Today

Today we went to the Wellpinit High School / Middle School library to hear Warren talk about The Spokane Tribe of Indians also known as the Children of the Sun in stories usually. Where we went canoeing yesterday was above a whole lot of things like the valley it used to be, even graves. The salmon that used to go through this river are not so big anymore. Big fish wheels were common here to take fish to can and be sold all over the world. Until the Grand Coulee Dam was built the people that lived in that valley had nothing because it flooded their valley. We met Robert Nelson the operations manager of something.

  I learned a little bit about radiation like the different types of radiation such as cosmic radiation, terrestrial, internal, medical. Cosmic radiation is from outer space obviously, terrestrial is from the earth’s crust.

  In 1954 the Brett brothers started a uranium mine. They created this big hole you know to get the uranium and they started to collect water from the rain and the natural ground water because no plants were around to take the water up. They later found out it is hurting the fish in the water so in 1982 they started a water treatment plant. They pumped out most of the water and still is while some gets evaporated. Once it has evaporated they plan to reclaim the land for the tribal members.

Uranium is used in nuclear weapons and in nuclear plants. The uranium mine shut down in 1982 while they started the water treatment. Water would be pumped out and taken somewhere else to get treatment.

 I really liked it when we did this little thing to kind of get moving around, just a little activity.

The first one was when we did the circle introduced ourselves for like the fourth time. After that we did the teepee sweep,  look over your horse, smoke signals, drum circle and canoe.
We got to see the mine, and the big holes.