wronged’
After the House’s failure to act on RECA, Justin Ahasteen, executive director of the Navajo Nation Washington Office, said that in allowing the program to expire, Speaker Johnson not only betrayed Navajo veterans, blue-collar uranium miners and families who were unwitting victims of the nation's nuclear weapons program, he “profoundly wronged the Navajo people who have given so much to this country.”
“The government made a sacred promise to care for those harmed by its nuclear actions. By abandoning this commitment, Speaker Johnson has chosen to value dollars and cents over the lives and well-being of our people. This decision dishonors the sacrifices of the Navajo Nation and undermines the trust and respect that should bind us all,” Ahasteen said.
Phil Harrison, longtime advocate for expanding coverage for Navajo uranium workers and downwinders, was beyond disappointed with the House’s lack of action. He couldn’t eat for days – and Harrison loves fry bread and mutton stew.
“I was hoping that the extension would be accepted with some kind of compromise that we continue working on expanding – keep the work going – but that didn’t happen,” he said.
New Mexico Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez and Sen. James “Jim” Moylan, R-Guam, tried to get RECA back on the National Defense Authorization Act bill, but and the Rules Committee voted against it, 9-4, Harrison said.
“Right now we’re at a plateau. We don’t know. It’s anybody’s guess what D.C.’s going to do,” he said. “It’s the House Republicans that’s holding this whole thing up.”
Leger Fernandez told the House in January that while the movie “Oppenheimer” reminded the nation that New Mexico is where the government first detonated an atomic bomb, the explosion’s impact on nearby communities remains untold.
“Little girls danced around catching the ash on their tongues, thinking it was summer snow,” she said. “Those little girls, like thousands of New Mexicans, developed cancer and deadly diseases because of the Trinity Test.” Let’s talk Harrison said he recently called Johnson’s office on a Friday. He didn’t get to speak with Johnson directly, of course.
“I did tell them that – being a grassroots organization from the members of the Navajo Nation – our people have been doing this work for a long time. As a group, we submitted some changes and it’s almost like we’re the sponsors of this bill.
“We know how the program runs. We’re well versed with the program. ‘Believe me, I said, the burden is on the worker. It’s a cumbersome thing. It takes a long time to get a payment. They’ve gotta pay for this, they’ve gotta pay for this, they’ve gotta pay for this. They don’t believe in Indian Health Service – they don’t even give a diagnosis letter.”
“This is what we’re dealing with today,” Harrison said he the told the young lady. “I said if Speaker Johnson wants to meet with me, I’m open. I said we can have a Zoom meeting if they have any questions. I guarantee it’s not going to be 100 billion dollars.’
“Then she said, ‘I’ll get this to Speaker Johnson,” and I said, ‘Thank you, and here’s my phone number – and my full name.’ So far, no call came back. I was sad that I didn’t hear from Speaker Johnson.”
Harrison said the Navajo Nation has people who are hesitant to file for compensation because they don’t want to admit they have cancer. “They’re reluctant and they’re emotionally drained after hearing [the diagnosis].
“The other thing that’s going on among our people is that the elderlies are telling each other, ‘Don’t file, don’t file. That program is not good. If you file, if you get some money, you are going to die in three months,’” he said. “So people are reluctant to file because of the fear that once they get compensated, there’s no hope.”
Harrison has worked on RECA claims for various home health agencies over the years, so he has a feel for how Navajo claimants are taking the news about being abandoned by the House.
“I know they are disappointed and I know they need help,” he said. “I know that they feel that the government has no sympathy over our radiation victims.”
“They fear that nobody’s going to come, nobody’s going to help. This is something that they’re going to have to deal with themselves, so they’re reluctant to come around. It’s just sad that our leaders who are supposed to take care of us and work for us are deaf to the ears. They don’t listen. They can’t correct their wrongs. Here, all of this work that we did was in the name of national security and democracy.”
Harrison said he told Arizona’s Gosar: “Senator, did you know that we are the first responders to national security? During the Cold War era, the threat of Russia, the threat of Germany – you gave a shovel to the Navajo people.
“They didn’t know what they were doing. All they did was provide for their family. The people that didn’t read and write, you took advantage of them. They didn’t sign a consent to work. A tranche agreement took place and now you can’t even correct the wrongs to help.
“You have freedom.” ‘What is that?’ Maggie Billiman, a member of the Navajo Nation, was born at home in Buell Park, Ariz., and grew up in Sawmill Chapter, a remote, mountainous community nearby. She, really doesn’t know what date she was born, just that she showed up in March while her sister was still breastfeeding.
There weren’t a lot of business operations in Sawmill so when Billiman learned that she had been exposed to ionizing radiation all the way out there, she thought it was crazy – until recent years when she put two and two together and came up with “downwinder.”
Billiman believes she was 2 or 3 years old when the family moved into a large two-room house up in Sawmill community. “I remember walking into the house – it was brand new and I was so happy! We were so excited,” she said. “That’s where I saw the mushroom cloud.”
The awe of a child is still in her voice when she describes the event.
“One of the nights, we woke up my mom – me and my little sister and another sister. We needed to go to the bathroom and mom said OK. So we got up and, I don’t recall, I think it was like in the middle of the night somewhere – everybody’s asleep, quiet – we went outside and then when we were heading to the outhouse, we saw this huge – it was huge, I mean, it was BIG, with the mushroom tail. It was huge, huge! We were like, ‘Oh my God, what is that?’
“Mom was just like – staring at it – and we were just looking at it for a while.
“When we went to the outhouse and went to the bathroom, it was kind of still there but it was vaguely, real slowly going away. When we got back in the house, it was still there. I remember peeking out from the window. Mom told us to go back to sleep. She didn’t say anything, what it was.” “I saw that,” Billiman said.
Now family members either have cancer or are exhibiting signs that it might be in their future – something she attributes to radioactive fallout from Nevada Test Site.
The Navajo Nation, and certain chapters in particular, including Sawmill, became hot spots on numerous occasions during the Upshot-Knothole and Teapot tests due to radioactive fallout from Nevada.
“My sister Lula, she’s like a year older than me, she has bladder cancer, but she doesn’t trust the hospital. She already had surgery and they cut her like five different areas and she’s not trusting them. She almost ended up in the ER twice, but she hung in there. She said, ‘I’m going to live with my pain. I’m not going to go to the hospital.’” Billiman and her brother Daniel have thyroid issues, Jenice, an older sister, recently had a “bump” removed but because they didn’t do a biopsy, she has no idea whether it was cancerous or not, Billiman said, adding that it seems like she and all of her siblings have COPD, cardiopulmonary disease. “They’re having a hard time breathing.”
“What did we do? Where did we go wrong? Why are we this way?” she asked. “The doctor said it will get worse for me. My lungs aren’t all that great. I hear it too. I used to never really pay attention to it, but when I ended up in the E.R., I could really hear the wheezing in my lungs. I was so upset about that. I was like, ‘Here we go. What next?
Great!’ I was just so mad.”
Her cousins still live in the Sawmill area, where one of them is now “in really bad shape,” she said. An uncle died of lung cancer, her grandmother died of ovarian cancer, her mother had COPD, a heart condition and toward the end of her life, ovarian problems. None of them were compensated.
Billiman was diagnosed almost two years ago with thyroid and pancreatic diseases. “I have documentation through the cancer screening,” she said. “I have a document stating that I was exposed to radiation – ionized radiation. It’s on my medical records.”
But even if the RECA program had lived on, she said “they wouldn’t have paid me. I have to have actual cancer. But I’m heading toward that eventually.”
The pancreatic disease is very painful, she said. “I am really getting to be picky what I eat, what makes it painful. I can’t eat a whole lot. I kind of eat like a little bird. But I hurt if I eat too much.”
The image of the cloud she saw as a child has been a source of intrigue over the years.
“I always wonder about it, think about it: Would it be like, a meteor, if it was an asteroid that came through?
“No. If you look at it today and think back, it was in the clouds. It was like huge, with the tail.”
She believes she must have witnessed an atomic bomb test, “now that that [cloud] makes sense, you know?”
“When you think back – I’m going ‘Wow!’”