Perry H. Charley’s life illustrates translation as an act of healing. He is entwined with the American quest for nuclear supremacy through uranium. Like many other Native Americans, Charley was sent to boarding school as part of the U.S. government and Bureau of Indian Affairs efforts to assimilate Indians. At Shiprock Boarding School his hair was cut off, and he was treated with insecticide against lice. “I was told to never speak my language again, but I sit here today as a fluent-speaking Navajo,” Charley says. “To repair as best I can what was lost, that has been my life’s work.” His father died young as one of the thousands of unprotected uranium miners sacrificed in the building of the first nuclear weapons and the uranium economy. Perry later discovered the cause of his father’s death as respiratory failure from fibrosis of the lung. It was a disease with which the Navajo had no experience and thus, no vocabulary. There are no Diné words for radon progenies and radioactivity, or for alpha and beta particles, or gamma radiation. But Charley is changing that with a painstaking effort to create a glossary, constructing new Navajo words for radiation-related terms. In his published work he translates in the opposite direction to re-inscribe his traditional culture's way of seeing harm from contamination to show that health physics is not inclusive of spiritual, mental and physical health.
