Toxic Waste in Navajo Country

Written by: Mason Noble

Photo Credit: John Fowler/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_Buttes_volcanic_field

Dilkon, Arizona is a small town and according to the 2010 US census the town had 1,184 residents. Dilkon is also a on the reservation of the Navajo Indian tribe. Before this contemporary issue the Navajo people faced is discussed it is important to understand the background of the Navajo and the importance of their land. According to PBS land is important to the Navajo people historically, religiously and culturally (Luther 1).  As one can see, the Navajo value their land which is important when the contemporary issue they faced is mentioned. The opposition in this struggle is a company called Waste-Tech Services. Upon looking into this company, I was not able to find any relevant information about them as this issue took place 32 years ago. I am to assume that the company was restructured or renamed after this ordeal as in nearly every state I have found a company with the same name registered with the BBB post 1988.

            In the year 1988, a recycling plant was approved for construction it was hoped that it would bring jobs to the impoverished town of Dilkon (Cole and Foster 134). As a generalization most native reservations tend to face problems involving poverty and unemployment this seemed like a fool proof plan at the time. The Navajo council approved the plan as they were told it would bring 200 jobs and pay money back to the tribe (Cole and Foster 134). When an offer is too good to be true that is usually the case, but the Navajo were soon going to discover the guise this “recycling plant” was wearing. The residents of Dilkon really took the initiative in trying to understand the true nature of the plant that was going to get built. The residents even formed a group called CARE – Citizens Against Ruining our Environment (Cole and Foster 134). This is a great example of the residents of this town uniting together against something that they feel might bring harm to their town. Ultimately CARE discovered that recycling plant was just a good public relations name for and incinerator. There is a large difference between a recycling plant and an incinerator. Recycling plants are known to repurpose items and are not know for producing to much pollution. An incinerator is like a trash can with fire, anything can be thrown into it and it gets destroyed via heat and flames. Waste tech told the activist group CARE that once incinerated the ash would not be toxic, CARE had investigations performed and they concluded the contrary (Cole and Foster 135). The fact that this ash was found to be toxic is extremely important because some people might just move and say, “oh well”. However, the Navajo have placed such a large emphasis on the importance of their land that people would not be as apt to move as someone off the reservation would. Not to mention economic factors limited the ability for some citizens to move so most the town would have likely stayed even if this toxic plant was built next to them.

The final nail in the coffin for this planned incinerator was when it was revealed that the plant would also burn medical waste from hospitals i.e. amputated limbs and body parts (Cole and Foster 135). When it comes to death, the Navajo people hold it to be very sacred and they possess many different taboos about it. One of their primary beliefs is that the devil can linger around where corpses were, and it is important to them to bath and change clothes immediately after handling a dead body (Shufeldt 304).  While the Navajo who would have worked at this plant were not going to be handling dead bodies fully intact, they would be handling portions of them which is one and the same to them. The fact that this plant was going to mainly employ Navajo and expect them to dispose of remnants of body parts without even looking into their mortuary culture is a very large oversight on part of the Waste-Tech Services. With the information about the body parts needing to be incinerated coming to light the tribe voted a motion to block the plant (Cole and Foster 136). As of writing this there is no plant of this sort located within the Navajo Reservation. The group CARE was immensely responsible for the halting of this plant. They were able to mobilize their town and take environmental action against something that would have brought them physical harm via the toxic ash that would have covered the surrounding area and also put them in a place where culturally some of the things taking place at the plant would be questionable like the incineration of amputated limbs.

Sources

Cole, Luke W., and Sheila R. Foster. From the Ground up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York University Press, 2001.

Luther, Billy. “Independent Lens . MISS NAVAJO . Navajo Culture . The Land.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/independentlens/missnavajo/land.html.

Shufeldt, R. W. “Mortuary Customs of the Navajo Indians.” The American Naturalist, vol. 25, no. 292, Apr. 1891, pp. 303–306., doi:10.1086/275311.