World comes to Window Rock
Summit panelists alarmed at new need for uranium

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

WINDOW ROCK — Mining companies selling unsuspecting villagers radioactive waste rock from their nearby uranium mines. Cattle grazing on the grass sprouting from radioactive tailing piles. Locals coming down with uncommon diseases in striking numbers.

The stories are familiar to many Navajo, whose people still live with the often deadly legacy of the country's first uranium mining boom and now stand on the unwelcome verge of a second.

But as told to a captive audience in a quiet conference room of the Navajo Nation Museum Thursday afternoon, the stories were not about the Navajo Nation. Nor were they about the United States, or any other place in North America. They were about Jaduguda, India, as told by Shri Prakesh, an Indian activist fighting the same fight against nuclear energy as the Navajo, only half a world away.

Prakesh was one of some 250 panelists from 14 countries expected to converge on Window Rock over the coming days for the Indigenous World Uranium Summit, a grassroots effort to stop the mining of uranium on indigenous lands across the world. That his story could just as easily have come from a village down the road highlights just how universal their struggle is.

The summit continues what was started in 1992 in Salzburg, Austrian, where delegates from around the world ratified a declaration opposing all uranium mining on indigenous lands. Carletta Tilousi, a Havasupai councilwoman who was there, recalled a pair of local mountaineers who took their declaration and buried it in a nearby glacier so that its message would live on. But that many of those same delegates are back in Window Rock 14 years later making the very same demands shows that their fight is far from over.

If anything, it's only begun. With the market price of uranium reaching new highs, mining companies are, as New Mexico Environment Department Cabinet Secretary Derrith Watchman-Moore put it, "pounding on the state's door" for permits. More than half-a-dozen uranium mining companies have some stake on or near Mt. Taylor alone. Still others have their eyes on Church Rock and Crownpoint.

Worldwide demand
But the new boom is hardly confined to American shores, let alone New Mexico. Western Europe may have the most nuclear reactors currently in operation, according to the World Nuclear Association; France alone gets 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. But Asia, in search of ever more power to fuel its booming economies, outstrips every other region in the world when all reactors under construction, planned or proposed get added to the mix. India alone is in the process of building eight, more than any other nation.

And to hear the summit's participants tell it, the story for indigenous people is the same the world over.

"(The Indian government and mining companies) never told anything about the danger of uranium mining to the community, to any of the people at all," said Prakesh's colleague Karunabala Murmu.

"The danger in Brazil is no communication," echoed Norbert Suchanek, who is fighting that government's attempts to build more nuclear power plants in the rain forests of South America. "Nobody is telling the people what is the danger."

Rebecca Bear-Wingfield, an Australian Aboriginal, spoke of her government's persistent silence on the fallout from nuclear bomb tests carried out half a century ago.

Manuel Pino, who was in Salzburg in 1992 and now teaches at Scottsdale Community College, knows what they're up against. He's been fighting uranium mining around Laguna-Acoma most of his life and likened to struggle of indigenous peoples against multinational corporations and the national governments backing them to David and Goliath.

The language in declarations like the one crafted in Salzburg may be able to generate global awareness, Pino said, "but to have nation states of the world and the corporations ... adhere to that language is one of the most difficult things."

"It is an almost impossible task to save the world from nuclear proliferation," said Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. in his welcome address to the summit-goers Thursday morning. "But in my way of life, in the Navajo way of life, there are no impossibilities."

Lynnea Smith, of the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining, attributed the mining companies' interest in indigenous lands to the minority status of its inhabitants. But Pino finds it ironic that the land the U.S. government granted the Navajo in 1868, having little use for it itself, is the same land the government and mining companies are pining for now. And now that the Navajo and other indigenous people are trying to express their sovereignty, he said, they feel threatened.

Pino finds power in that threat.

The summit officially kicked off Thursday, with two days full of specialized panel discussions, although participants who arrived early had a chance to visit a few uranium mining sites in the area Wednesday. The summit will end Saturday with the drafting of a covenant encompassing the participants' goals.

And although it's been 14 years since the last summit, organizers hope to make it an annual event. They'll announce next year's host Saturday.