"Sherman Alexie was a teenager when he first felt threatened by the uranium mines near his home on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
His grandmother had died from esophageal cancer in 1980. A few years later, his mother and some other tribal members took out a road map and began marking red dots on every home where someone had cancer.
The roads where the ore trucks rumbled by were pocked with red.
"I remember at that point knowing at some point in my life I'm certainly going to get sick," recalls Alexie, the acclaimed author who now lives in Seattle and recently won the National Book Award. "I have very little doubt that I'm going to get cancer."
Such is the legacy of the Northwest's only uranium mines. At least for those who even know they exist.
Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation, toxic birthplace of the bomb that set off the atomic age, routinely makes headlines. The Midnite Mine, just 100 miles to the north, is all but forgotten, a combination of denial, neglect and willful amnesia.
One of the world's largest mining companies is trying to wash its hands of responsibility for a costly cleanup. The federal government is supposed to help sick uranium miners, but people on the reservation don't even know the program exists.
Even on the reservation, where everybody once worked at the mines or knows someone who did, its presence is almost invisible: no monuments honoring miners, no displays of old photos showing dirty, tired workers next to mountains of ore.
But for the people who live here, it is a nagging presence, at once feared and longed for.
In a place where more than three-quarters of the people on the reservation are out of work, according to the latest federal statistics, the mines were a ticket out of poverty.
But now a new case of cancer can take people back to the uranium-tainted dust that settled on miners at work and came home in their clothes. People know which houses once sat next to the plant that milled the uranium ore, as if they were haunted.
The mine itself haunts people with a question: Are we being poisoned by what was done to our land?"
Get the Story:Radioactive Remains | The forgotten story of the Northwest's only uranium mines (The Seattle Times 2/24) $rl Spokane Tribe - http://www.spokanetribe.com
