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Yellow Dirt: An American Story Of A Poisoned Land And A People Betrayed (2010)

by Judy Pasternak(Favorite Author)

3.97 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1416594825 (ISBN13: 9781416594826)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Free Press

review 1: Looking back at the 20th century now has an eerie ring of “the end justifies the means” for those with eyes to see it. True, here in America we developed faster than any other period in history: from the Industrial Revolution to the automobile to electricity to running water to medicine to the information age, we accomplished more than has ever been done in a century before. Not to mention we fought two enormous wars during those years and five or six smaller ones. In truth, history will probably look back on the 20th century as an enormous success for progress.However, we miss the little things. For example, the topic of Yellow Dirt: people thrown by the dangerous, radiation-ridden wayside in the name of national safety. Not only did the hasty desire to be the most po... morewerful drive us to destroy one of the most beautiful areas of the American Southwest, we set a legacy of pain and loss for three generations of people.Impeccably researched and journalistically reported, Yellow Dirt takes readers back to the 1930s on the rocky, arid Navajo Reservation in the Four Corners area, where people still herded sheep and lived off the land just as their ancestors had done for thousands of years. Certainly not an easy life, but one the Navajo people have fought government legislation and invading frontiersmen for hundreds of years to preserve. However, when an intruding white prospector discovers the presence of potent uranium in the “yellow rocks” of a northern section called Cane Valley, it’s only a matter of time before the Navajo lands are to be breached.For the next twenty-some years, American mining corporations excavated the nearby mesa in the Monument Valley for uranium to power the Manhattan Project and the arms race leading into the Cold War. Until the mine was abandoned in the 1950s, hundreds of Navajo workers entered the mesa and breathed in radiation-laden smoke every day for twelve-hour shifts, then returned home to houses built of uranium-rich ore and drank from uranium-polluted water. So, to modern readers, it is no surprise that fifteen years later, they were developing cancer in record numbers, and the US government refused to take any responsibility.Judy Pasternak, a former L.A. Times reporter, has laid out each character and his or her role in the escalation of the situation in precise language, taking us logically through the story with little to no extraneous information. With a concept this complicated, it would be easy to go down rabbit trails of history or politics, but she has edited down the essentials of what we need to know about what occurred on the Navajo lands during those years, and it lends a refreshing brevity to what could be a very cumbersome story. E.G. Straight to the point, no wishy-washy ambiguity.Pasternak has also not taken the “victimized underdog” approach that many people take when writing books about the abuse of the Native American culture by the encroaching U.S. government. She presents the characters as gravely real, faulted people (Adakai, the forefather in Cane Valley, is a rampant gambler; his son, Luke Yazzie, is a chronic drinker) caught up in a situation over which they have little to no control (Luke thought he could get enough money for a truck out of presenting the prospectors with the yellow rocks). By the time we reach the 1990s, when attention on the situation is finally coming to the environmental forefront, the people are just catching on and have begun to make noise about it, just as any other community would do.Environmental journalism is nothing new, but Pasternak has put an emotional human face on it, similar to Rachel Carson’s infamous Silent Spring. It’s amazing how fast we forget these happenings: I had absolutely no idea about the extent of the mining or its aftereffects, and the news about this only came out in 2005. For sure, this kind of heavy topic is not for casual reading, but for those interested in the powers or ideas involved, this is a great work to start in on. Weighing in at just over 200 pages, it’s not a long read, and flows much like a novel.Yellow Dirt is available on the Kindle for $10.38, or in paperback from Amazon for $10.40. I snagged my copy off a random shelf in my library, and because it’s almost four years old now, your library is likely to have a copy. See if you can find it, because it’s definitely worth a read, but unless you’re a social worker or an environmental lawyer, it may not be a book for prolonged study.
review 2: What am amazing work -- compelling and tragic that reads like fiction! I could not put it down. There is no doubt the US government has treated Native Americans shabbily since we white folks invaded and conquered many peoples. Then after "we" gave reservations and nation status to various tribes on the land least desirable to us, we continued with our betrayals. We mined uranium for our bombs without letting the indigenous people who lived there know. And we left huge heaps of radioactive tracings. People who were used to living off the land came to haul it away to build their houses from. Children played on the pilings. And to his day, the Navajo people -- generations later -- are paying a horrific price for our government's secrecy and carelessness (as in there's no evidence we cared). An eye-opening book that makes me ache. less

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