Flossie and Grey

The little woman who was my down-the-alley neighbor turned 100 this year. After she sold her home she moved into Neosho Ridge housing.

Her daughter gave me Flossie’s address. I really didn’t need it. I could have walked the neighborhood and known her place. It was the one with Egyptian Walking Onions Allium Cepa Viviparum in pots out front. These “green onions” go to seed, form small onion clusters and when too heavy for the stalk, they fall over and walk all over your garden!

Her husband had been a miner in the Picher Field and when mining played out here, he found a job in Grants, New Mexico bringing his valuable welding and electrical skills to work the uranium mines. The whole family moved and their 2 teenage daughters attended 3 ½ years of high school before returning to Ottawa County. 

I loaned Flossie the book, If You Poison Us, Uranium and Native Americans by Peter H. Eichstaedt, 1994. One fourth of the uranium miners were Native American, with one of them was my son’s paternal grandfather, Grey Jim a full blood Navajo, who worked in Cove, Arizona at another uranium mine. Grey and many other Navajo miners spoke no English, brought no additional skills, only willingness to work.

Grey worked underground for 12 to 13 years in the mines outside Cove, Arizona. He told his children it was dark and scary in the mines ¼ mile underground with only the light on their helmets. They used gunpowder to dislodge ore, then shoveled it into canisters that ran on train tracks inside the mines. Once hauled out the ore was trucked uncovered for 40 miles and processed in New Mexico.

Both Grey and Flossie’s husband ended up being part of the government’s effort to compensate miners who did the essential work to provide the essence used to ultimately end the last world war. After he died, Flossie qualified too, having been there with him. Wives were compensated, because they faced great risk too, handling the contaminated clothing of their husbands brought home from work.

IN 1990, THE US CONGRESS passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). This act acknowledged responsibility for the historical mistreatment of uranium miners by the US government, and made provision for financial compensation to miners with diseases that could be related to their mining experience. 

The History of Uranium Mining and the Navajo People 

I remember driving from Shiprock to Farmington, NM many decades ago. There was a curve by what the locals called the “hog-backs.” The road was dangerous and slick sometimes when too many snakes were run over by the passing traffic!

But over the edge of the highway way down below were tailings piles. One pile was bright yellow, the color of “yellow cake” uranium left out in the open, visible from the road above.

A small modular nuclear reactor will be placed underground in a borehole one mile (1.6 km) deep in Parsons, KS. Experts say this technology is untested and will be dangerous. Several of us attended an “open house” the company held. That format guarantees the company can slide into a community claiming to be “open” to questions, but is useless to residents as a whole since not everyone can hear the answers and grow their understanding together.

Stewart Udall summed it all up: Mining is like a search-and-destroy mission. Harms the earth and the people. This story is not over. Pay attention to the Oklahoma Advancement of Nuclear energy HB 3175. Watch SILKWOOD. Oklahoma said NO to nuclear 44 years ago in the Blackfox fight. We say NO again. 

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

This Month’s Superfund Listing of Abandoned Uranium Mines in the Navajo Nation’s Lukachukai Mountains Is a First Step Toward Cleaning Them Up