Yellow Powder

Went to a meeting of midwives yesterday. More discussion about all the sudden breech babies. It's not all in my head.

I'm having a hard time tearing myself away from mindlessly watching CNN and MSNBC. I'm genuinely worried about the world.

Midwifery clients have started asking about whether we (specifically, T and I) recommend they take the potassium iodide pills that have been all over the news. We've been telling folks the amount of radiation that will reach us or has already reached us is too small to cause any harm, at least for now. There have been emails flying around the national midwifery world with info about everything from getting emergency kits ready to treating radiation exposure with homeopathy, and of course, a plea to beg our government to start using proven, non-toxic energy forms such as wind and solar.

I was reminded of a story I read during a college class I took called "Race, Gender, and the Environment." In the Navajo creation story, Creator tells the Navajo people there are two very powerful yellow powders that exist in the world. The Navajo are asked to choose only one of the powders and are instructed to leave the other one buried in the ground. The consequence of not following this order, they are told, is that a great evil would come. The Navajo wisely choose the yellow powder of corn pollen and are able to feed themselves with it and multiply for many generations. However, beginning in the 1950s, the US government approached the Navajo, lying and tricking them into allowing uranium mining on their land. True to the creation story, a great evil soon followed.

As soon as I remembered this story, I saw an email from one of the three Mexican-American midwives in the US (the others being me and a woman in Arizona). Here are her words:

Dear sister midwives,

I share your many real concerns about the potential risks involved in the most recent exposure that we are experiencing. I am on two national midwifery lists and one homeopathy list and in the last few days there have been only posts about fears of radiation exposure. I live in Northern New Mexico, at the foot of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. LANL is currently in the process of building a new facility to produce thousands more pits- the very plutonium core of the nuclear weapon, that once and forever decimated the Japanese Nation.

Before I became a midwife and an aspiring homeopath, I spent 18 years working full-time addressing the nuclear industrial complex in the United States. In 1992, I walked across the U.S. with 100 other people including a few Hibakusha (survivors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki). We walked from New York to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. It took us 9 months. It was a prayer set out by concerned citizens from around the world including Belgium and the U.S. Every step of that nine-month journey was a prayer for all the living things on Earth because we are all being affected by this nuclear contamination. It is in fact shortening the life of all the living things.

What I learned on that Walk was that from the moment the uranium is pulled out of the Earth and throughout the entire processing chain, there is exposure and a trail of contamination that we cannot even begin to fathom. From mining, transportation, processing, power production, research, testing, to the end waste products, there is a chain of exposure throughout the country. Some of these particles have half-lives of 250,000 years or more. This is a time frame that our humble lives cannot possibly comprehend. We have not even begun to imagine the impact that our actions have already had on the future of many many generations yet to come. This exposure already exists as there is no putting the uranium back in the ground. There is no burying this. The water from the pools cannot be kept separated from the waters of the Earth as on our planet there is only one water, only one air. As holistic practitioners and philosophers, we know this.

I have tirelessly worked for environmental justice for decades. Throughout the nuclear chain, communities of color and disenfranchised communities have been disproportionately affected by these exposures. Most of the nuclear facilities in the US have been placed in the communities and homelands of some of the poorest and most disregarded people in the country- Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos... In our New Mexican community of primarily Native and Hispanic people, we live in one of the poorest counties in the nation that is adjacent to the wealthiest county in the nation, Los Alamos. We experience the exposure from the run-off from the lab through Mortendod Canyon that runs through our Pueblos and into the Rio Grande. Exposure for us is real every single day- as it is for all of us really. There are hundreds of nuclear sites throughout the US and believing that this can be contained is a fallacy. From Savannah River to the Columbia River, Idaho, the Navajo uranium mines that still leave tailings that children play in, and the 190 power production sites across the US, we are exposed, some more than others, some more resilient than others.

I feel the need to share this because many activists, concerned citizens, Hibakusha, and whistle blowers have fought long and hard for many decades to address this issue. Maybe some of you. It pains me to see so many many American people now activated by their own fear for their own risk of exposure. Please, if you feel afraid now for yourself, please consider those people that experience this threat daily- workers, truck drivers, affected community members. Keep us all in your prayers- every living thing on Earth. Let's put our energy towards putting a stop to the continued production of nuclear products- from energy, to weapons, depleted uranium that has been spread throughout the war zones, and everyone downwind immediately adjacent to these sites and throughout the world. This is my prayer I ask of all of you. For all the living things on Earth.

No Nukes
Shundahai
Michelle

For me, I can't quite separate what's happening to the earth with what's happening to women's bodies, all as a result of an obscene misuse of technology. I've heard the crunchy hippie types say forever that we are all connected. Oh my goodness, I actually believe it now. You can't take this poison out of the water, or out of the air, or out of the bodies of mothers and fathers and babies.

And yet, all I can do about it is just deal with what's in front of me, even as I worry that it won't be enough. I have supplies packed and ready to help out in a disaster, but I worry about how long my oxygen will last, how I will manage to sterilize the instruments and bandages I have so they can be used to help multiple people, how I will be able to reach people needing help, how my family will cope with knowing I will most definitely not be staying home, how I will manage to suture with limited supplies and experience limited to perineums, how will I cope if I get a migraine, how will I work without T . . . ?

I'm not ready for a disaster here. But, how could I be? I doubt the Japanese midwives were "ready" for the earthquake and tsunami, but it doesn't really matter now. I know they're just trying to do the best they can. All I can do is send them prayers.