Residents of Navajo Nation (Dine Bikeyah), a sovereign Indigenous Tribal nation of the American Southwest, are vulnerable to environmental pollution from various sources such as resource extraction and unregulated solid waste disposal (Kirkemeno et al. 1998; Ong et al. 2014; Lewis et al. 2017). For example, from the 1940s through the 1980s, one of the most sought-after resources was uranium, as evident by the hundreds of abandoned uranium mines (AUMs) across Navajo lands. This legacy of mining and continuing presence of AUMs has caused significant environmental contamination in Navajo Nation (Eichstaedt 1994; Masco 2013; Voyles 2015; Lewis et al. 2017). As a result, understanding the distribution of potential exposure to these AUMs is a significant concern in Navajo communities. Some recent work to model this exposure potential includes a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) (Malczewski 2006) model developed by Lin et al. (2020) to analyze and understand potential exposure within Navajo Nation.
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