February-March 1980 RAIN Page 7 photos by Carlotta Collelle "The Navajo nation has exercised its right by deciding to literally give away all its water to the energy companies!" WLD: By the trl'aties we had the right to have our own government, like we always had. But in 1934 they established governments on the reservation under the Indian Reorganization Act. They were subject to the approval of the Department of Interior, and those are the guys that sign the mineral leases for Indian reservations. Well, at that time they didn't have the technology to l' Xploit uranium-they didn't know what it was '-but they were into gold and oil and natural gas and things like that. And the found those on the reservation so they got the tribal councils lI) sign the leases for that, 'cause the people were poor, and they thought it would be a good idea at that time. There was a lot of that kind of development. You could see that in Oklahoma, specifically, where the Indian land base is totally eroded because of thl' Oklahoma oil rush. That's where the oil companil's started. Well, in the atomic age the first place they found the uranium was Great Bear Lake in Canada, which is the land of the Dene nation-that means "people" in their language-then the U.S. dl' cided it would "go domestic" for uranium, atoms for peace, etc. They came down here, and the Atomic Energy Commission contracted out about 25 some projects, uranium mining, at that time. There were some like at Edgl'mont, S.D. , whIch are the legal lands of thl' Lakota, or Sioux nation, and some in southern Oregon and near Spokane. Colorado had a lot of them-there's a lot of Union Carbide operations there. Then of course there's the Southwest. So they started all these mining operations thl'n, and I would say about half of them were on the reservations. Now, what happl'nl'd is that a lot of them closed down and a lot of them expanded. So, we found out that in the Southwest is wheH' the biggest expansion was, in what's called the Grants Mineral Belt. The Southwest, in the area where those four states cross, the Four Corners aH'a, 350,000 Indian people live there. It's the biggest concentration of Indian people in the Northern Hemisphere. That's where they found all the resources. Somehow, when it started out they were mining just on the resl'rvation, the Navajo (Dine) reservation, and at Laguna Pueblo just due cast of Navajo. There Anaconda openl'd up a " small" uranium strip-mine opl'ration in '51 and now they've got the largest uranium strip min.. In the world. (In the free world, actually. Its only competition is in Namibia.)Though thert"s uranium in other places, they chost' to operate it on the reservations. For t'xample, in 74,100% of all fcd
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