In Ceremony, Silko tells the story of the ancient witch people who released evil in the world by telling the story that created white people.
“They will take this world from ocean to ocean, they will turn on each other, they will destroy each other. Up here in these hills they will find the rocks, rocks with veins of green and yellow and black. They will lay the final pattern with these rocks, they will lay it across the world and explode everything” (137).
The rocks the witch story-teller refers to here is uranium, a radioactive mineral that was mined heavily in the Southwest, on Navajo lands, in order to fuel America’s atomic arsenal – that is, in order to create and experiment with the atomic weaponry that was eventually dropped on Japan in World War II.
Watch this slide show put together by the LA Times in 2006, including interviews with Navajo who experienced – and are still experiencing – the effects of the government’s radioactive mining near their homes:
Watch Blighted Homeland.
Learn more from the Uranium Impact Assessment Program.
The Literary Works 