Navajo woman helps prompt uranium mine cleanup

MONUMENT VALLEY, San Juan County — The stretch of high desert on the Arizona-Utah border gives way to towering rock formations that resemble huge mittens, chimney spires and castles.

But to the west of Monument Valley lies a reminder of what has been blamed for much heartache and tragedy in Elsie Mae Begay's family: A mesa stained with a gray streak where uranium was mined decades ago.

Begay, 71, has spent more than 30 years living among residue piles that her children slid down when they were younger, and other contaminated waste carried down the nearby arroyo or kicked up by high winds. She's taken her story of the dangers of uranium to college campuses and Congress, along with a documentary outlining her family's plight.

Now it's being cleaned up, and Begay is partly to thank.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is wrapping up a $7.5 million project that uses a cable system to transport some 20,000 cubic yards of material up Oljato Mesa, where it came from. A lined repository atop the mesa will hold the waste that Navajo Nation officials eventually want taken off tribal land.

The cleanup at the Skyline Mine represents not only a reduced risk of exposure for Begay and her family, but marks the first significant remediation of a mine on the country's largest American Indian reservation where such sites number in the hundreds.

Tests have found gamma radiation activity greater than two times the background level at 80 locations on the site. In the traditional Navajo home where Begay once lived with two of her sons, the radiation levels were up to 100 times the acceptable level. The two sons have died — one of lung cancer and the other from a tumor. The EPA tore down the home in 2001.

"What we've been asking for is not fallacy," said Stephen Etsitty, executive director of the tribe's EPA. "It's not stuff we're making up. There are real problems out there that need to be addressed."

The family's troubles with uranium are highlighted in a documentary about Begay's brother, who was adopted by white missionaries and later reunited with his family, and in the book, "Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed." Begay has traveled across the reservation and the country with the film, "The Return of Navajo Boy."