READ WHAT SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HAS TO SAY -
I'm Dora Chang. I just read the thing about the 4th of July by N.S. and the part about the Akaka bill and becoming like Native Americans is disturbing.
I quote you from a Worldwatch Institute, Paper 127:Eco-Justice by Aaron Sachs. "Approximately 65 percent of North America's uranium deposits lie inside Native American reservations.
But these reservations have been home to 80 percent of all uranium mining and 100 percent of the processing, largely because reservations fall outside the jurisdiction of most state and federal environmental laws, and reservation residents have no authority to make their own protection regulations.
With such large reserves of the valuable ore, and given the federal government's historical commitment to nuclear development, many Native American communities should by now have become quite wealthy.
But thanks largely to federal land managers, whose goal was to provide preferred companies with the cheapest possible exploitation rights, Native Americans have tended to receive as little as 3.4 percent of the market value for uranium extracted from their lands.
Native Americans also have the lowest per capita income of any demographic group in America and the highest per capita rate of malnutrition, disease and infant mortality.
The Navaho community in particular has suffered from cancer, respiratory ailments, miscarriages and birth defects caused by radiation.
In almost all cases, the people who worked the mines never received protective clothing or medical checkups or even basic information about the risks of exposure to uranium, and virtually no victims have ever gained any type of compensation.
To this day, many Native American communities have to live with illegally high levels of lead, thorium, radium and other toxins that have seeped into their water and soil from tailings ponds and processing plants.
"This isn't to say that Hawaiian lands might have uranium, but that apparently if the Akaka bill succeeds in giving Native Hawaiians Native American status, than it seems that all control over the land goes directly to the bureaucracy in Washington, "the federal land managers" and none of the federal and state ecology laws would apply and the Native Hawaiians wouldn't be able to institute their own laws.
I find all this very disturbing, and can only hope that the Akaka bill never passes and dies a deserving death.
