Jani Ingram had been driving across the Navajo Nation with one of her students for an hour and a half, looking for a remote water source.
Their goal was to find and test a well that one family was using near the Navajo community of Black Falls.
“It's something that needed to be tested, because it really wasn't great,” says Ingram, a Northern Arizona University professor and member of the Navajo Nation. “It had pretty high uranium. … The family that uses it has a hogan really close by, just the nicest people, but live a very off-the-grid, rural life.”
For years, Ingram and her students have collected water quality data on the Navajo Nation to help inform families like that one.
Now, the data have been added to an online map of safe wells on the reservation.
The map is intended to assist tribal communities still struggling with the effects of past uranium mining. Hundreds of abandoned Cold War-era uranium mines dot the Navajo Nation. For decades, they’ve contributed to environmental and public health issues.
It can be hard for Navajo families to know if the wells near their homes are contaminated by high uranium levels, which have been linked to health issues like kidney disease and bone cancer. Many wells aren't regulated by public drinking water systems.
Ingram and her students mapped safe wells using water quality data they collected from years spent in the field.
The map on the Navajo Safe Water website shows the boundaries of every chapter in the tribal nation, with yellow dots indicating a Navajo Tribal Utility Authority water point where water can be accessed for a fee.
Blue and red dots show water points installed using federal funds from the Indian Health Service CARES Act following the COVID-19 pandemic. Those water sources are free to access and are managed by chapter houses.
When Ingram comes across a well that tests above the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum contaminant levels for safe drinking water, she says she tells those who are drawing from the well in that community.
In the 1950s, the Indian Health Service drilled a lot of wells on the Navajo Nation for use by livestock like cattle and sheep, Ingram adds. She says some of those wells draw water from the Navajo and Coconino aquifers.
Ingram hopes tribal members can use the website and its new data to keep themselves healthy.
“[I hope they’re] able to choose what wells that they feel are safe as opposed to maybe one that's close by but isn't as safe,” she says. “It's still a matter of convenience and difficulty in accessing water.”
She says work isn’t over: there are tons of tribal wells that haven’t been tested, something she says she’s willing to do at no cost.
