Going to the #ShiprockFair, #KleeBenally Remembered the #UraniumDump on the Banks of the #SanJuanRiver
By #BrendaNorrell, #CensoredNews, August 29, 2024
SHIPROCK, #NavajoNation -- "In his book published shortly before his passing, Klee Benally writes of going to the #NorthernNavajoFair and the #UraniumDump in #Shiprock that no one talks about. It is along the San Juan River, the same river that flooded this week, now eight months after Klee's passing.
"'The Northern Navajo Fair at Tsé Bit A'í (#ShiprockNewMexico) has been held for more than one hundred years,' Klee writes in 'No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred.'
"Klee describes how the fair each fall marks the changing of the seasons and the #harvest. He describes the neon glow of the carnival in the cold, dusty nights, and the #uniper fires that burn.
"All of this revelry is held right on #UraniumBoulevard just a couple miles from a massive 105-acre #Radioactive dump containing 2.5 million tons of #RadioactiveWaste on a site that was a former #UraniumMill (which is just 600 feet from the San Juan River.)'
"The Shiprock Uranium Disposal Cell studies showed that more than 1.8 million liters of #groundwater were contaminated with uranium, #selenium, #radium, #cadmium, #sulfate, and #nitrate.
"Now the #NavajoNation again is targeted by the #Nuclear Industry and #DebHaaland's radioactive agenda is being ignored.
"Speaking in Farmington, Interior Sec. Haaland said the transition to green energy in the #FourCorners region will be led by the #AtomicBomb industry, #LosAlamos National Laboratory, which has already poisoned #Pueblo lands in northern #NewMexico.
"There is no mention of the fact that there is no safe way to store #NuclearWaste.
Now, adding to the layers of deception, the U.S. #EPA is deceiving the public. The EPA doesn't actually clean up the uranium dumps and strewn #RadioactiveTailings from #ColdWar #UraniumMining on the Navajo Nation -- it only announces plans and promises to do it.
"#EricJantz, legal director of the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, told the Inter-American Commission on #HumanRights in March that the #EPA has not completed any of the cleanups.
"There are 524 uranium mine sites waiting to be cleaned up on the Navajo Nation. Zero -- none of these -- have been fully cleaned up, Jantz told the international commission.
The truth is people seldom talk about the uranium dump at Shiprock because there is so much strewn radioactive waste, and so many unreclaimed uranium mines, with radioactive waste strewn from Cameron to #MonumentValley, and across the Four Corners region.
"During the 1990s, on assignment for USA Today, I talked with #Dine' in #RedValley and Cove, south of Shiprock, down the mountain from where I lived. In every family, there was cancer. In every family, someone was dying of #cancer, or had already died, from cancer because of the uranium mining.
"One Dine' grandmother in her 80s was living in a stone home built of radioactive rock. We had a Geiger counter with us."
Read more:
https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2024/08/going-to-shiprock-fair-klee-benally.html
