Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday October 26, 2010
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YELLOW DIRT: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed
Judy Pasternak
Free Press
ISBN 978-1-4165-9482-6
317 pages
$26
Reviewed by Ann Cummins
I first heard about radiation poisoning on the Navajo Reservation in the late 1960s. I was a teenager living on the reservation. My father was one of the white millers employed by the Vanadium Corporation of America to run the uranium mill in Shiprock, N.M. News of health disasters came to me as rumors at school: "They say a herd of sheep drank from the river and died. They say miners at Red Mountain are getting sick." Over the next several decades rumor gave way to evidence of serious health problems among uranium miners, their families, the livestock and the land. In her disturbing and illuminating "Yellow Dirt," Judy Pasternak evokes the magnitude of a nuclear disaster that continues to reverberate.
Pasternak locates ground zero in Cane Valley, 30 miles northeast of Arizona's gorgeous red rock country, Monument Valley. Prospectors had been eying the mineral rich reservation since the early 1920s, but it wasn't until 1938 that Congress passed a law giving the Navajo tribal council authority to issue leases. The following year, Franklin Roosevelt pledged U.S. material support, his "arsenal of democracy," to the allies in the war effort against Germany. Specifically, Roosevelt was interested in developing a domestic supply of carnotite, which yields uranium and vanadium. Vanadium is a steel-hardening agent used for armor-plating in warplanes and weaponry. The VCA immediately took steps to help build the arsenal, contracting with the government and aggressively seeking mining rights on Indian land. In August 1942, the company sealed a deal to mine carnotite in Cane Valley; the agreement stipulated that VCA must employ Navajo miners.
There's nothing clinical or dry about "Yellow Dirt." While Pasternak cites a wide array of specialists in fields ranging from geology to nuclear physics, the story unfolds like true crime, where real-life heroes and villains play dynamic roles in a drama that escalates page by page. Pasternak briefly traces historical beginnings, from Marie Curie's discovery of radium to the Manhattan Project's work with plutonium, the bombing of Japan and the birth of Harry Truman's postwar baby, the Atomic Energy Commission. She describes how the AEC partnered with U.S. mining companies to fuel the Cold War.
Culling from oral histories and interviews to tell the story of the native people, the author tracks the U.S. nuclear industry as it affected generations in Cane Valley. From the 1920s, Navajo patriarch Adakai presided over the valley. Pasternak beautifully evokes his family's rugged agrarian lifestyle raising sheep in an austere desert. Adakai was only a couple of decades removed from "The Long Walk" generation, which had been subjugated and exiled during the Lincoln administration. Having no reason to trust white people, he refused to cooperate when VCA employees made initial inquiries about yellow rocks in Cane Valley. But his son Luke Yazzie, motivated by patriotism and his family's poverty, was lured by a promised finder's fee and showed them the rocks.
The crime story in "Yellow Dirt" develops around early tensions within the Atomic Energy Commission. Pasternak quotes AEC safety inspector Ralph Batie telling a Denver Post reporter in 1949: "Definite radiation hazards exist in all the plants now operating." Batie was ordered to "keep your mouth shut." Jesse Johnson, the liaison between Washington and the mining companies, cut Batie's travel budget and strong-armed him into transferring out of the area. Pasternak writes that "Johnson simply would not allow uranium to pose a distinct peril of its own; he would not let cancer be an issue."
The arms race gave the government a powerful motivation to speed ahead, and the VCA had carte blanche to exploit resources on the reservation. "Exploit" is the appropriate word here. The author details deep cultural and language gaps as well as geographical isolation that allowed the company to cut corners and put the Navajo miners at great risk. The AEC eventually raised safety standards, but neither they nor the VCA effectively educated the non-English-speaking miners about health hazards in yellow dirt, the tailings that piled up all over Indian land. After the industry collapsed in 1969, the piles remained for several years, and Cane Valley residents recycled the dirt, using it to make adobe bricks and radioactive housing, in which they lived for decades.
This crime story builds to a powerful climax: chilling statistical evidence for an epidemic of cancer, birth defects and other devastating fallout from uranium mining on the reservation.
Pasternak is a compelling writer, though she can seem biased, as when she calls Johnson "an ambitious man who liked to feel important." Declarations like this are gratuitous in a book so comprehensive and well-told that readers can draw their own conclusions.
Eye-opening and riveting, "Yellow Dirt" gives a sobering glimpse into our atomic past and adds a critical voice to the debate about resurrecting America's nuclear industry.
Ann Cummins is the author of a novel, "Yellowcake," and curator of Southwest Book Reviews for NPR affiliate KNAU in Flagstaff, Ariz.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THREE BOOKS ON LANGUAGE
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NA
ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA
Reviewed by Christopher Schoppa
Environmentalists are alarmed by the rapid decline of biodiversity over the last century, with species becoming extinct at a rate that outpaces science's ability to discover, let alone study, them. The same is true of languages the world over. A 2007 study by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages painted a dire picture, identifying five "hotspots" (eastern Siberia, northern Australia, central South America, Oklahoma and the U.S. Pacific Northwest) where languages are vanishing at a pace that outstrips that of species extinction. So what's to blame? Colonialism, technology, industrialization, the (gulp) English language itself? All of them, actually.
1. "The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages," by K. David Harrison (National Geographic, $27). A linguist at Swarthmore College, K. David Harrison helped conduct that 2007 survey. This chronicle is as much an homage to noble elders who often struggle to surmount indifference in their own communities as it is an op-ed by the author, who sounds the alarm among a skeptical public, and even other scientists, about the incalculable loss posed by a language's extinction.
2. "The English Is Coming! How One Language is Sweeping the World," by Leslie Dunton-Downer (Touchstone, $24). Fascinated since childhood by words (especially compound ones), the author aims to decipher something much more complex: the entire English language. Today, with more nonnative speakers than native ones, English has become the world's lingua franca, the preferred choice in entertainment, science, business and (much to the chagrin of the French) diplomacy. We're given a tour of English's remarkable rise from its Anglo-Saxon roots through the Renaissance (and all the words Shakespeare added to the lexicon) to Modern English and the 21st century's texting variety. Chockablock with facts, figures and interesting tidbits, this is no stodgy history lesson.
3. "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages," by Guy Deutscher (Metropolitan, $28). The thrust of this title, that language does indeed mirror culture, is one of the arguments that linguist Harrison makes for preserving language diversity. Guy Deutscher confidently asserts that a language influences how its users perceive the world. The book is a thrilling and challenging ride, and in the end you may find yourself agreeing with Frenchman Etienne de Condillac that "each language expresses the character of the people who speak it."
Christopher Schoppa can be reached at schoppac(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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