Narrated by Laural Merlington

Award-winning reporter Judy Pasternak tells the haunting story of uranium mining
on the Navajo desert and its terrible, long-ignored legacy.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded an
entire tribe of people. The Navajo worked unprotected in the uranium mines that
fueled the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Long after these mines were
abandoned, Navajos in all four corners of the Reservation (which borders Utah,
New Mexico, and Arizona) continued grazing their animals on sagebrush flats
riddled with uranium that had been blasted from the ground. They drank
contaminated water from old pits, which had filled with rain. They built their
houses out of chunks of yellowcake, they inhaled radioactive dust borne aloft
from the waste piles the mining companies had left behind, and their children
played in the unsealed mines themselves. Ten years after the mines closed, the
cancer rate on the reservation shot up and the babies began to be born with
crooked fingers that fused together into claws as they grew. Scientists filed
complaints about the situation with the government but were told it was a mess
"too expensive" to clean up.

Few had heard this story until Judy Pasternak exposed it in a prizewinning Los
Angeles Times series. Her work not only inspired this book, which is already
a winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award, it also galvanized
both a congressman and a famous prosecutor to clean the sites and get
reparations for the tribe. Yellow Dirt powerfully chronicles both the scandal
of neglect and the Navajo.s fight for justice.

Download File Size:491 MB

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