WINDOW ROCK — The children of the late Sam Billiman grew up in Sawmill drinking water that, on bright days, carried what looked like a film of oil on its surface.
Decades later they are scattered around the Navajo Nation and its border towns, and nearly all of them are sick. They share stomach problems, removed gallbladders, growths and unexplained pain, and a years-long struggle to get a clear diagnosis from a health care system they say keeps sending them in circles.
Sam Billiman was a Navajo Code Talker and a uranium miner. His daughter Maggie Billiman said he died of cancer after years of exposure to radioactive material. Before he died, she said, he asked her to find a cure for cancer.
“That’s what dad went through. So I think that’s where we all got sick,” she said.
Maggie Billiman has been in severe pain for about a year and a half. Doctors removed her gallbladder at Cibola General Hospital in Grants, New Mexico, and assured her the surgery would end it, she said. It did not. The pain under her right rib cage has only worsened, and she now lives largely on broth and soft food.
Searching for answers
Since the surgery she has cycled through clinics in Grants and Albuquerque and as far as Las Cruces, four hours away. She estimates she has been seen well over 20 times, handed referral after referral and told by a string of providers that nothing was wrong, even as she lost weight.
Much of her frustration centers on provider turnover. At one Grants clinic she cycled through four or five providers, she said, many of them short-term travel nurses who left within months. A nurse practitioner she trusted left without notice. A later provider opened his laptop and told her he did not have her records at all.
“They just pass me around or give me pills,” Maggie said.
She eventually told providers she would accept no more medication until they diagnosed her and told her insurer to stop paying for referrals that produced no answers.
“I feel like we’re just guinea pigs,” Maggie said.
A 2018 Government Accountability Office report found an average provider vacancy rate of 25 percent in the Indian Health Service. In January 2026 the agency cited a near-30 percent rate as it announced what it called its largest hiring effort.
Maggie credits Dr. Robyn Rodriguez, a Grants physician who lives locally, with finally taking her seriously. A scan Rodriguez ordered led to a bone-marrow biopsy at a New Mexico cancer center, where a specialist, she said, was the first to review her full record and explain it plainly. She does not want chemotherapy or radiation if cancer is found, only to understand what is happening inside her so she can decide how to face it.
John Boomer, Maggie’s partner of more than two decades, has been at nearly every appointment.
“Not knowing is worse than knowing what’s going on,” he said.
FAMILY, from page A1
Barriers at every step of care
Boomer, who has lived about two miles downstream from a uranium mill near Milan and spent years with cleanup groups, traces the family’s illnesses to the mill’s tailings. He has watched Maggie sent hours away for tests local hospitals could run but not interpret. He and Maggie have pushed an idea modeled on the Doctors Without Borders response during the pandemic, to bring cancer diagnosticians to the region rather than send each patient hundreds of miles for answers.
Maggie’s brother Daniel Billiman, 63, has lived with stomach pain most of his life. He went to the Indian Health Service hospital in Zuni until last year, when the referrals stopped and a letter told him the facility was for community members. He believes the change is tied to insurance. He carries only Presbyterian coverage and Medicare Part A and said he was told he was not old enough for more. A long-promised surgery in Gallup never happened, and each new provider tells a different story, he said.
“You guys are the one that throw me out,” said Daniel, recounting what he told a clinic.
He said the churn is especially hard on elderly Navajo patients, who may not press for answers, and that he is unsure where to turn.
Alvina Carl, an aunt of the siblings, was told at Tséhootsooí Medical Center in Fort Defiance that she would be referred elsewhere for a growth near her stomach. The referral never came. When the pain became unbearable her granddaughter drove her to San Juan Regional Medical Center in Farmington, where she was admitted for four days with a serious bacterial infection. Carl could not name the diagnosis from memory and read it off her paperwork, spelling out words she could not pronounce. There was no Navajo translator present.
“They can just say that it was infection of the large intestines so people will understand,” Carl said during an interview by phone on Wednesday.
Carl, who once taught health education throughout the Navajo Nation, said she has watched permanent doctors give way to short-term staff who do not know their patients.
“A good interpreter. A good interpreter,” Carl said on what the system most needs.
Maggie said she and sisters Janice, Lula and Julia all had their gallbladders removed. Janice asked an IHS provider to check a painful growth for cancer and was told the referral would take a month, Maggie said. It has not come. A fourth sister, Geneva Silversmith, said she has trouble with her lungs, bones and heart and prefers Navajo herbal medicine. When she requested her childhood medical records, only records dating to 1980 could be found.
All of them link their illnesses to their father’s years in the uranium mines and to the water they drank as children. Geneva and Daniel recalled seeing what looked like grease on the water in the early 1970s. The family said water and soil were tested back then.
“They never gave us a result,” Silversmith said on the water testing.
Most of the family depends on Medicare or Medicaid, and the siblings describe a gap between what their plans say they cover and what providers accept. Maggie was turned away by the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix twice and by a California facility, she said, both citing her insurance, even after her insurer agreed to cover a consultation there.
There is no comprehensive cancer treatment center on the Navajo Nation. The nearest centers sit in border towns, in Farmington and Albuquerque, and even the New Mexico Cancer Center’s clinic in Gallup is staffed by oncologists who travel in from Albuquerque, the same traveling model the family blames for the gaps in their everyday care.
“There’s just barrier after barrier after barrier,” Boomer said.
Push for cancer care close to home
A trip to Albuquerque or Las Cruces means a ride, gas money, sometimes a hotel and a day of recovery. For elderly patients without those means, Boomer said, a missed appointment can push the next one a month or more.
For Maggie, the larger fight is for permanent cancer care on or near the Navajo Nation and for mobile cancer screening, alongside others connected to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act effort. She has framed it as her father’s unfinished work.
“My dream is to get doctors out there. Cancer doctors,” Maggie said.
Maggie has also been grieving. She lost her daughter and two young grandchildren, a loss she has described as the hardest thing she has faced. The providers she told never asked whether she wanted counseling, she said. She leans instead on Boomer and a few close friends.
She keeps a thick binder of her medical records, sorting and re-sorting them to keep her mind occupied. She keeps going, she said, partly for her siblings and for the relatives around the Navajo Nation she believes are living the same story.
“It’s hard to be Maggie right now,” she said.
By Donovan Quintero
Special to the Times