the Pipeline Road
and head southeast until you see the plastic dangling flowers fading on the left – if you stop
have you arrived at your destination?
the Mission cemetery is reaching capacity
yet the border cannot be extended – only maintained
a collector of the discarded radioactive debris
a collection of the radioactive actors
ancillary ancestors
a collated color-coded collection of cautionary coughing
clogging, consecrating, congesting t’áá béé hózínígo ‘át’é it is common knowledge; it is a thing known about
is the knowledge like the superfine dust collecting in cornered folds of flesh?
or is it like interpretations, reading the dark and darker, or gray folds of an x-ray?
or does some(one)(thing) choose the definition of knowledge(able) – worth
(ac)knowledging
Transition
Debra Edgerton
Flagstaff, Arizona
Long-term exposure to uranium has a harmful effect in the body and the environment. We live in a state that has rich deposits of uranium and new mining has started. Our water supply is in jeopardy. I believe in the statement “Water is Life.” But we live life in the inconsistency of use vs. need. The US Geological Survey estimates that each person uses 80-plus gallons of water per day. That is 640 bottles of water per day per person. But the Centers for Disease Control maintain that each person needs 1 gallon of water per day for survival. Eight bottles a day for drinking, cooking and minimal hygiene.
I wanted to create a piece about hope in this time of crisis. I chose a symbol to represent the idea of transformation and transition: the chrysalis. The chrysalis also embodies protection, the home, and the body.
In making the piece I realized the other element I chose, the water bottle, provided a paradox for the hope I envisioned. Native people must buy bottled water to use to cook and drink. There is little to no fresh water on the reservations. So bottled water is a necessity. Therefore, my art demonstrates what we use vs. what we need and how the body must process this constant change.
sculpture
15” x 15” x 83”
Nilchí, Air iiná, Life
Kéyah, Earth Tó, Water
Amy Martin
Flagstaff, Arizona
Many layers and emotions were exposed in the process of understanding the effects of uranium mining on landscapes, individuals and communities of Diné Lands. Hearing personal stories, visiting contaminated lands and better understanding the environmental and social injustices surrounding the mines, I felt overwhelmed with the weight of the impacts. The contamination has permeated elements of everyday life that we as humans need to ensure survival– the Earth (Kéyah)_ _,_ _A_i_r_ _(_n_íłc_h_ʼi_)_,_ _L_i_f_e_/_F_o_o_d_ _(iiná), and Water (tó). The contamination is invisible to the eye, but insidious and embedded in landscape and life. Layers are revealed of distrust and unease of those elements that are necessary for life, but hold fear, illness and suffering.
As artists, we create pieces that explore our own experiences. In this case, I am distinctly aware that I have been welcomed into a community with very sensitive issues surrounding land and lives. My hope through this process is to have created images that are impactful, but also give a voice to those affected. I thank the community members of Cameron for welcoming us and all of those who shared their expertise and personal stories. I hope for increased awareness of the issue and healing to follow.
Photographic Prints
10” x 14” each
When They Came Home
Ann Futterman Collier, Kim Hahn, Jane Lilly Benale, Malcolm Benally
Flagstaff, Arizona
This piece symbolizes the lives of women and the land. The designers were inspired by a Navajo weaver and matriarch; she wove a prayer for the earth and told a story through her voice. When the uranium workers came home, their clothing was tarnished by yellow toxic dust from the mines; the dust stayed in their homes. Navajo women, who keep the home safe, must wear the memories of how their lives were changed.
The Diné bloodlines temper the fabric of the brown earth; the life-giving turquoise, the water is just below and on the land. The red streaks running into water are red ochre rock, earth history, bloodlines of strata. Sheep is life and Water is Life.
Growth becomes green pastures, the healing medicinal plants, the juniper and piñon trees. From the blue sky comes the clouds, then rain. The fifth generation Navajos will grow. The sheep now pasture and drink uranium contaminated water that is no longer safe. The coming of daylight is yellow then gold. The offerings of corn pollen for renewal will heal us, and transform us. Like something new, we learn: “In beauty it is done.”
Textiles
Rug: 37” x 29”
Dress: 25” x 18” x 52”
Rebekah Nordstrom
Flagstaff, Arizona
To gain an understanding of place, you must immerse yourself within the landscape, let your heart be touched, allow your eyes to look and see, and learn its history and its cultural reality.
I made these plein-air paintings between February and July of 2017 from a dusty little road just south of Cameron, AZ. I use my art to feel physically and emotionally connected to place. This connection allows me to relate to the people whom I encounter that live within this landscape. I listen to their stories and learn their history.
I’m listening to the language of the land.
100 paintings, oil on panel
4” x 4” each
Reality
Milton Tso
Cameron, Arizona
Photographic Prints
18” x 23”
Slaying Monsters
Venaya Yazzie
Farmington, New Mexico
I.
Intentional placement of matrilineal tools of hózhó the perpetuation of prayer and the narrative is implied. Visual images via photograph stills create new dialog.
II.
As a 21st century Indigenous being – the deliberate roaming the western land mass of my desert family concerned empathy. For the deemed contamination zones in the Cameron, Arizona community are sacred sites, but for the reason that human, ‘five-fingered earth dwellers’ still survive and exist and offer corn pollen; they pray in this zone.
III.
As a member of the eastern Diné people I was unaware of the vast and deep contamination of the land in western Navajoland, I was overwhelmed: mentally, physically, spiritually…
IV.
oppression on the land
monsters roaming
swallowing gallons of hope,
yet
the people celebrate life –
with pink birthday cake
and ribbons bright,
yet
beyond the land glows poison.
Installation
64” x 34” x 55”
Yellow Dirt Testimony – A Promise in Many Parts
Edie Dillon
Prescott, Arizona
Uranium poisoning was known to mine owners and the U.S. Government, but Navajo miners were not provided safety training or personal protection; not even dust masks. I shared information on this history with people all over the country and asked them to, while acknowledging deep sorrow, anger, responsibility – and the fact that everyone on the planet is, in some way, downwind – record a message of hope, active peace, and honoring the earth, our source of life. This mushroom cloud is their pledge that the future will be different. The threatening shape disintegrates as it forms.
With appreciation to over 300 artists from Hawaii to Florida, including students from the following schools: Prescott College, Pratt Institute, Northern Arizona University, Plymouth State University, Highline High School, and Smith Valley School. Special gratitude to the children at Bluff Elementary School after school program who made turtle shells and overwhelmingly voted to color them green, and at Cedar Tree Montessori School, who put lots of glitter on the birds.
Installation
12’ x 6’ x 18’
Poise/End
Klee Benally
Flagstaff, Arizona
We are Poise/End.
Though we have faced nuclear colonialism and the extreme poisoning of our land, water, and bodies, we still maintain our dignity and hózhó (balance).
We are not victims, but survivors who continue to resist and fight for Mother Earth and our future generations.
Poise/End is an immersive detox from nuclear violence.
Virtual Reality Film & Headset
Running Time: 8:25
Headset and stand 3’ tall
Anna TsouhlarakisWashington, D.C.
While not much visible evidence is left of the Church Rock uranium disaster, the catastrophe resurfaces every time the wind blows and sends radioactive particles to the homes and corrals of local residents. The wind speaks to the forgotten and diminished stories of the land and people. It is invisible, constant and unrelenting.
Film
Running Time: 3:16
Uranium Mine Landscape #1 & 2
Jeremy Singer
Tucson, Arizona
Oil on Canvas
24” x 36”
Atomic (r)Age
Chip Thomas
Inscription House, Arizona
As a physician at a small clinic on the Navajo nation since 1987 many of my patients have suffered and continue to suffer the effects of uranium mining. I asked a co-worker whose father worked as a uranium miner in the mid 60s and who died of a uranium related cancer if she’d share with me any memorabilia she had of her father from that period. She shared with me stories of her dad and provided photographs from that period. Her mother died of a uranium related cancer and she has an older brother presently suffering from a uranium related cancer.
I chose to work with a translucent fabric to emphasize the penetrative, see-through nature of radioactive material and to place the viewer in the perspective of a radon daughter. The see-through material also references the ephemeral, fragile and transient nature of our life experience at a time when the new Secretary of Energy seeks to “make nuclear cool again” in a new atomic age.
Installation
99” x 21” x 98”
Enriched
Jocelyne Champagne Shiner
Flagstaff, Arizona
To make rich or richer especially by the addition or increase of some desirable quality, attribute, or ingredient the experience will enrich your life: such as
a: to add beauty to: ADORN
b: to enhance the taste of
c: to make (a soil) more fertile
d: to improve the nutritive value of by adding nutrients – enriched flour
e: to process so as to add or increase the proportion of a desirable ingredient – enriched uranium
As a child, my Tennessee hometown sat as a close neighbor to the Oak Ridge Reservation, where I learned uranium was ENRICHED and nuclear scientists helped give rise to the mushroom cloud, the Trinity test, Little Boy, Fat Man.
At 21, cancer was discovered in my thyroid. Doctors said it was the result of toxins released into the environment from Oak Ridge. I was asked to participate in a medical study. My body ENRICHED the lives of future cancer victims.
At 55, I learned firsthand where uranium was mined on a different reservation, in Cameron, AZ. I learned of the Navajo men who mined in their jeans and boots. I learned that mining ENRICHED Navajo families through desperately needed jobs and income. I learned of the government lies about safety. I learned that hundreds of mines polluted water and land, sheep and human bodies. I learned of the cancers and the babies born with high levels of uranium. I learned. And as I learned, I was uplifted by resolute friends made on and off the reservation. We shared mutton and tears, fry bread and heartache and hope. And now I join with these friends, determined to walk in restored beauty, together, ENRICHED.
Sculpture
12” x 12” x 41”
Lies We Were Fed
Jocelyne Champagne Shiner
Flagstaff, Arizona
Uranium. The Atomic Age. Patriotism! Duty! Security! At all costs… Hunger. Greed. Lies. …a story to be told.
Once upon a time, a bright yellow cake was baked. It was baked from the most amazing yellow ingredient found on earth. Sweetly frosted, and scrumptiously presented, the cake was eaten. Savored. Bite by bite. However, the bakers soon discovered that their secret yellow ingredient caused decay. Surely this was incorrect. More cakes were baked and shipped where others, unaware, took fork to precious cake and declared it good. Others refined the recipe and enriched the ingredients.
All ate joyfully of the yellow cake. “It is good for you!” cried advertisements.
We consumed the irresistible yellow cake until we thought we would explode.
The more we ate, the more we wanted. We ate the lies we were fed.
Blinded by white sweetness, we ate until we got sick.
We started to decay. To die.
The cake platters, long abandoned, are messy with dried crumbs. A ring of hard, white icing marks the edges of what was once the object of our hunger.
The platters need cleaning. So many are piled in the sink. Who will help me clean up this mess?
Yellow Cakes with White FrostingServed at Preview Night
August 12,2017
χλωρός (khloros)
Frederica Hall
Flagstaff, Arizona
χλωρός (khloros): dun-colored pale yellow green, from the Christian Bible’s fourth horse of the Apocalypse.
Εδώ είναι άλογο ωχρό κίτρινο χλωρός , (behold this horse pale yellowish green).
My Father, who was in the uranium business, believed, until it was too late, that nuclear energy would help save the environment, and that it wasn’t dangerous. He gave me a big piece of beautiful khloros Torbernite uranium crystal. This toxic mineral from hell was a favorite childhood object. Through its prisms I spent my youth imagining beautiful worlds.
Nurtured on get rich propaganda with uranium toxic capitalism, toothpaste and cosmetics, to ‘Fat Boy’ and ‘Little Man’ toys, we became blinded to its menace, willing to be lead by false promises down this pale yellow green road of destruction.
With the atom splitting, did we split our soul?
Were we no longer able to distinguish lies and truth?
Will we continue to bathe our love ones in this rotting khloros light?
Travelling down this yellow brick road, we fell into the deadly meadow, having forgotten the peril.
“Run fast,” shouts the Scarecrow, “get out of this deadly flower bed,” save yourselves from apathy and complacency. Save our world for all the children.
Installation
8’ x 8’ x 6’
Unmanifest Destiny
Helen E. Padilla
Flagstaff, Arizona
TO what new fates, my country, far
And unforeseen of foe or friend,
Beneath what unexpected star
Compelled to what unchosen end.
Across the sea that knows no beach,
The Admiral of Nations guides
Thy blind obedient keels to reach
The harbor where thy future rides!
The guns that spoke at Lexington
Knew not that God was planning then
The trumpet word of Jefferson
To bugle forth the rights of men.
To them that wept and cursed Bull Run,
What was it but despair and shame?
Who saw behind the cloud the sun?
Who knew that God was in the flame?
Had not defeat upon defeat,
Disaster on disaster come,
The slave’s emancipated feet
Had never marched behind the drum.
There is a Hand that bends our deeds
To mightier issues than we planned;
Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds,
My country, serves Its dark command.
I do not know beneath what sky
Nor on what seas shall be thy fate;
I only know it shall he high,
I only know it shall be great.
~Richard Hovey
1864 – 1900
My work speaks to what was,
what is, and what could be.
Photographic Print with Light
15” x 20” print
Awareness
Action
Celebration of Life
Elisa Rosales Juega
Flagstaff, Arizona
We poets […] new honey makefrom our old sorrows. Antonio Machado (Spain 1875 – France, 1939)
For me, these lines by Spanish poet Antonio Machado represent the essence of art. Far from escapism, art deals with what hurts and in this process, pain is overcome and transformed into beauty. This is why art is inspiring and uplifting.
This trilogy of pendants —”Awareness”, “Action”, “Celebration of Life”— have been made with dry and petrified wood from the land where the United States mined the uranium used to create the atomic bombs dropped on Japan August 1945.
“Awareness” is seeing things as they are.
“Action” is taking the necessary steps to modify the course of what is not good.
“Celebration of Life” is living a full and meaningful life.
War is the greatest failure of Humanity. No one wins. Politicians without integrity drive us into unwanted and unnecessary wars with devastating effects abroad and devastating side effects here at home. We are here at home advocating for cleaning-up the abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation and saying NO to any more uranium mining.
Jewelry
4” wide each
Uranium Mining Legacy
Mark Neumann
Flagstaff, Arizona
The scenes in these images simultaneously reflect our fears, worries, curiosity and fascination over the legacy of uranium mining. My photographs incorporate prefabricated HO scale figures placed in natural and constructed site-specific landscapes. The images are akin to dioramas, created in actual landscapes. Since the HO scale figures are less than one inch in size, photographs are the only way to see the “scenes” depicted in these temporary dioramas.
In this project, these scenes are drawn from the real past and an imagined future of uranium mining in the American Southwest: the massive clean up of uranium mill tailings in Moab, Utah; an abandoned uranium mine near Cameron, Arizona; uranium prospecting by lay people, popular during the late 1950s and early 1960s; a hypothetical transformation of traditional herding practices; and imagined solutions for burying radioactive waste and the problems of communicating the dangers of these toxic sites for more than 10,000 years into the future. The postcard rack conjures a form of dark tourism spawned from the legacy of uranium mining. The postcards offer an image that travels beyond these scenes and this exhibit; visitors are invited to take a postcard with them.
Photographic Prints
23” x 37” each
Postcards
4” x 6” each
Postcard Stand
6’ tall
A Warning Ahead
Jerrel Singer
Flagstaff, Arizona
Oil on Canvas
40” x 30”
Radon Daughter
Pash Galbavy
Sedona, Arizona
My artistic passion and goal is to express common human experience in a viscerally impactful way using masks and movement. The body is a wonderful tool because expressing with it tends to bypass logical thinking and go directly to viewers’ core. I love working with masks because they are iconic. They rise beyond the personal into the archetypal, and visually illustrate characters and emotions. I am especially interested in using masks to animate inner parts of the psyche that are reflected on the larger world stage.
Radon Daughter Mask: Radon is a toxic, tasteless, colorless and odorless gaseous byproduct of uranium decay. The natural decay process creates radioactive elements nicknamed “Radon Daughters” that stick to dust particles and other surfaces. During mining, Radon Daughters are disturbed and float freely in the air. Ultimately, they can cause lung cancer, tumors, and other health problems, which are especially common to miners. In the past, radioactive tailings were also often used in the fill on which homes, schools, and other structures were built, thus causing increased exposure and health risks to their inhabitants. The “Radon Daughter” mask is an artistic representation of this hazardous compound.
Mask and Textiles
36” x 20” x 70”
When the federal government looked to the uranium-rich lands of the Colorado Plateau to supply ore for atomic bombs and nuclear reactors, a labor force was close at hand. Many Navajo men worked in the mines because other jobs were scarce in the region.
But work conditions were primitive, safety precautions absent. Mines were poorly ventilated, and miners lacked even rudimentary respiratory protection. In far northeastern Arizona the tiny Navajo community of Cove was especially hard hit. Knowing nothing of the hazards of radiation, miners worked in dangerous conditions, then wore their soiled clothing home for washing. Some built house walls of conveniently sized chunks of waste rock, or mixed concrete for floors from the fine sand left over from milling.
Even as scientists began to raise concerns about the health effects of radiation, Navajo miners were told little. Not until 1969 were federal standards set for radon in mines. By then, communities such as Cove faced high rates of illness and death among miners.
Today, radiation levels remain high in many places around Cove. Research from the Centers for Disease Control shows uranium in babies born today on the Navajo Nation. A cleanup effort overseen by the federal Environmental Protection Agency is slated to remediate some of these sites in coming years.
“It seems like part of you is gone. They put holes in our mountains and left them that way. The uranium, to this day, it is spreading its disease among us. They had piled up uranium ore beside the road which they never took care of completely when they left. They thought of us as nothing, us Navajos, that’s how I think about it, and it really hurts my heart. Sometimes it makes me cry. They killed our husbands, that’s what I think.”
-Anna Aloysious, interviewed in the 1990s by Phil Harrison
translation by Timothy Benally
“There was lack of air when we worked. There was just lots of smoke after blasting, powder smell … there was lack of ventilation and lack of safety. The workers did not work according to their desires then. They were forced to work. They told the worker only once if he is doing something wrong. If caught repeating the mistake, he got fired. For that reason, they did not speak up on their own behalf or did not say what their concerns were.
“There are no elderly men in Cove, because they were mostly miners and had died, but there are many widows. No men! People are still suffering today, especially the widows.”
-Joe Ray Harvey, interviewed in the 1990s by Phil Harrison
translation by Timothy Benally
On July 16, 1979, an earthen dam burst at the United Nuclear Corporation’s uranium mill tailings pond at Church Rock, New Mexico. The break spilled over a thousand tons of solid radioactive waste and 93 million gallons of highly acidic, radioactive uranium tailings solution into the Rio Puerco. The contaminants flowed downstream through northwest New Mexico and into eastern Arizona.
Residents of communities downstream, many of them Navajo speakers, did not learn of the accident in time. Livestock died after drinking the contaminated water. People who waded in the water suffered burns and skin infections. Thousands lost access to clean water. Radiation levels spiked at nearly 7,000 times what is allowable in drinking water.
Nearly 40 years later, the spill’s effects are still being felt. More than 50 miles downstream from the spill site, the small town of Sanders, Arizona, is among those affected. In the summer of 2015, Northern Arizona University PhD student Tommy Rock tested Sanders’ municipal water supply. He found an average concentration of uranium of nearly 50 parts per billion (ppb), exceeding federal limits of 30 ppb. The residents of Sanders had not been notified of the contamination levels until Rock presented his results at a community meeting.
When they learned of the results of Rock’s water tests, residents of Sanders began hauling in water from other areas and drinking bottled water to reduce health risks. The town now gets its water delivered from outside the Rio Puerco drainage. The local school district, which relies on its own well, has used bottled water for two years but has just installed a quarter-million-dollar filtering system.
“The day of the meeting a lot of people showed up … There must have been over a hundred people there, the place was crowded. They got mad. They said, ‘Why hasn’t anyone told us this?’ From 2003 to 2009, there was a gap in the data. But in 2003 and after 2009 all the data showed exceedances. We showed the community members that. They were asking, ‘Why hasn’t anyone informed us about this?’”
-Tommy Rock,
Northern Arizona University graduate student
“If this was down in Phoenix metropolitan area, Flagstaff area, I don’t think this would be ignored as much as it appears to be. I’m going to be excited to go turn our drinking fountains back on in the schools, and be able to have the water running. I mean, our drinking fountain out here is off.”
-Dan Hute, superintendent,
Sanders Unified School District
“I think everybody was in an anxiety state, and all of a sudden you start hearing people’s stories about, you know,‘I have this problem, that problem.’ It played on the mind of the people that lived there, and it brought back many memories of cancer, people that they know developed illnesses that had no reason, no explanation of how they received these illnesses, or contracted cancer. So the blame all went back to uranium: you know, we’re drinking this stuff.”
-Lorenzo Curley, Sanders resident
Around Cameron, Arizona, on the western part of the Navajo Nation fifty miles north of Flagstaff, uranium crops out in shallow deposits among colorful sedimentary rocks and fossils of petrified wood. Beginning in the early 1950s, sites were found by amateur prospectors, both Navajo and Anglo, following get-rich-quick dreams. Only Navajos could get tribal permits to mine, but under those permits mining rights were often assigned to non-tribal individuals or companies. Most of the royalties went to mining companies.
The boom was intense but short-lived. Over a 12-year period, the Cameron area produced more than a million pounds of uranium. Most of the old mine sites were capped with rock in the 1990s, but many areas remain contaminated. Mining left behind many surface depressions that filled with water, which was used by both people and livestock. Some sites have been fenced in or have signs posted warning nearby residents of the danger.
Federal lawmakers finally recognized the damage done to uranium miners and downwinders with the passage in 1990 of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). The law provides compensation to uranium miners, people who closely witnessed atomic testing at test sides, and residents of certain downwind areas in Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. To date almost $850 million in compensation has been paid to former miners who worked in the uranium industry, and more than a billion dollars to downwinders.
“I worked underground with my father in my early teen years through vacations and school outage. Our residence was at Flagstaff and we mined outside of Cameron on several of the A.E.C leases. There were many small open pits scattered for miles around Cameron, and a few shafts that went down to around 130 feet in depth. One such shaft was about four miles southeast of Cameron and on the northeast side of the Little Colorado River: Denetsone. My father worked this shaft for about a year. He had leases on a couple of open pits further out on the east side of the Little Colorado.
“In these mines the only ventilation we had was the nearest test borehole and a fan on the surface blowing air down it. The mine inspectors would check the mines and use a Geiger counter with a filter system to take a count on air quality. They had just begun to realize the real dangers of bad air and miners’ health.”
-Blake Borgerson, son of a uranium miner, worked in uranium mines in the 1960s and ’70s
Two uranium mines at the Grand Canyon have legacies that continue today. The Orphan Mine, located on the rim of the Canyon, proved to be one of the 25 most valuable known uranium deposits in the country. In 1954, the Western Gold and Uranium company began extracting uranium ore there. The logistics were daunting, for miners had to descend to the mine—and ore had to make its way up—by means of a rickety-looking tramline that began near the park’s West Rim Drive.
It was not until 1965 that the company built a tall headframe atop the canyon rim, and completed a vertical shaft that made for easier access. By the time the mine closed in 1969, almost a half million tons of ore had been lifted up and out of the canyon on its way to mills in Tuba City and elsewhere, producing some $40 million worth of uranium.
The steel headframe was a West Rim landmark for decades; so too was the small hotel that stood on mining company land—an island of valuable private property in one of the country’s most famous national parks. In 1987, the National Park Service finally acquired the 20 acres that made up the mine parcel, but not until 2008 was the headframe removed. Far below, pristine-looking Horn Creek trickles a few steep miles to the Colorado River, but its water continues to run radioactive, and hikers are advised to avoid its use.
In 1984 the company Energy Fuels, Inc. sent a proposal to the U.S. Forest Service proposing to develop a breccia pipe mine, the Canyon Mine, on the Kaibab National Forest about ten miles south of Grand Canyon. The proposal soon led to vigorous protests by environmentalists and members of regional Native American tribes.
Declining uranium prices shut down the mining effort in the late 1980s, but Energy Fuels, Inc. has continued to develop the Canyon Mine site and hopes to begin removing ore from the mine beginning in the fall of 2017. If the mine becomes operational, the ore will be excavated from shafts and tunnels a thousand feet below the surface, then shipped from the mine site through Flagstaff and the Navajo towns of Cameron, Tuba City and Kayenta on its way to a mill in Blanding, Utah.
Arizona ranks in the top ten states for highest number of highway fatal accidents. Some estimate that as many as 50 uranium transporting trucks per day would travel through Flagstaff and the Navajo Nation from the Canyon Mine. The only available route is on 2-lane unlit roads with open range where animals often cross, leading to a high frequency of accidents. The Navajo Nation does not have a hazardous materials response program in the event of a spill.
“They first approached the tribe and we found out they were going to start drilling for uranium on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. It’s an area that is really sacred to our people. It’s a place of emergence, they say. They told us that it is our place of emergence and our mother’s abdomen is there at Red Butte and the surrounding area.before they even do that?”
“The mine on the North Rim, that mining company [left] a big hole, and remnants of their building and structures are still there. They tell us that there’s nothing left there, the land wasn’t bothered, but no. I can’t believe that when I see a big old hole. It’s going to take millions of dollars, but who wants to spend millions of dollars when it can be prevented”
-Coleen Kaska, Havasupai tribal member, interviewed by Taylor Haynes
Acknowledgments
Hope and Trauma in a Poisoned Land was produced by the Flagstaff Arts Council in partnership with Northern Arizona University, the Cameron Chapter House of the Navajo Nation, University of New Mexico Community Environmental Health Program, and North Country Healthcare.
Additional Funding was provided by:
