Route 66 is known for its history, it’s a cultural touchstone that represents the expansion to the West, the Mother Road, vintage cars and diners and Americana trinket shops.
But, Katrina Parks, director of a new short film, documents another more troubling history of Route 66: its atomic history.
In it, Parks profiles some of the women from the Red Water Pond community on the Navajo Nation 15 miles north of Route 66, including Edith Hood.
“My grandfather used to say, or my grandma, if you want to take something from Mother Nature, you say a prayer, put out your pollen, but you only take what you need,” Hood says. “And then, those kind of things I think started thinking about that with the mining industry. I said, ‘They didn’t just take what they need, they took the whole thing and left a mess that they didn’t clean up.’”
Community organizers there have been working to get uranium tailings removed from their land for decades. But theirs is just one of the stories Parks unearthed as a part of the project, “The Atomic Legacy on Route 66.”
She told The Show it all started for her with her first documentary series on Route 66 about women on the Mother Road.
Full conversation
KATRINA PARKS: The film series was finished, so I was actually doing presentations, and someone in the audience asked if I had ever considered the effect of atomic testing on women’s lives, and specifically if I knew about the Downwinders and how many communities along Route 66 were impacted.
And I drew a blank, and luckily Arizona state historian Marshall Trimble was there in the audience, and he certainly counts family members among the Downwinders. And he explained that that’s the name used to refer to people who experienced radiation as a result of the atomic testing at the Nevada test site, which didn’t end until 1962, and that there are in fact many communities along Route 66 like Kingman, Seligman, Winslow, Gallup where there are clusters of Downwinders.
So that was intriguing to me. And then when I started to do more research, I realized that the Route 66 region has really faced a triple impact. Not only are the communities impacted by atomic testing, but also I would say by the development of nuclear industries and specifically uranium mining.
LAUREN GILGER: Wow. OK. So zoom in for us on Red Water Pond and the people that you profiled there, because they’ve been working for decades, it sounds like, to get uranium tailings removed from their land and have faced a lot of challenges in doing that. Remind us of the history here. You said this goes back quite a long time.
KATRINA PARKS: Yes. So uranium mining really was propelled by the Cold War. After World War II, the United States really wanted to find a domestic source of uranium, and the Colorado Plateau region happens to be very rich in it. So under this need to develop more weapons, this huge rush to exploit uranium took place, and there wasn’t much thought given to the health and safety of the workers.
And that’s something that when you talk to people at the Red Water Pond community really becomes clear. Edith Hood, one of the women that I interviewed — in what is now a short film but will hopefully become a longer project — she actually worked in a mine, and she talks about how the physical hazards of mining were explained to miners, but the long-term consequences of exposure to radiation were not explained at all. And so it’s something that she along with many others have had to deal with over the decades.
LAUREN GILGER: What are the health implications for these communities? Because these impacts, as you said, which began so long ago, are still being felt today.
KATRINA PARKS: Yeah, I mean, the most obvious health impact are clusters of cancer, but I think it’s also the impact on traditional lifestyles. Particularly when you’re talking to people from the Red Water Pond community, that is something that becomes very clear because they can no longer have, for example, livestock in the way that they had for centuries on that land.
I was very lucky to collaborate with three amazing women from the Red Water Pond Community Association who are leading this effort to remove this uranium tailings pile from their homeland. But I also interviewed, for example, a uranium miner, a woman whose father was involved in testing at the Nevada test site and a nuclear scientist. So my interest is in kind of uncovering these hidden stories of the nuclear legacy and trying to give it a human face, but from many different voices and experiences.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So I want to know more about the women from the Red Water Pond community who you mentioned there. I mean, why has it been so difficult for them and taken so long to get rid of these tailings?
KATRINA PARKS: Well, as I understand it, the issue now is that the surrounding communities don’t want the tailings pile moved through their communities. So the uranium tailings pile, what it contains is not uranium. It’s something much less radioactive. And the damage to the community has taken place because of their exposure over a long-term exposure to these tailings. But the communities around them are concerned about 20,000 — whatever number of truckloads it is — of this material going through on its way to a landfill.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. You mentioned Edith Hood and the fact that she used to work in the mine, which was true for so many people in this part of the state, particularly people on Navajo land. This was also a source of jobs, right?
KATRINA PARKS: Yes, it certainly was. And I interviewed a miner who worked at the Haystack Mine, and he talked about, he was excited to have the job. It was a way that he could build a better future for his family. He grew up facing a lot of discrimination in Winslow, and he really worked his way up, and he paid a very high price for that work.
So I guess it’s kind of humbling. They’re humbling stories to listen to because you can feel — you understand the choices people made and why they made them. It was a good job, and there seemed to be a path, upward mobility within the industry.
LAUREN GILGER: Right, right. So complicated, so human. Let me ask you, Katrina, just what struck you most in the making of this project so far? I mean, this is obviously complicated, there are so many personal stories involved. What do you think about when you think about this most?
KATRINA PARKS: Well, I think about how history sadly is repeating itself because we have, in Arizona in particular, there’s the reopening of the Pinyon Plain Mine, which has caused a lot of controversy because of the impact on Indigenous lands and people again.
LAUREN GILGER: But this is also going on today in a different way, right? Because there is pressure on lawmakers in Washington to reauthorize and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act before the end of the year, which is coming up rapidly here. What kind of difference would that make for the Downwinders that you profile here?
KATRINA PARKS: It would make a big difference, and I, of course, hope that Congress will do that.
LAUREN GILGER: All right, we’ll have to leave it there. That is Katrina Parks, the director of the documentary film “The Atomic Legacy on Route 66” joining us. Katrina, thank you for coming on, thank you for talking about this. I appreciate it.
KATRINA PARKS: Thanks so much.
