Advocates are encouraged that Congress again admitted culpability, but they are frustrated at interminable delays that have persisted more than a decade since the original compensation bill, also sponsored by Hatch, was passed in 1990.

That bill was supposed to offer "compassionate payments" to Navajos, among many others, who worked the mines and were victimized by radioactive fallout. But of more than 3,000 Navajos who registered for payments only about 500 requests were granted.

Navajo victims and their families found themselves lost within a bureaucratic maze. Many could not speak, read or write fluent English, and filling out the mountains of paperwork demanded by the Department of Justice became an impossible task.

Many couldn't prove they actually worked the mines. They were migrant workers who traveled from mine to mine, were paid in cash and left behind no employment records.

Surviving spouses were often denied compensation because they couldn't produce a marriage certificate — a common situation on reservations where traditional wedding ceremonies are conducted by tribal elders.

The Hatch amendments are supposed to correct such shortcomings in the 1990 legislation. But advocates say there are still too many workers falling through bureaucratic cracks.

Those who worked in the mines after 1971 are still not eligible. Neither are family members who got sick from radiation brought home on workers' clothing, Neither are the children who played on tailings piles.

Maryboy blames the cancer death of his sister on the fact she played in the spent uranium ore stacked outside one southern Utah mine where his family lived.

"As poor as people were, they would move to the mine to work and use materials from the mines to build their shelters," Maryboy said. "And kids being kids, they played in the yellowcake. I was 3 or 4 at the time. I probably played in it too."

Phil Harrison, a consultant with the Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims Committee, suffers from several ailments he attributes to working in uranium mines in the early 1970s. He is not eligible for compensation, but his family could be. His father died of lung cancer in 1971 after years in the mines.

It is a small price to pay, Harrison said, for the government to admit it victimized thousands of American Indians, many of them war veterans who served their country with distinction. These were workers who were paid half of what white miners were and who were subjected to then-secret government experiments on the effects of radiation on the human body.

The 1990 compensation act, which addresses downwind victims throughout the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, acknowledges the government made mistakes in failing to warn citizens of the deadly effects of radiation.

"The government did lie to them and frankly we proved it," Hatch said.

"I think the Navajo people were sacrificed," Maryboy said.

"You hear the cries of people who are dying (from uranium exposure) on a daily basis," he adds, "and when you are in constant contact with people like that it makes you think. You just don't want to see anything like that happen again."

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E-mail: spang@desnews.com