The Longest Walk

alter*Native Voices
Date:	Feb 24, 2008 8:00 AM
Subject:	The Longest Walk
Body:	The Longest Walk began on February 11, 2008 in San Francisco and will be traveling through Colorado beginning on March 14, 2008 on their journey to Washington D.C.. They will be taking rest days in Pueblo and at The Sand Creek Memorial, if you would like to help out with activities, food, water, or even socks please contact us at producer@alternativevoices.org or www.longestwalk.org.

Radioactive Remains | The forgotten story of the Northwest's only uranium mines

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/pacificnw/2004191779_pacificpuranium24.html

Radioactive Remains | The forgotten story of the Northwest's only uranium mines

By Warren Cornwall

Sherman Alexie was a teenager when he first felt threatened by the uranium mines near his home on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

His grandmother had died from esophageal cancer in 1980. A few years later, his mother and some other tribal members took out a road map and began marking red dots on every home where someone had cancer.

The roads where the ore trucks rumbled by were pocked with red.

"I remember at that point knowing at some point in my life I'm certainly going to get sick," recalls Alexie, the acclaimed author who now lives in Seattle and recently won the National Book Award. "I have very little doubt that I'm going to get cancer."

Such is the legacy of the Northwest's only uranium mines. At least for those who even know they exist.

Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation, toxic birthplace of the bomb that set off the atomic age, routinely makes headlines. The Midnite Mine, just 100 miles to the north, is all but forgotten, a combination of denial, neglect and willful amnesia.

One of the world's largest mining companies is trying to wash its hands of responsibility for a costly cleanup. The federal government is supposed to help sick uranium miners, but people on the reservation don't even know the program exists.

Even on the reservation, where everybody once worked at the mines or knows someone who did, its presence is almost invisible: no monuments honoring miners, no displays of old photos showing dirty, tired workers next to mountains of ore.

But for the people who live here, it is a nagging presence, at once feared and longed for.

In a place where more than three-quarters of the people on the reservation are out of work, according to the latest federal statistics, the mines were a ticket out of poverty.

But now a new case of cancer can take people back to the uranium-tainted dust that settled on miners at work and came home in their clothes. People know which houses once sat next to the plant that milled the uranium ore, as if they were haunted.

The mine itself haunts people with a question: Are we being poisoned by what was done to our land?

The story of what happened, and continues to happen, on the reservation is a cautionary tale at a time of renewed interest in nuclear energy and the toxic uranium needed to fuel it.

Concerns about global warming, mixed with the demand for more electricity, have some in the United States taking a second look at nuclear power. The price of uranium has soared, sending prospectors back into the hills. A pound of uranium sold for $7.10 in 2000. Today it's priced at around $90 a pound.

"People are just crazy about uranium right now," says Chuck Gulick, an Eastern Washington state mine inspector who heard people talking about resumed exploration at a recent Spokane meeting of the Northwest Mining Association. "It feels like the late '70s all over again. It's kind of freaky."
AS ALEXIE once wrote, no one winds up on the Spokane Indian Reservation by accident.

Miles from the nearest town, perched on a rolling plateau of rock outcroppings and ponderosa pine forests in the state's northeast corner, only two country roads and a little-used state highway join the 157,376-acre reservation to the outside world.

Before whites arrived with their plows and railroads and rifles, the bands of the Spokane Tribe lived throughout the Spokane River Valley, including what is now the city of Spokane. After smallpox epidemics and several skirmishes with the U.S. Army, in the 1880s part of the tribe agreed to live on a reservation near the confluence of the Spokane and Columbia rivers.
The tribe wound up with some of the least valuable land. Too rocky for farming, it also turned out to have little of the gold and silver early prospectors wanted.

Then, in 1954, brothers Jim and John LeBret, both tribal members, discovered something fascinating on the side of Spokane Mountain, near the center of the reservation: rocks that glowed under a special light. It was uranium.

The government was scouring the country for the radioactive metal, raw material of the nation's growing nuclear arsenal. Much of it lay beneath the red sandstone of the Southwest, also on Indian reservations. But the Spokane Tribe sat on a hot spot.Over the next 27 years, workers dug 38 million tons of rock and radioactive rubble from the ground at the Midnite Mine. Later, workers also dug at the nearby Sherwood Mine, open for just five years.

From the Midnite Mine, they trucked the ore through the center of the reservation to a mill that crushed and bathed it in chemicals to make yellowcake. That form of uranium could be converted into highly radioactive rods destined at first for nuclear-weapons factories like Hanford, and later nuclear-power reactors.

The uranium mines became an economic and social mainstay of the reservation.

"It was a good thing. It brought lots of good jobs," says Pearl McCoy, who worked at the Sherwood Mine along with many of her 13 children. Her husband, Alfred McCoy, a revered tribal leader, worked at the mill.

While McCoy says she would like to see the mine return, she simultaneously wonders if it contributed to her husband's death from emphysema.

THE WORD "URANIUM" might evoke images of mushroom clouds and toxic waste. But on the reservation it was part of everyday life.

Deb Abrahamson, a founder of a small group of tribal activists pushing to clean up the mine, remembers her father, a millworker, bringing home hard rubber balls used to help crush the radioactive ore. They became playthings for her and her siblings.

As a child, Harold Campbell played in the dust beneath huge ore trucks as they were parked near his house. He lived next door to the mill, in a small settlement called Uranium City.

Chico Corral's body still bears the scars of his time at the mine. He fell down a hole there, he says, and broke his neck and four ribs. He wore his dusty work clothes home, where his wife washed them. There was a washing machine at the mine, he says, but it was always broken.

The risks? "Nobody knew. We just worked."

WHEN THE URANIUM market crashed in the 1980s, the mines crashed, too.
But while the mines closed and the jobs vanished, the pollution didn't.

The two mines and the mill were filled with tons of radioactive debris. At the bottom of one of two giant pits at the Midnite Mine, a small lake contains a brew of toxic metals and radiation so poisonous the eerily blue water is virtually sterile.

Roads along the 18-mile route from the Midnite Mine to the mill were littered with spots that set Geiger counters whirring. So did driveways at homes, built from crushed ore hauled from the mine.

Uranium and other toxic metals leached into groundwater, and into the sand and water of several small streams feeding Blue Creek, which runs through the reservation, and eventually into the Spokane River.

Fish in Blue Creek had high levels of heavy metals. The roots of plants growing around the mine had radioactive uranium levels as much as 11 times higher than plants from elsewhere in the area.

The tribe should basically warn people away from fishing, hunting and berry-picking around Blue Creek because of prolonged contamination, says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

One scientific model used by the EPA concluded that someone living on food gathered in the Blue Creek drainage and using the water for sweat lodges had a 1-in-5 chance of getting cancer from the added radiation.

Some of the mess is already cleaned up. The short-lived Sherwood Mine and its adjoining mill are now a series of sculpted earthen terraces.

The original mill next to what was Uranium City is in the final stages of being dismantled. Dawn Mining Co. paid to scoop up radioactive soil along the roadsides.

But, at the center of the reservation, the Midnite Mine remains a festering wound.

TO GET THERE, drive up a dirt road, past weathered, metal-sided buildings littered with debris left from the mining days. Higher on the mountain, massive piles of ore remain.

A steep side road leads up to a rocky outcrop. Harold Campbell walks to the edge of a cliff. At his feet, a vast hole opens up. This is Pit 3. A thick hose snakes from the pit, pumping the eerie blue water up to a building where it's treated to take out heavy metals, radium and uranium.

Campbell drove an ore truck into that pit in the late 1970s, as they dynamited away part of the mountain.

"When they'd blast, we'd drive in, and there was still dust in the air," he remembers.

They would drive to where people equipped with radiation measurers mounted on poles directed them.

"The probers, they were the worst ones. They're probing in here when the stuff is hot. They didn't care about us. They just cared about getting the uranium to build bombs and stuff."

Did the uranium mines make anybody here sick?

Start with this basic fact: It's virtually impossible to say for sure.
No one has done the difficult medical detective work it would take to try answering the question.

But there's ample evidence uranium mining causes lung cancer and other fatal lung diseases. Studies in the Southwest found that Navajo uranium miners in underground mines were three times more likely to get lung cancer and more than twice as likely to get other serious lung diseases. Uranium-mill workers have higher incidences of lung disease, blood cancers and kidney disease.

On the Spokane Reservation, the U.S. Public Health Service recently declared the mine doesn't pose a risk to newcomers if they keep away from it.
But many in the tribe don't believe it. They're angered by the suggestion that it's safe as long as the center of their reservation is treated as a toxic no-man's land. And the report said nothing about what it might have done to people who lived or worked there for years.

Tribal councilman Richard Garry's mother-in-law died of breast cancer. His wife has lupus — a disease of the immune system.

"She got it at a young age. I was bringing the clothes home. It had dust on it," says Garry, who worked at one of the uranium mills. Councilman Matt Wynne's uncle, Hank Wynne, died of emphysema. He was a heavy-equipment operator at the mine starting in the 1970s.

In addition to watching her husband die of emphysema, Pearl McCoy has buried her oldest son, Donald Dennison, who died of liver cancer years after he worked as a mine foreman.

"A long time ago, people died of old age. You didn't hear about cancer," says McCoy. "It was after these mines came in."

In some cases, such as lupus, there's no known link to radiation. There is for emphysema. But the picture is complicated by other things. For example, McCoy's husband also smoked for decades, the single biggest cause of emphysema.

Bob Nelson, who now manages the mothballed mine and mill for Dawn Mining, says he doesn't think the mine has made anyone sick. He's worked there since 1968. For much of the 1970s he was the radiation-safety officer.
Some people "believe there's a lot of gloom and doom there, and there isn't. There is a problem that we're pretty well controlling," he says.

Whether or not the illnesses trace back to the mine, the very question has become like an illness, spreading whispers of doubt when a diagnosis returns, changing the way people interact with the land.

The McCoys stopped fishing in Blue Creek after they saw it running milky white one day. Harold Campbell won't hunt deer and elk on the mountain above the mine. Deb Abrahamson's family stopped gathering chokecherries along Blue Creek. The tribe's library has Geiger counters people can check out.

After visiting people around the reservation last year to talk aboutthe mine, Abrahamson sits in the tribe's tiny casino at the edge of the Spokane River, eating lunch. As she speaks, tears surface. Her voice cracks, words spilling out over the electronic chirps and bells of the slot machines.

"It's like our life revolves around loss a lot of the time . . . We're surrounded, so surrounded by loss and death."

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is supposed to be doing something to help ease the losses for some miners and their families.

Congress created a program to pay each sick uranium miner, mill worker and ore-truck driver $100,000. It also took the unusual step of apologizing to miners and their families.

To qualify, applicants have to prove they or a dead relative worked at a uranium mine or mill for more than a year before 1972, when all of the uranium was mined for the government. And they must have one of the diseases linked to uranium mining.

But there's no sign any of that money has come to the Spokane reservation.
The Justice Department, which administers the program, says its records don't show payments to a member of the Spokane Tribe, or to anyone who worked at the Midnite Mine.

Pearl McCoy, who would likely be eligible since her husband worked in the mill, hadn't heard of the program. Neither had Garry, the tribal councilmember.
Abrahamson has been trying to boost awareness. She has asked the Justice Department to send someone to talk about it, but she says officials refused.
Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller says the department was never invited to visit the reservation. It did send some forms to the tribe, but did not hear back. Someone from the program would be happy to visit if they're asked, he says.

THERE IS A PLAN to repair the land around the Midnite Mine. But it will leave a lot of scars.

Mining debris would be pushed into the open pits and covered. A factory would clean water leaking out of the mine for the foreseeable future. Blue Creek, it's hoped, will eventually flush its pollution downstream and dilute it in the Spokane River.

The plan is expected to cost $152 million. No one knows when it will be finished. That's because no one knows who's going to pay for it.
Under the federal Superfund law, anyone with a hand in the pollution can be forced to pay for cleaning it. But Dawn Mining Co. has few assets.
That leaves two others: federal taxpayers, and Denver-based Newmont Mining Corp., Dawn Mining's parent company and, today, one of the largest mining corporations in the world.

U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush recently ruled the federal government is partly responsible because it controlled the reservation land where the mining happened.

Newmont, meanwhile, says it shouldn't have to pay because it didn't manage the mine's day-to-day operations. Newmont had a controlling 51 percent share of the Dawn Mining Co. It named a majority of the board of directors. Many of the mine's top managers were longtime Newmont employees who remained on Newmont's payroll while working at the Midnite Mine. An early agreement called for Newmont to manage "all operations" of Dawn.
The EPA, which is suing Newmont to force it to help pay for the cleanup, says that's ample reason for the company to get part of the bill.
The tribe agrees.

"Those responsible for the contamination should be required to clean it up, and Newmont is as responsible as Dawn," says attorney Shannon Work, who represents the Spokane Tribe.

But Newmont says it didn't have control of how the Midnite Mine was run — a crucial point for proving whether it bears responsibility for the pollution. The Newmont workers who ran the mine took orders from Dawn, the company argues in court documents. The management agreement just involved logistical support, the company insists.

"To try to say there may have been some Newmont employees involved and therefore we're liable for it, I don't think that flies so well," says Newmont spokesman Omar Jabara.

Could the new interest in uranium trigger a revival even at this troubled site?
Dawn Mining's Nelson says he's gotten calls from several people interested in getting at the remaining uranium at the Midnite Mine site. The company estimates that as much as 7 million pounds are left.

He tells people: "Well, we aren't going to. But I say, 'If you're interested, have at it.' "

More than half a century after the tribe's encounter with uranium began, leaders show little interest in digging up more of it while they cope with the mess. But neither has the tribe banned uranium mining, as the Navajos did in 2005.

Tribal councilman Wynne says he has been approached about restarting the mine.

"I don't see it going forward. If I were to have to vote today or tomorrow on it, I would vote 'No.' I'm pretty much an outdoors guy. I'm really close with my traditional ties, to how I feel about Mother Earth, and I just can't see doing it again."

Warren Cornwall is a Seattle Times staff reporter. He can be reached at 206-464-2311 or wcornwall@seattletimes.com. Alan Berner is a Times staff photographer.

Monument Valley Film Festival – Call for Submissions

Monument Valley Film Festival – Call for Submissions February 22nd, 2008 by Indie-pendent VUE

2nd Annual Monument Valley Film Festival  Call for Submissions
The 2nd Annual Monument Valley Film Festival is making a call for entries to all Native American film makers for this year’s 2008 festival. This year’s festival will be held July 4-6, 2008 here on the Navajo Nation in Kayenta, Arizona. Like the previous year, the […]

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Free Burma: Burmese in Karen State say the latest Rambo movie tells it like it is.

Burmese in Karen State say the latest Rambo movie tells it like it is.


WONG:
In "Rambo 4", released a week ago, an aging John Rambo leaves
his quiet retirement as a boat repair man in Bangkok to help Christian
missionaries kidnapped by a battalion of Burmese soldiers in Karen State. Critics may have scoffed at the latest chapter in the Rambo saga, but the film is a big hit with everyday Burmese and Karen freedom fighters.

STORY:
For some, it was elation at seeing somebody -- albeit a fictional
Hollywood character -- taking it to the foot-soldiers of a military regime
that has ruled with an iron fist for the last 46 years.

[Young Burmese Man]:
"This is reality. Because I come from Burma and I know the scene
is right and my family also are in Burma too, so this is a real story."

In Karen State troops have become huge fans of Rambo, saying Stallone's
success in the movie has spurred on their will to beat the military junta.

[Captain Gilbert, Karen National Union Troops]:
"It is a good movie for Karen people and the Karen fighters also like it. They said they could get some experience from the film and it also raise their confidence and their bravery which could encourage them to fight against the Myanmar junta."

After the crushing of last September's monk-led protests, anti-junta
activists see the movie as a rallying cry to a cause that receives little
Western backing beyond words of support for detained opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

[Edward, Overseas Burmese Patriots]:
"Please don't forget us. Please help us. Please support our cause for change and democracy in Burma."

But for others, it was a painful but telling reminder of real life-and-death
encounters.

[Cinthy, Student from Karen State]:
"When I was five years, six years old, I still remember, my parents and I ran away. We all go and sleep inside the jungle and bushes. We all are always living with the fear."

aoljembedAdd, aoljembedAdd_1

Your Power Sample! In Where to Buy Your USA- Gas

WHERE TO BUY YOUR USA-GAS

WHERE TO BUY YOUR USA-GAS, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO KNOW. READ ON--
Gas rationing in the 80's worked even though we grumbled about it.

It might even be good for us!

The Saudis are boycotting American goods.

We should return the favor.

An interesting thought is to boycott their GAS.
Every time you fill up the car, you can avoid putting more money into the coffers of Saudi Arabia Just buy from gas companies that don't import their oil from the Saudis.


Nothing is more frustrating
than the feeling that every time I fill-up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my family, and my friends.

I thought it might be interesting f o r y ou to know which oil companies are the best to buy gas from and which major companies import Middle Eastern oil .

BOY COT These COMPANIES And Watch Gas Prices Fall/ONT>

These companies import Middle Eastern oil :
Shell........................... 205,742,000 barrels
Chevron/Texaco......... 144,332,000 barrels
Exxon /Mobil............... 130,082,000 barrels
Marathon/Speedway... 117,740,000 barrels
Amoco............................62,231,000 barrels

Citgo.......from South America , from a Dictator who hates Americans

If you do the math at $30/barrel, these imports amount to over $18 BILLION! (oil is now over $90 a barrel and heading to $100.00/)

Here are some large companies that do not import Middle Eastern oil:


Sunoco................0 barrels
Conoco................0 barrels
Sinclair.................0 barrels
BP / Phillips.........0 barrels
Hess.....................0 barrels
ARC0....................0 barrels

All of this information is available from the Department of Energy and each is required to state where they get their oil and how much they are importig.
But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of gas buyers. It's really simple to do.

Now, don't wimp out at this point.... keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!

I'm sending this note to about thirty people .
If each of you s end it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300)... and

those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) . and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people,

we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers !!!!!!!

If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted!

I f it goes one level further, you guessed it .... THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!


Again, all you have to do is send this to 10 people. How long would all that take?

If each of us sends this e-mail out to ten more people within one day, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next eight days !

Buffalohair says you have a voice, you are not forgotten! Free Burma!

Kansas "Dust In The Wind"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koBWtYVRf-0

I close my eyes,
only for a moment, and the moment's gone
All my dreams,
pass before my eyes, a curiosity

Dust in the wind,
all they are is dust in the wind

Same old song,
just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do,
crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see

Dust in the wind,
All we are is dust in the wind

(instrumental break)

Don't hang on,
nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away,
and all your money won't another minute buy

Dust in the wind,
All we are is dust in the wind
(All we are is dust in the wind)
Dust in the wind,
(Everything is dust in the wind)
Everything is dust in the wind

Buffalohair Free Burma: Ibrahim Gambari, the contemporary Nevil Chamberland

Ibrahim Gambari, the contemporary Nevil Chamberland

Inadvertently the United Nations has qualified the criminal junta that has enslaved the nation of Burma. Liken to Nevil Chamberland and his association with Adolf Hitler Gambari and the military junta have become bedfellows. This new so called “Constitution” is nothing more than criminality on paper and will one day be part an parcel evidence whence the criminals of “Crimes Against Humanity” come to trial.

Apparently Gambari was swayed by the lavish accommodations provided by the band of thugs who have enslaved Burma. The track record of some of the leadership at the UN has dubious honors to say the very least. What are you thinking Gambari? Does the wholesale murder of monks and innocent protesters stir any interest what so ever? How can you justify any dialog from a rouge regime who has arrested all opposition and their leadership?

Like Nevil Chamberland who simply ignored the cries of human beings being exterminated to purport peace from Hitlers Germany, he said nothing or simply ignored the cries from the Burmese people. How many monks must die? How many innocent people must be arrested and tortured? What exactly needs to be done or said before this inert organization makes a stand for Human Rights? How far beyond stupid has the United Nations become? For all the billions this organization has received over the years, their response is simply a letter of condemnation. Hmm, that's about fifty cents for the piece of paper, the envelope and a stamp. Should I include the price of ink from the pen?

Obviously all the nations of the world have followed suit to some degree since criminals still kill and torture those who oppose the iron fisted rule of the Burmese government. “Lets write Mayanmar a nasty letter”, oh boy that will show them. And now, Japanese industrialist, of all people, have taken the bait and decided China is way to expensive. They plan to move their textile industry to Burma to take advantage of the slave labor. Maybe the sleeping giant (China) will finally realize the military junta of Burma would stab them in the back as well. I know the honorable Japanese people who would be appalled by this reality since they've already suffered corruption from industry leaders in the past. So lets tell them.

It is time for the human spirit to unite in a global effort to quell totalitarianism on a grand scale. Chevron and Total Oil are only the tip of the ice berg as far as “free world” enterprises who glean a profit from human suffering. And I'll wager there are thousands of other “free world” industries who are invested in the Burmese criminal government. Who is invested in Burma? Well lets find out and I know you will be surprised. With an army of journalists reading this article it is time to dig for facts boys and girls. It is time to expose the greedy who have capitalized on the bones of the innocent and fueled their cars with human blood. The pen is mightier than the sword as they say. Time for the sleeping dragon to awaken.

Humanity has declared war on you Snr-Gen Than Shwe and one day there will be another Nuremberg Trial. Along with thugs, Tay Za, Chevron Execs, Total Execs, Execs from Japan, Switzerland and the USA who dishonor their nations, others will be added to the list of human rights violators. Like they say in America, you can run but you can't hide and now it's time for every human being from all nations to expose these culprits. Let their industries be known world wide, let their corporations be known, let their cronies be known and let them hang in the gallows of shame.

The human beings of the world are armed with the most powerful weapon of all. It is the dollar, yen and other forms of currency. We can make a difference if we unite and stop buying from these supporters of hatred and greed. It is time for humanity to stand up and be heard. We will simply stop buying from them and cripple them in the pocket book. Like rats abandoning a sinking ship they will begin to crumble and point fingers at one another as the world looks on. Those with no honor will betray their own.

We can bring tyranny to it's knees within a year if we all band together and assault them financially. It's all about the money for the corporations of the world who secretly side with the criminal Burmese government. No money, no corporation, how simple is that eh? Remember the saying, “Fight Fire with Fire”? It is time to go on the offensive and hit them where it counts, in the wallet, the stock markets, the gas pumps and the stores where we shop. Money is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction and now it's time for the mouse to roar.

WE CAN CHANGE THE WORLD, if we try.


Your Devil's Advocate
Buffalohair
_________________
Creativity is the byproduct of a fertile mind