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Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos Judy Pasternak. New York, NY: Free Press, 2010, 320 pages, $15.00.
Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos by Judy Pasternak (2010) is a powerful example of deceit toward and exploitation of a minority group in the United States, consistent with the Public Health Service abuses of African American men in the infamous Tuskegee study. In this heart-wrenching true story, the Navajo people suffered cultural, economic, and health injustices when mining corporations and the federal government extracted uranium from sacred lands during World War II and well into the Cold War era. Federal and corporate promises to safeguard Navajo land and health went unfulfilled, resulting in decades of death and destruction of health, environment, and ways of life.
Judy Pasternak is an award-winning investigative and environmental journalist who worked for the Los Angeles Times for 24 years. She is currently an editor with Bloomberg News in Washington, DC. The book Yellow Dirt was developed from Pasternak's 2006 Los Angeles Times newspaper series about uranium mining in the Navajo Nation. Her series won many awards and prompted a congressional hearing that resulted in a federal cleanup effort in the Navajo Nation. Yellow Dirt was chosen as one of the best books of 2010 by the Christian Science Monitor and Publishers Weekly.
Pasternak discusses the cultural importance of the number Four: Navajo lore describes four sacred mountains, four worlds, four directions, four precious substances, and four colors. The four colors-white, blue, yellow, and black- correspond to four important times of day (Hill, 2007). As I finished reading the book, these colors flashed before my eyes after digesting the depth of inequities experienced by the Navajo people. At first, I saw a hot, white streak representing the shock of the events. White turned quickly to blue, as sadness and grief flowed through me. Eventually blue became yellow, the color of leetso, Navajo for "yellow dirt" which contained uranium. Then yellow faded and there was nothing but black, the color of heartbreak . . . the color of chest X-rays.
Pasternak retraces a contemporary long walk through the generations-long, unforgiving devolution of the health of the Navajo people that resulted from uranium exposure. Prior...