The Salt Lake Tribune’s recent article “Utah has the last conventional uranium mill in the country. What does it do?” doesn’t tell the other half of the story: my people’s story. What does the White Mesa Mill do to our Ute People in White Mesa?
The mill destroys our homelands. The mill’s manager told The Tribune that the mill is not a dumping ground, but more than 700 million pounds of radioactive waste that other communities do not want near them has been trucked here to White Mesa.
The mill takes out a little uranium, but most of this stuff they can’t use, so they dump it just a few miles from where we live, not thinking about our water, our lives and our future generations — our children who are not yet born.
When the mill was built, our people didn’t really understand what was going to happen here. The mill was built to mill uranium from mines and then shut down. We didn’t understand it was going to take stuff from all these radioactive sites around the United States and the world.
The mill keeps changing, and the state of Utah needs to start thinking about our future generations.
Now the mill wants to become a processing plant for minerals used in cell phones and wind turbines. But the mill was not built for this, and no one has asked us what we think of living next to these operations. Utah regulators have not asked the public what they think, either. I believe those operating the mill are thinking about green money, but we need to learn from history. We need to think about our future generations, about our land and our water, about our springs.
Water is very important to us. Water is where we begin. No matter who we are, we begin in the mother’s womb, in the water. Our elders teach us to always take care of our water and our homelands.
This mill is built on our ancestral lands, and it violates our human rights as Indigenous peoples — rights that we Ute People have under international law. Those rights include living free from discrimination, enjoying mental and physical health, maintaining our traditional cultural practices and our spiritual relationship with our homelands. We also have a right to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials takes place on our lands or territories without our free, prior and informed consent.
The White Mesa Mill violates these rights, and we say enough.
We have suffered historic injustices. Our lands and resources have been taken from us. When the mill was built, religious places, sacred sites and burials of our ancestors were destroyed. If the mill expands, as its owners want it to, it will surely destroy more. We can no longer visit the springs we used for ceremonies; we can no longer hunt or gather plants near the mill; we grow more concerned for the health of our people and our young ones each day. We do not consent to more desecration of our sacred places.
The White Mesa Mill makes money by taking contamination from other tribes: radioactive materials from the Cherokee Nation, from Mvskoke Creek lands, have come to White Mesa. They are still coming from a superfund site in Spokane Nation. Now, the mill wants to take radioactive dirt from the Navajo Nation. We do not want this.
The nuclear industry has hurt Indigenous Peoples, and that hurt will continue.
The White Mesa Mill is the last uranium mill of its kind in the United States for a reason. All the other mills have been shut down and now they have to be managed, probably forever. Look at the contamination in the groundwater in Monticello, north of us, where there used to be a uranium mill.
Our White Mesa Ute community is tired. We’re tired of seeing our mesa used as a dumping ground. Regulators in Salt Lake City, in Denver and in Washington, D.C., do not live here. They do not smell the fumes from the mill. They do not worry that their children will be exposed to radioactive materials on the roads when they ride the school bus. They do not fear contamination of their well water and destruction of their ancestral sites.
Too many Indigenous people have suffered and died at the hands of the uranium industry. We want our community to have good air, clean water, healthy animals, safe plant medicines. But this is only possible if the state of Utah will help us, if the EPA will help us, if the people of Utah will help us.
We’ve fought this monster for a long time. Now it’s time to lay it to rest and to put this waste somewhere it can’t hurt anyone.
(Malcom Lehi) Malcom Lehi is a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council.
Malcolm Lehi is a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council. He lives in White Mesa.
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