The radioactive issue: Meet the 2 Native American women fighting to save nuclear exposure benefits

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), the quarter-century old law that compensates Americans sickened by U.S. nuclear testing, expired this summer, but two Native American women are keeping up the fight, even if they have to fund the effort themselves.

Loretta Anderson of the Pueblo of Laguna and Maggie Billiman of the Sawmill Chapter of the Navajo Nation have raised funds to travel back to Washington from the Southwest on Tuesday and lobby Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to bring a reauthorization bill that already passed the Senate to the House floor.

Anderson told The Hill recently she was first introduced to the RECA issue while working with retired uranium miners through a home health care business. Many of the miners, she said, had been working after 1971, the cutoff for benefits under the original RECA.

“There was nothing available for them,” Anderson said.

The original law, passed in 1990, offered benefits of $50,000 to Americans downwind of the Nevada nuclear testing ground, $100,000 for uranium miners and $75,000 to nuclear weapons testing workers.

But advocates say several categories of people affected by testing and its aftereffects fell through the cracks. In addition to post-1971 uranium miners, RECA also did not offer benefits to those downwind of the 1945 Trinity atomic bomb test, or to those affected by the contamination by wartime uranium refinement of Coldwater Creek in St. Louis, an issue that led current Missouri Sens. Josh Hawley (R) and Eric Schmitt (R) to join the efforts.

Based on these conversations, Anderson said, “I decided to get a meeting going. … It started out pretty small, [but] soon we had 50 people.”

“It’s been a challenge and a wonderful adventure,” she said. “I think everything from being a supervisor to different organizations, being a part of them, it brought me to where I am, working good and hard.”

Billiman, meanwhile, is the daughter of a World War II-era Navajo Code Talker who died of stomach cancer she attributes to the aftereffects of nuclear fallout from testing in the area. Being motivated by the loss, she said, is “why I had this fight in me.”

The aftereffects of Cold War and World War II nuclear testing and weapons development have been particularly harmful for Native American communities in the American Southwest.

In addition to wartime testing, the Navajo Nation still suffers from the effect of the Church Rock incident from when Billiman was a teenager, a 1979 accident in which a dam that included a reservoir for uranium waste disposal broke, releasing nearly 100 million gallons of radioactive wastewater that largely ended up in the Navajo Nation.

A bipartisan bill to reauthorize RECA and expand its coverage to several more states passed the Senate by a 2-to-1 ratio in March. However, Johnson has yet to bring the bill to the House floor, with sources familiar with his thinking saying he has concerns about the cost and whether the legislation — which passed with less than half of the Senate Republican caucus — would have the votes in the GOP-controlled House.

A separate measure, introduced by Utah Sens. Mike Lee (R) and Mitt Romney (R), would have extended the law but with no expansion of its coverage. Both Lee and Romney voted against the broader Senate-passed bill.

Johnson scheduled a House vote on the Lee-Romney legislation but pulled it from the schedule amid bipartisan and bicameral opposition. In the meantime, RECA’s authorization expired in June.

Billiman told The Hill the law sunsetting has done nothing to blunt their drive.

“It’s a positive thing right now, [the motivation] to revive it,” she said. “We’re not going to let this die; we’re not going to let it go. It’s expired, and we need to get this bill passed. It needs to be done.”

“We’ve come together to organize this,” Anderson said. “We have come together with a dream that, maybe let’s protest instead of just sitting back and allowing this to disappear and nothing happen. We need to do something.”

Billiman and Anderson are set to join other activists in a lobbying blitz on Capitol Hill on Tuesday that will include an attempt to get another meeting with Johnson.

“Many of our people have testified; we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of stories of our people who are sick and dying and suffering,” Anderson said.

Billiman said the continual struggle to get RECA expanded has echoes in their warrior heritage as Native American people.

“We’re called warriors, [and] there’s a reason behind that. It’s not fistfights or cussing out somebody,” she said, but rather a broader refusal to back down or take no for an answer on an issue this important.

“If I had to tell Mike Johnson, I would tell him if it wasn’t for my dad, we wouldn’t even be here.”