Tribe battles uranium transport through ancestral lands

Dianna Sue Uqualla always wears
traditional moccasins and regalia when she visits Red Butte Mountain.
The mountain is sacred to the Havasupai people, and wearing her
traditional attire is how she connects with her ancestral homeland near
the Grand Canyon and shows it respect.

Uqualla said the Havasupai people
once lived around Red Butte Mountain because it had everything they
needed to survive, including medicinal plants, wild game and plenty of
wood.

“You can still see the fire pits along the tree lines,” she said.

As a traditional practitioner for her
tribe, Uqualla said that when she looks at Red Butte Mountain, she sees
the medicine that has sustained her people since time immemorial.

While non-Native people may see it as
just a mountain with shrubs and trees, the Havasupai people see it as a
holy place where their medicine people came from.

“These are gonna die,” Uqualla said
of the vegetation because three miles north of Red Butte Mountain sits
Pinyon Plain Mine, where uranium ore has been extracted since the
beginning of 2024 and is approved for transportation along a route that
passes by the mountain.

Energy Fuels, Inc. owns and operates
the Pinyon Plain uranium mine on U.S. Forest Service land in the Kaibab
National Forest near the Grand Canyon. Numerous tribes, including the
Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe and the Havasupai Tribe, have ancestral
lands there.

The Havasupai Tribe, which lives at
the bottom of the Grand Canyon, has repeatedly and emphatically said
that the mine poses risks to its drinking water, natural wonders and
sacred cultural sites.

Uqualla said that many people from
the Havasupai Tribe used to come to Red Butte Mountain to pray. However,
with the mine now extracting uranium ore, the fear of contamination is
high, so only some still do so. 

“It’s a blessing for the land,” she
said of the community’s tradition of coming together to collect
medicine, dance, and pray. Now, it’s rare for the tribe to have large
gatherings at Red Butte Mountain, though Uqualla still visits the
mountain when she gets the chance.

She said it was heartbreaking when
the Havasupai people learned that the mine was now extracting uranium
ore — and when the company sent out its first haul trucks in July
without any notice to the tribes or communities along the route. 

Uranium ore from Pinyon Plain Mine
near the Grand Canyon will be transported by over-the-road 24-ton haul
trucks and end dump trailers, according to Energy Fuels, Inc., and up to 10 trucks will make the trip daily.

Pinyon Plain Mine is at the end of
Forest Service Road 305ab, about 6 miles from the main highway. Driving
along the narrow dirt roads, there are no indications that it is the
starting point of a uranium haul route. 

The only identifiers along the narrow
gravel road are flexible orange roadside markers staked into the ground
every other mile. Uqualla said the markers are insufficient, given that
she only noticed them once the Arizona Mirror pointed them out to her.

The trucks hauling ore from Pinyon
Plain Mine travel along the gravel road through the dense trees of the
Kaibab Forest before reaching the main highway, State Route 64. 

The trucks pass Red Butte Mountain, where the main road sits about half a mile from the open area at the mountain’s base.

The Havasupai Tribe condemned Energy
Fuels’ actions in July when it started transporting uranium ore. Uqualla
said that many of her people did not like that the transport happened
by surprise, even though the company had promised the Havasupai Tribe
five days’ notice. 

Uqualla thought it was in poor taste
that the mining company sent the trucks out early in the morning, a time
when many people would not notice them. 

“That was not right,” she added.

As part of the mining company’s transportation policy,
trailers hauling uranium ore must be kept closed at all times, both
when containing uranium ore and when empty. That is done using a tarp,
which can be removed only when loading and unloading “so that there may
not be any leakage of radioactive material from the trailer.”

When Uqualla learned that only a tarp
would cover the uranium ore as it was being transported, she said that
was not enough to prevent contamination. 

She said that if the tarp is not
secure, it will start flapping, allowing more air to pass through the
truck trailers and potentially releasing contaminants along the roadway.

“If they don’t maintain those things,
a lot of contamination is going to be spread from here all the way up
to Utah,” Uqualla added.

The roughly 320-mile route starts
from a forest service road before entering State Route 64. It then
travels south toward Interstate 40 to enter Flagstaff, proceeding east
to head north on U.S. Highway 89 until heading east on U.S. Highway 160.
The final stretch sees the trucks take U.S. Highway 191 north into
Utah.  

All shipments of uranium ore from the
Pinyon Plain Mine to the White Mesa Mill must be transported without
unnecessary delay, according to the mining company’s transportation
policy. 

However, in the event of a delay,
they have designated safe havens for “temporary storage of
transportation vehicles” along the route.

Many communities along the haul
route, which passes through towns in Arizona, the Hopi Nation, the
Navajo Nation, Utah and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, oppose uranium
hauling and condemned the first haul in July, citing fears of
contamination and accidents along the route. 

Uqualla said the route raises
concerns because State Route 64 attracts heavy traffic in both
directions as people head north to the Grand Canyon or south toward
Williams and Interstate 40. 

“You have wrecks all the time,”
Uqualla said, noting that speeding and poor weather are regular factors
for many accidents along the highway. 

“If one of those big trucks crashes,
all that ore is going to come out,” she said. And then what? She said
even if the mining company has an emergency plan in place and is going
to clean up, the contamination has already happened and can’t be taken
back. 

The trucks hauling the uranium are
almost impossible to distinguish from the other tractor-trailers that
routinely travel the state’s highways and interstates. The uranium ore
produced by the mine is classified as LSA-1 (Low Specific Activity),
which means that trucks are not required to label their shipments with
more than a yellow placard that reads “RADIOACTIVE” in three-inch
letters, according to their transportation policy. 

The placard must be placed on each
side and each end of the truckload, the policy states, and it must be
clearly visible from the direction it faces.

Dinolene Caska, a member of the
Havasupai Tribe, said she believes that if the mining company has
nothing to hide, it should clearly mark its trucks with signs indicating
uranium ore so people can easily identify it and know to stay away. 

“Don’t try to be discreet,” she said,
adding that she believes the mine knows that many people are against
it, so “they don’t want to advertise it because they’re probably going
to get more opposition.”

“Why are you hiding it?” Caska asked. “You’re hiding it because you know uranium is cancerous.”

Decades of opposition span generations of tribal leaders

Uqualla said her tribe’s elders have been resisting the uranium mine’s efforts for generations; she has been part of that resistance since she was 14, and she is now 65. 

“We’ve been fighting it so long,”
Uqualla said. She recalls how she helped the elders in her community as
an apprentice and assisted them during meetings about the mine. 

“Now, I have become the elder that is fighting for this,” she added.

The Havasupai Tribe’s land is over
188,000 acres of canyon land and broken plateaus bordering the western
edge of the Grand Canyon’s south rim. Supai, their main village, is
located eight miles below the rim of the Grand Canyon.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity,
the mine has a history of flooding. It drains into shallow groundwater
aquifers that flow into South Rim springs. The mine also threatens to
contaminate deep aquifers that feed Havasu Creek and other Grand Canyon
springs.

The Havasupai Tribe, several
conservation groups and other tribal nations have opposed the mine for
years. The Havasupai Tribe was involved in a lengthy legal battle that
sought to close the mine, but a federal judge ruled in the mine’s favor in 2020.

But that hasn’t stopped the Havasupai
from trying to halt the mine’s operations. Their latest effort involves
calling for a new environmental impact statement and writing a letter
of opposition to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, which issued the mine an aquifer protection plan permit in 2022.

The Havasupai Tribe was also one of
many that advocated for the designation Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni –
Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, which
effectively bars mining on roughly a million acres of land near the
Grand Canyon, including the land for Pinyon Plain Mine and Red Butte
Mountain. 

However, according to the U.S. Forest Service, Pinyon Plain Mine is exempted because of its previous existing rights.

“This is part of our history,” Caska said of the land surrounding Red Butte Mountain. “All this land around here, that’s us.”

Caska is part of the Havasupai Tribal
Council’s uranium subcommittee. She advocates alongside her community
to educate people about what is happening and stop uranium mining and
transportation within their ancestral homelands. 

Caska said she grew up wandering
around Red Butte Mountain, where she would go hunting and gather
medicine with her family. She said she hopes that the work the Havasupai
Tribe is doing to protect the mountain will save it for the next
generation. 

“We’re trying to make sure that we protect our land,” she added. “This is where we came from.”

Caska said she wants the next
generation of Havasupai people to be able to come out to the mountain
and participate in the Havasuapi’s way of life, including hunting,
gathering and other cultural customs.

“It’s our culture that we need to protect,” she added.

When she heard Pinyon Plain Mine
started sending trucks along the route hauling uranium ore, Caska said
she was devastated and scared. She said hauling the uranium ore across
the Havasupai’s ancestral homelands and near their traditional cultural
property is putting the tribe’s health and people in jeopardy. 

“We are in jeopardy, whether these people see it or not,” she said. 

Caska said their community has been
fighting against the mine for a long time, and she wants people to
understand that “uranium kills.” Having the mine continue operating and
transporting ore will only end in “disaster.”

“It’s not just my people; everybody has to speak up,” Uqualla said. “Uranium doesn’t kill you right away. It makes you suffer.”

Uranium ore hauling from Pinyon Plain
Mine is currently on hold as negotiations continue between the Navajo
Nation government and Energy Fuels. 

In addition to negotiations, other
requests have been made, including calls from the Havasupai Tribe,
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, and Gov. Katie Hobbs for the U.S.
Forest Service to conduct a new environmental impact study for the
Pinyon Plain Mine.

Caska said that when the mining
company halted the transportation of the uranium ore in August after
calls from their tribe, the Navajo Nation and Hobbs, it gave her some
hope. 

“I guess we do have people on our
side,” she said, adding that it fuels their hope that the tribe will
prevail. “It’s going to be a hard fight.”

However, Caska expressed concerns
about the mining company’s voluntary transportation halt and ongoing
negotiations with the Navajo Nation. 

Caska said the mining company is only
talking to the Navajo Nation, and the Havasupai Tribe should be
included in the negotiation because the hauling route starts in their
ancestral homeland. 

“We should have a part in that
negotiation because they are using our ancestral lands to get it out of
here,” Caska said. “They’re coming out of our territory, so we should
have the same say, but we’re left out.”