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Like many calamities faced by the Navajo since they were defeated by United States troops in the 1860s, the trial visited upon America's largest native American tribe - whose 300,000 members occupy a vast reservation of deserts, mesas, mountains and canyons that straddle Arizona, Utah and New Mexico - originated with a decision made far away in Washington.
In 2003, the Bush Administration approved a controversial project to expand its nuclear arsenal with "low-yield" mini-nukes. At the same time the nuclear energy industry, exploiting the demand for clean energy as a means of reducing the nation's carbon footprint [although CO2 is produced when uranium is processed into fuel], hopes to build new reactors. The result has been a uranium boom.
Global demand has fuelled a steep climb in ore prices, from US$3.15 ($4) a kilogram in 2000 to US$32.4 a kg last year. While mining companies operate throughout the West, the crown jewel for prospectors is the Navajo reservation. Texas-based Uranium Resources calls it the "the Saudi Arabia of uranium".
To the Navajo the nuclear lobby's demands are an unwelcome echo of events started six decades ago, when the world's first atomic bomb was detonated at White Sands, New Mexico, in 1945.
The mushroom cloud ushered in the Cold War arms race, the nuclear industry of power "too cheap to meter," and a uranium bonanza that brought prospectors to Indian land.
Between 1944 and 1986 private companies supplied the US Government with 3.9 million tonnes of uranium [4.7 million tonnes of easily extractable ore are known to exist worldwide], mined from the 69,929 km reservation.
Last November, the Los Angeles Times said more than 1000 uranium mines and four processing mills had bequeathed a lethal legacy of radioactive debris and contaminated aquifers, despite Washington's promise that Navajo land would be returned in "as good condition as received".
Unaware of any dangers, the Navajo and neighbouring tribes drank polluted water, ate meat from animals that had drunk the same water, inhaled poisonous dust, and sometimes slept in homes made from radioactive material.
"It is the job of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to prevent environmental damage and safeguard the tribe's interests," noted the Times. "Both fell down on the job spectacularly."
Before the Manhattan Project created the first atomic bomb, the Navajo had very low rates of cancer. After the 1970s rates doubled as national rates fell.
The tribe has also been devastated by kidney disease, premature deaths, blindness, neuropathy - a debilitating disease that wrecks the peripheral nervous system - and other ailments.
Any link between mining and health is unproven, although the Times concluded mining "almost certainly contributed to the increase in Navajo cancer mortality."
But anecdotal evidence is powerful.
"When I talk to people on the reservation, I hear about the father who worked in the uranium mines and died of cancer or who lost his sight," says David Taylor, a tribal lawyer who works on uranium issues. "It just goes on and on. It makes you want to cry."
"There's never been any comprehensive study of all the sites and the health and environmental effects," says Don Hancock, a nuclear waste expert with the SW Research and Information Centre, who says 15 ore-crushing mills exist on or near the reservation.
While there was some remediation and piecemeal cleanups - the Department of Energy spent US$240 million between 1984 and 1995 to cover tailings, or fine sand left when ore was crushed, at some mills - Hancock says most mines, many of them open, are full of radioactive debris.
"There's a long, sordid history in the US of genocide, theft and relocation that's been done to Native Americans," says Hancock. "In our view this is continuing with ... uranium problems that have killed thousands."
Sadly, America's Indians, vilified, romanticised, forgotten or exploited, are used to such suffering.
Even as the Navajo weigh their legal options, a decade-old class action lawsuit, representing 500,000 Indian landowners, seeks to wrest billions of dollars from the federal government. The suit, filed by Blackfoot Indian Elouise Cobell, wants royalty payments for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging and grazing on 4 million hectares of Indian land managed by the US Government since 1887.
Responding to claims that a century of mismanagement and malfeasance had cost Indians US$100 billion - land allocated to Indians as part of efforts to "civilise" them was held in trust - the Government offered US$7 billion.
Plaintiffs want $27.5 billion. The Supreme Court refused to intervene after a judge sympathetic to the Indians was removed from the case.
A federal appeals court took the rare step in July last year of removing District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, saying he appeared to be biased against the Interior Department.
The Court of Appeals cited Lamberth's own words to illustrate why he should be removed from the case, including a July 2005 opinion in which he called the department "a dinosaur - the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind".
The court said Lamberth's opinion "extends beyond historical racism and all but accuses current Interior officials of racism".
In Ecuador, in a case closely monitored by the worldwide oil industry, another huge legal contest is being waged, this time between 30,000 Indians and settlers - known as the Affected Ones - and US oil giant Chevron.
Plaintiffs, who filed suit in 2003, allege that Texaco, now owned by Chevron, dumped 68 billion litres of pollutants in 4402sq km of rainforest during drilling operations from 1972 and 1992.
They want Chevron to pick up the US$6.1 billion damage tab in the largest environmental lawsuit ever. The oil company says a US$40 million cleanup approved by the Ecuador authorities releases it from any liability.
All three struggles have one overwhelming similarity: they pit mostly poor, often marginalised, indigenous groups against powerful government and corporate interests.
For the Navajo the problem is two-fold: cleaning up the mess, and preventing miners from returning to their lands. For years uranium mining divided the tribe. Some members were opposed. Others hoped to profit. The campaign to prevent future mining was long and hard fought. But in 2005 the tribe banned mining on the reservation and adjacent "Indian Country," land traditionally used by Navajos.
Nonetheless, Uranium Resources was awarded a Nuclear Regulatory Commission licence to prospect near Crownpoint, New Mexico, just off the reservation. The company plans to extract ore with chemicals in a process called leach mining.
It hopes to begin test mining next year. If it can persuade officials its operations are environmentally sound, the company will begin in earnest.
But first the company must best the Navajo Nation, Laguna and Acoma pueblos, and the SW Research and Information Centre.
"It's our view that they will contaminate ground water," says Hancock. "It will probably be litigated in the courts many times over."
Crucially, the Environmental Protection Agency has decided the Navajo have sovereignty over Indian country, a legal distinction that may ultimately take the issue to the US Supreme Court. Uranium Resources subsidiary Hydro Resources has appealed.
It might be easier to stop new mining - even if a post-Bush administration wants new nukes, and if new commercial reactors are built, there is plenty of enriched uranium from existing reactors and the US has a uranium stockpile - than it will be to clean up contaminated sites. A big dilemma is finding the money for this huge task.
In May, El Paso Natural Gas, arguing the US Government should bear the responsibility, sued the Energy Department to pay for a cleanup at a Tuba City, Arizona, processing mill that operated from 1956 to 1966.
Taylor hopes this might be a precedent. And whereas El Paso's $800,000 cleanup pledge is paltry, considering the sums needed to deal with contaminated sites, the company has joined the tribe in lobbying Congress to amend a 1978 law that allotted money for cleanups but had a 1989 sunset clause.
It will likely be a long haul. Last month the agency spent US$2 million decontaminating five Navajo homes near Church Rock. "It's just a start," says Taylor, "but it's something."
