Poison Fire, Sacred Earth,
TESTIMONIES, LECTURES, CONCLUSIONS,
THE WORLD URANIUM HEARING, SALZBURG 1992
page 155
Austin Sam
Austin Sam, Diné (Navajo) Nation, Arizona,
USA. Member of Navajos for Clean Water.
My name is Austin Sam, from Arizona. My nation, the Navajo Nation, is the largest Indian nation in the United States. And I'm one of those people that I will put information about myself and how I worked in nuclear weapons as a chosen person by the military.
I'll go back to the younger days in my life, on
the Navajo Reservation in the 1940's. The
time and the place is traditional, where
there were no cars or no other means of
transportation, therefore, we had horse and
buggies. I was born in a hogan. My traditional
parents, they don't understand English. The only
way that we can communicate was Navajo. As I
went to school I was chosen to go to a college,
onto military service where I was able to learn
nuclear weapons, service to air missiles. As I
was chosen further on into nuclear weapons to be
in maintenance, to disable and engage.
I look back into my life as a young person
by an older, a military person. It was good that I
came from a traditional hogan, a one-room house,
to a place where there is new technology. I didn't
understand when I was 15 years old. A few were
chosen to do that job of specialized work, I was
part of that. But later, in my military years, I
decided that it shouldn't be, that this is a weapon
that one has seen was a destruction force for the
Japanese. And I stood at that peculiar spot where
they tested the first bomb in 1945, at the testing
site. That was my introduction to where the place
was hard destructed, the bomb was so -- I don't
have no idea that I was going to be in that type of
weapon field, that kind of specialized field.
The reason why I'm here is to have you,
the world, feel how it is to be standing at the
site of the first bomb that was dropped, in the World
War I was there to use it, with the people of the
United States. That was in the past. I'm older now
and I realize the destruction, and I have been
working against it since the mining has been
taking place in the forties, fifties, sixties in the
area of San Juan Basin, the uranium mining areas
of the Southwest. I have been in that particular
area when I came back from the military service,
where there was a tailing spill, an accidental
breakage in the dam which contaminated several
villages in the Arizona and New Mexico area.
We are still fighting to get better water
systems into our area where we cannot use the
water anymore, and we cannot use or sell our
livestock along that river. It just happened that I
am one of those people that has been in the same
area as some of our brothers that were here a few
minutes ago. This is the San Juan Basin Area
right here, and this is the Navajo reservation and
the spill. The tailing spill ran through here, at
Church Rock. I have the video tape with me in
case you want to get more information on that
particular area. I have the video for your
convenience, any time in the video shop.
And I thank you for being here and
having you listen to the people that have been
damaged by the mining of the areas of Arizona,
New Mexico and other places in the world. And
with my people, the Diné people, I like to give
you a welcome, to come out any time if you are
in the United States to see our beautiful land with
a lot of colours in there.
Thank you.