One year after RECA expiration, communities still suffer without compensation

By Donovan Quintero | Jun 5, 2025 | News |

WINDOW ROCK

When the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expired on June 10, 2024, Mildred Chino was among the many who felt the final blow of a decades-long injustice.

For Chino and fellow advocate Earl Tulley, the expiration meant that those living in the shadow of uranium mines – who continue to suffer from radiation-related illnesses – were left without recourse or remedy from the federal government.

Special to the Times | Donovan Quintero
Maggie Billiman, left, becomes emotional as she remembers her late father Navajo Code Talker Howard Billiman Jr., during a candlelight vigil in Washington, D.C.

“We were very disappointed and frustrated because we just couldn’t reach the hearts of those congressmen,” Chino said, speaking from her home near the Jackpile-Paguate Uranium Mine, once the world’s largest open-pit uranium mine. “I can’t believe they have no empathy for what the government did to our people.”

The RECA program had provided partial restitution to uranium miners, millers, and “downwinders” exposed to radiation as part of U.S. nuclear weapons development. But when Congress allowed the program to lapse last year, it abandoned thousands of Indigenous and rural community members across the Southwest. Chino’s husband, who died from a mining-related illness, never qualified for compensation because he did not meet a bureaucratic requirement to have worked the entirety of 1971.

“He lacked working a year, yet he got sick,” Chino said. “To have some medical hygienist back East determine that he had low levels… How did that man know? I don’t think he’s ever been to any open pit mining to see the dust, the silica that affected all our miners who are sick with pulmonary fibrosis.”

To read the full article, please see the June 5, 2025, edition of the Navajo Times.

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