A Prayer for My Mountain - PDF free download eBook

Introduction

This is a story about people, cultures, a sacred mountain and death. After a heart attack and job loss Oliver, Nance and their three children move from Ohio to an abandoned schoolhouse near an...

Some brief overview of this book

This is a story about people, cultures, a sacred mountain and death. After a heart attack and job loss Oliver, Nance and their three children move from Ohio to an abandoned schoolhouse near an Indian reservation in New Mexico. They have neighbors, Carlos Sanchez, his wife and grandchildren who share flowers from their garden and traditions from their heart.

They also have This is a story about people, cultures, a sacred mountain and death. After a heart attack and job loss Oliver, Nance and their three children move from Ohio to an abandoned schoolhouse near an Indian reservation in New Mexico. They have neighbors, Carlos Sanchez, his wife and grandchildren who share flowers from their garden and traditions from their heart.

They also have a visitor, a Native American elder who teaches Oliver how to harvest pinons and Indian tea. It's also a story about choices, yellow choices, uranium mining and the deadly consequences. It's about reclaiming a cultural identity, assuming responsibilities and making apologies.

Mount Taylor is located about halfway between the cities of Albuquerque and Gallup New Mexico. It was named for our 12th president, Zachary Taylor. He assumed office in 1849 and died 16 months later.

When the Spanish claimed this land for God and Crown they named this highest peak of the San Mateo Mountains, Cebolleta (tender onion). But this 12,000 foot volcanic mountain had other names before that. The people of the Acoma Pueblo call it Kawesh Tima, the place of snow.

At the Pueblo of Laguna, Mount Taylor is referred to as Tsibina, and the Dine (Navajo) call this sacred mountain T'soodzil. the turquoise mountain. Unfortunately, this sacred mountain contains one of the world's richest deposits of uranium. From 1946 to 1968 thirteen million tons of uranium ore was mined there.

The majority went to the Atomic Energy Commission. According to Manuel Pino, college professor and 2008 recipient of the Nuclear-Free Future Award, "In those early years of production, uranium development was a pick and shovel operation. The Indian miners were virtually miner's canaries, who were sent into the crude, unventilated mines called 'dog hold's immediately after dynamite blasting.

There they breathed radon gas and silica-laden dust". Over a period of two decades, fifteen hundred uranium miners worked in those conditions. Today more than half these miners have died from cancer and respiratory diseases.

We have been friends with some of these miners, and have been to their funerals. This story is dedicated to them.