Billiman family story highlights cancer struggles in McKinley County

Maggie Billiman’s family has spent years trying to explain illnesses that began after childhood in Sawmill, where water on bright days sometimes looked as if it carried a film of oil. The family’s experience has become a local example of how contamination-related sickness can move through a household for decades before anyone gets a clear diagnosis.

Howard Billiman Jr., a Navajo Code Talker and uranium miner, died on January 1, 2001, after being diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. Maggie Billiman has said he believed his cancer was tied to years of exposure to radioactive material, including work at the Kennecott Mine in Utah and the Kingman Mine in Arizona. Before he died, she said, he asked her to find a cure for cancer.

That plea has weighed on the family for years. Maggie Billiman and her siblings have described stomach problems, gallbladder surgeries, growths and unexplained pain among relatives scattered across the Navajo Nation and border towns, even as they continued to struggle for a diagnosis that made sense of what they were living through. The delay has meant repeated trips for care, medical uncertainty, and years spent trying to connect symptoms to a cause that no doctor could quickly pin down.

Their story landed in McKinley County as hundreds of people gathered at McKinley County Courtyard Plaza for the 15th annual Relay for Life of Gallup McKinley County. The American Cancer Society’s Relay events center survivors, caregivers, a luminaria ceremony and a fight-back message against cancer, and the local gathering put the Billiman family’s experience alongside the wider toll cancer has taken across the county.

The setting matters in a place shaped by uranium history. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says there are 523 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation, with settlement funding now supporting assessment and cleanup at 230 of them. A McKinley County health impact assessment also points to the July 1979 United Nuclear Corporation mill failure, when more than 1,100 tons of uranium tailings and 100 million gallons of radioactive water spilled into Pipeline Arroyo and downstream along the Rio Puerco.

Chris Shuey of the Southwest Research and Information Center has said the closer people live to mine waste, the higher their risk of chronic metabolic disease. For families like the Billimans, that risk has played out not as theory but as a chain of sick relatives, missed treatment and the long wait for someone to say what was wrong.