04: Wastelanding / Part 01
Mining companies never explained the dangers of uranium to them. Neither did the government.
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If you’re reading this on the day it’s being released, July 16, 2025, it is the 80th anniversary of the Trinity detonation in the Tularosa Basin in New Mexico—what this project refers to as Time Zero. This marks eight decades of existential schizophrenia, irreversible environmental violence, and a global theocratic order that worships absolute annihilation.
On today’s podcast episode, we opened with a moment of silence for the millions of people impacted by the nuclearized world. If you are moved to do the same, please do.
Tonight, at 8:15 p.m. MDT, the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium will be holding their annual Luminaria Vigil, observing the anniversary. You can watch via livestream on Facebook, whether you have an account or not. And, this morning, Trinity Downwinders will be formally recognized with the installation of a permanent marker at the Stallion Gate Entrance to the Trinity Site. Finally, you can read about their next moves with the recent expansion and extension of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act on their website.
Now, onto this week’s installment…
04: Wastelanding / Part 01
I met up with cross-disciplinary photographer and educator Will Wilson at his studio in an industrial patch of southwest Santa Fe in July 2024. It was hovering around 90 degrees outside. But inside the studio, it was considerably more pleasant.
Years of Will’s photographic prints lined the walls, covered work tables, and filled up flat file drawers. Before we’d even sat down, without my having to ask, he’d flipped off the studio’s swamp cooler, so the mics wouldn’t pick up the hum. Will’s a pro. He leaned towards the mic and introduced himself in Navajo, indicating that he is Kinyaa'áanii (Towering House clan), on his mother’s side, and born into the Irish and Welsh peoples on his father’s.
“In 2019, I got my first drone and fell in love with the capacity that it unleashed, or that it unfolded in front of me. In the American West, it is so vast that when you're on the ground next to some of these sites, you just really have no kind of sense of their scale.”
Those sites Will is talking about are abandoned uranium mines, as well as uranium disposal sites, across the Navajo Nation.
“But if you get a few hundred feet up in the air, it totally transforms the way that you understand space. And that is this notion of counter-surveillance. I am thinking about all of this technology that originally had its history in surveillance, and also military control of space. I mean, that's still very much a way that it's used today.
But also, I’m thinking about trying to visualize this enormous issue. There are over 500 of these abandoned uranium mines within the Navajo Nation. The vast majority of them are just sitting out in the open. Some people know about them, but most people don't.”
The ancestral homeland of the Navajo, Dinétah, sits between the four sacred mountains: Sisnaajiní (Blanca) to the east, Tsoodził (Mount Taylor) to the south, Doko’oosłííd (the San Francisco Peaks) to the west, and Dibéntsaa (Hesperus Peak) to the north.
Those mountains tower in what is today commonly called the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah come together.
In 1864, the U.S. government forcibly removed the Navajo, or Diné, marching them to an internment camp at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Thousands died on what’s known as the Long Walk1. Four years later, the Treaty of Bosque Redondo allowed survivors to return to a designated portion of their homeland2, which has since expanded into the present-day Navajo Nation.
The Navajo Nation, or Diné Bikéyah, is a 27,000-square-mile sovereign territory that stretches across parts of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. It is home to over 170,000 Diné, and boasts some of the most remarkable geological features on this continent: Canyon de Chelly, Rainbow Bridge, Ship Rock, Monument Valley, and many others.
These Southwestern terrains serve as the backdrop for Will’s long-running series Auto Immune Response. In digitally altered photographs, gas-masked figures—played by Will—move through a post-apocalyptic Southwest, gazing over fragile water sources and sheltering inside a hogan.
“The Auto Immune Response series started in 2004 and it's much more of a speculative, imaginative, or critical fiction, in relation to some of these issues and ideas. And there's other stuff going on, too—stuff about me. I don't know if I'm directly inferring this in the imagery, but it's what's driving the creative process.
Being a boarding school survivor. Or what it means to be half-white and growing up on the Navajo Nation, sort of being an anomaly.”
“But there is also this notion of an apocalypse that Indigenous people have survived and are actively working through.
Autoimmune disease disproportionately affects Indigenous people. Diabetes is probably the most well-known, thinking about Indigenous people and vector populations.
We’re canaries in the coal mine—we share this common coal mine. I think it's also a cautionary tale, and also a response. So, it's not autoimmune disease, it's immune response. How do we deal with having lived through the apocalypse?”
For Will, it is important to identify these antagonists—disease, assimilation, uranium, and environmental racism—so that they might be confronted as monsters.
“Part of that is about the histories of our creation story, in relation to this narrative. How would Hero Twins fight these monsters that exist in the world, to move forward and to survive?”
Hero Twins appear in several Indigenous cosmologies across the Americas. In Navajo narratives, the boys are Naayéé’ Neezghání (Monster Slayer) and Tó Bájíschíní (Born for Water). Their mothers are Asdzaa Nádleehé (Changing Woman) and Yoołgai Asdzaa (White Shell Woman), two important deities34. They share a father: the Sun5. In some versions, they are the twin sons of Changing Woman67.
The Hero Twins rid the world of monsters, so that the Diné could emerge into their ancestral land. The most powerful of those monsters, Yé'iitsoh, lived on Tsoodzil (Mount Taylor). When the Hero Twins slayed Yé'iitsoh, his blood ran across the land, creating El Malpais lava flow, just southwest of Mount Taylor8.
“When I kicked off that project, I was thinking about the post-apocalyptic movies of the seventies, and trying to sort of inhabit that space, move through it.”
We returned to Will’s project that employed drone photography, Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition, which allows viewers to really see the multiple-acre scars that extractive industries have left behind on the Navajo Nation—what Will calls “physical manifestations of a complex and traumatic history that has poisoned the land and endangered a people”9.
Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition is based on a counter-survey of abandoned uranium mines (AUMs) on the Navajo Nation, and thinking about the history of site—and space and place—from both a modern technological western sort of gaze, but also trying to understand what these places mean for an artist who identifies themself as a Diné man, living in the 21st century. It’s trying to think about history, trying to think about cultural imaginaries, in relation to this really broad story of environmental racism and colonialism in the American West and on Navajo land.”
Actually seeing the scale of this industrial violence makes it legible, un-abstracted, known, so that viewers might demand futures where this cannot be allowed to happen again.
Even prior to the advent of consumer drone technology, artists found innovative ways to document the enormity of the US nuclear industry’s ongoing impacts on the landscape. In August 2024, I spoke over video call with Matthew Coolidge, who has, for decades now, been the directer of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI).
“The uranium disposal cells were something that I started noticing in government documents. And they barely register, in a way, on the landscape when you're looking at them sideways, because they are fairly low profile—not all, but but many. But from the air, you can really see their structure and form. We've been doing aerial photography by renting Cessnas for forever, in order to just get that heightened view. It’s not the godlike view, but it's an oblique view that gets you above the fence level.”
CLUI is a Los Angeles-based research and education organization that produces exhibitions and other projects examining the ways that humans interact with the surface of the earth. They describe themselves as being “dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived”10.
“Drones have made that space even more accessible, obviously. There’s been a bunch of drone photography of those uranium cells, though, many of them are really even too big for that.
But certainly, aerial photography from an airplane enabled us to get the right angle, to view at the right elevation. We worked with a group called Light Hawk to help deal with the tremendous amount of aircraft work needed. Light Hawk provides a network of pilots who—for free—will take people up to photograph, or document, or even just look at things from the air, knowing that sometimes you can’t see things well from the ground. It does help to have that aerial perspective.
We conceived of that [uranium disposal cells] project as a portrait of these places, and did as many as we could. But that was all done before drones existed. I mean, we used balloons and kites to hold cameras up before drones existed. We really made a great effort to get up there, for that oblique view.”
Back in 2012, the Center for Land Use Interpretation staged an exhibition called Perpetual Architecture. The show included touch screens with images of uranium disposal cells that the Center captured via aerial photography.
Uranium disposal cells were created by contractors for the Department of Energy—previously the Atomic Energy Commission—throughout the 1980s and 90s. These geometric mounds, up to 100-feet-tall, cover multiple acres of land. Engineered soil and gravel cap low-level radioactive waste: tailings, demolished buildings from mill sites, and mill equipment.
What is called low-level material, it bears mentioning, is still quite dangerous, and exposure is cumulative.
“The structures in that exhibit, we call them architecture, Perpetual Architecture. Architecture is built stuff. You can't go inside those things; it's not like they're buildings. But they are tombs. And they are concentrations of material that are not unlike the pyramids—which are certainly architecture—and the idea that pyramids contain this reliquary of tremendously valuable, precious things, sealing them off from the present, to take the souls of the kings off into the netherworld, into the future.”
In a sense, Matthew says, that’s exactly what these tombs are designed to do, but with the uranium tailings, demolished mill buildings, and mining detritus that make up low-level nuclear waste.
As for high-level waste—the byproduct of nuclear power facilities—we don’t have anywhere to put that. The US alone has some 88,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel just sitting around. And we’re adding another 2,000 metric tons each year11.
“These structures are, in a way, spaceships, or time ships, meant to take this material into the future. And though the material is not precious, it's very valuable, meaning we spent a lot of money on it, on the uranium programs for concentrating the material for nuclear weapons, which is most of what that was for.
That's why the Department of Energy is the one who did the most of those uranium disposal cells, because they were sort of accountable for it, given the legacy of weapons production.”
Between 1948 and 1971, the Department of Energy, in its previous incarnation as the Atomic Energy Commission, purchased every single ounce of uranium mined in the United States12.
In the disposal cell designs from the Department of Energy, the Center for Land Use Interpretation noticed something.
“There was a sort of uniformity in the procedure that was interesting when serialized in a kind of a typological way, like any kind of typological photographer, like the Bechers of Dusseldorf, the great photographers from Germany, from the Kunst Academy, who developed this kind of industrial typological photographic approach on water towers and things like that.
Will Wilson’s Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition is also a kind of typological photography, documenting sites like the Mexican Hat and Ship Rock uranium disposal cells, or the uncapped Church Rock holding ponds.
Church Rock, you may recall from episode one, is the site of the holding pond that burst open in 1979, sending 94 million gallons of radioactive waste into the Puerco River.
Connecting the Dots is also interdisciplinary in scope, designed to propose what Will sees as innovative solutions, informed by Indigenous knowledge, that refocus discussions about remediation to more holistically consider how human and nonhuman animals, plants, water, and landscapes intersect and interact over expansive timelines. Connecting the Dots dares to imagine new futures in spite of traumatic histories and presents.
It is also, like Will’s Auto Immune Response series, about survivance—the active continuance of Indigenous presence, and the denunciation of tragedy and victimry.
“It goes back to me growing up on the Navajo Nation and going to a Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. I certainly consider myself a survivor of that slow violence of colonialism.
And also, being aware in the eighties of the potential of nuclear catastrophe, of annihilation. It was something that was present in my kind of cultural understanding of the world. There was that movie The Day After. We were all meant to sit down and consider what nuclear annihilation might mean.
For Will, Connecting the Dots is also an opportunity to return home, to be on the land, and to spark collaboration with other artists.
“I am exploring how people who are interested in understanding and visualizing culture from a different perspective might share, or teach, or learn together about how to address a big issue.
So, there's the actual photography of the mines—that’s the foundation of the project. But I was also hoping to share those histories with students at Diné College.”
Diné College is headquartered in Tsaile, Arizona, with several branches across the Navajo Nation. It’s home to the Uranium Education Program, a unique empowerment initiative concerned with legacies of radiation and environmental health issues in the wake of uranium mining across the Navajo Nation.
In collaboration with people from Diné College, Connecting the Dots has received grants from two Indigenous organizations: the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and the NDN Collective.
Eventually, Will hopes to photograph all 500-plus abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation. He’s also developing a smartphone app that incorporates strategies of counter-mapping.
Counter-mapping typically involves community-produced cartography that challenges, augments, or supplements official maps. Different knowledge systems reveal different things about landscapes and power that the US Geological survey, or the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, might overlook—or obfuscate.
“We're trying to make it very easy for anybody with a phone to understand where they are in relation to these sites, and then to easily access site screening reports that identify history of site location and the relative toxicity of the site.”
This could, Will says, include warnings about livestock.
“Maybe, don’t send your cattle in direction, or let your sheep water from that region, because the reason there's a depression in the landscape is because there was uranium mined from that site, and it’s still pretty toxic. That's one of the big vectors for human exposure: livestock grazing, and eating or drinking contaminated sources, and then we eat the animals.
Breathing in contaminated dust is also a concern…
“It's incredibly windy, usually in the spring. Maybe there’s a way to build a wind warning, so that people are at least made aware that there’s the potential for a dangerous dust storm headed your way.”
The Center for Land Use Interpretation is an instructive model for using artistic strategies to make intelligible the many ways that humans have become a geophysical force on this continent.
Will Wilson’s practice shares similar sensibilities, using counter-mapping strategies and 21st-century technologies to produce understandable visualizations of the uranium industry’s violence upon Indigenous land.
And in direct conversation with Will’s work is Santa Fe-based photographer Shayla Blatchford, whom we met briefly in episode one. Shayla is the force behind the multimedia, web-based Anti-Uranium Mapping Project. Shayla and I spoke over video call in January 2025.
“The Anti-Uranium Mapping Project is an interactive audio visual storytelling website on uranium mining. I'm trying to make it an educational database for people who live both on and off the Navajo reservation or Indigenous lands.
My family's from the Navajo Nation, so that's why I focus back to that place. But there are a lot of people who live in and around some of these sites that are impacted by uranium mining and they don't have access to the full scope of uranium mining practices, from the beginning to the end, and how toxic it is.”
And outside of the Navajo Nation, Shayla says, people have been kept in the dark about the renewed push for domestic uranium mining to fuel atomic power plants—and the rebuilding of the United States’s entire nuclear weapons arsenal (tto the tune of $1.7 trillion out of our paychecks13).
“The information that's out there now, it's very fractured and very surface level. A lot of the federal websites just skim the surface of these issues, because they don't really want you to know the depth of the actual dangers of uranium. And so, they're very vague and simplifying with how they describe everything.”
Beyond the misdirecting and generalized language, federal websites are also notoriously clunky and user-un-friendly. Their search functions are limited, and frustrating, if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.
“It's getting harder these days to even have stuff come up. A lot of things are getting deleted, or links are removed, especially newspaper articles from stuff related to Los Alamos National Labs and whistleblowers.
I'm realizing that this stuff is buried. So I'm trying to download everything, and not just provide links, because I know that those links could be changed or removed.”
Shayla was inspired to develop her website by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a collective that uses data-visualization, multimedia storytelling, and what they call “critical cartography” to document dispossession and resistance in gentrifying landscapes like Los Angeles, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
When I’m feeling overwhelmed by doom narratives—like nuclear annihilation—or cynical about contemporary creative culture, it’s exactly this type of generative influence that reminds me that art and design practices absolutely can have radical applications.
Shayla’s work, Will’s work, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation have each motivated me to dare to imagine de-nuclearized futures.
“I’m trying to see what I can do with counter-mapping. Creating a hub, putting everyone’s stories and experiences all in one place, so nothing gets lost or misinterpreted. I'm trying to create or offer something a little more personal, something that could instill empathy and hopefully accelerate remediation or direct action.”
During my July 2024 video call with environmental historian Traci Brynne Voyles, author of Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country, she articulated the ways that people have been conditioned to depersonalize—and, I’d argue, dehumanize—specific landscapes and their inhabitants.
“When I first started the research, I would talk to folks and describe the disproportionate exposure of Native nations and the desert Southwest to the radioactive and chemical toxicity that's entailed in uranium mining. And folks—especially non-Native folks who were not from the desert area—would often have this really interesting reaction, where it would almost seem as though the location of uranium mining in a place like that was obvious, or the detonation of the first atomic bombs at the Trinity site in central New Mexico was an obvious place for these kinds of major episodes of nuclear harm or radioactive harm.
What I was really interested in is that kind of naturalization of the desert as a place for targeted and really extreme forms of environmental violence. And it almost struck me as though the people I was talking to considered the desert Southwest as a place that was either unpopulated or unimportantly populated. They saw it as a place that was ecologically unimportant or barren.”
Part of this, Traci says, has to do with the way that maps of the American West are historically illustrated, where vast stretches are, essentially, depicted as blank.
“And that struck me as a kind of normalization of an idea of a particular kind of place as a wasteland.”
At the start of World War II, there were no U.S. mines dedicated to uranium, though vanadium mining unearthed some. In need of a stockpile for the Manhattan Project, the military quietly secured uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the material used to develop the atomic bomb. Most of the rest came from Canada’s Eldorado mine near the Arctic Circle, with smaller amounts from vanadium operations in the American West1415.
Uranium mining is just the first step in making a bomb. Milling comes next, wherein tons of uranium-laced rock is crushed, put into a fine slurry, then leached with acid to extract uranium oxides. After a series of chemical processes, the result is uranium oxide concentrate, U308, or “yellowcake.” It’s radioactive, but not fissionable, not explosive.
To make it weapon-ready, Manhattan Project physicists converted it into uranium hexafluoride gas, then used centrifuges at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to isolate the rarer uranium isotope that can sustain a chain reaction: U-235.
That enriched uranium was turned into solid components, including the uranium bullet and target inside Little Boy, the first bomb exploded over Japan. Confidence in this “gun-type” design was so high—and weapons-grade uranium so scarce—that the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 was the first time that a gun-type weapon was actually detonated16.
Physicists were less certain about their implosion model, which involved a fissionable core, or pit, made from plutonium produced in a large-scale nuclear reactor at the Hanford Site in Washington. The Trinity explosion proved the implosion weapon’s efficacy, so three days after Hiroshima, the US dropped one on Nagasaki17.
After the war, fears of Soviet nuclear advancement led the United States government to guarantee those high prices for domestic uranium, triggering a mining boom—one centered on the vast uranium deposits of the Colorado Plateau, especially on Navajo land18.
Uranium fever was so widespread that in 1958, there was an entire episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour called “Lucy Hunts Uranium.”
There was even a modest 1955 novelty hit, “Uranium Fever,” by country singer Elton Britt.
Within a few years, the United States had become the world’s leading producer of uranium.
Prior to the arrival of the uranium industry to the Navajo Nation, few Diné had participated in the American wage economy. Doing so generally required traveling far from home for long periods of time. So, when jobs appeared overnight in places that many Navajo men could walk to, they signed up to work.
The mining companies never explained the dangers of uranium to them.
Neither did the government.
For centuries in Europe, uranium-bearing ore was mined for metals and uranium dyes in Schneeberg, Germany, and Jáchymov, in (what is today) the Czech Republic. A long-observed correlation between working as a uranium miner and contracting lung disease was formally detailed in an 1879 report and studies eventually attributed roughly half of all miner deaths to malignant lung diseases. By 1932, cancer was designated a compensable workplace hazard for uranium miners in both Germany and (what was then) Czechoslovakia19.
Meaning, by the time uranium mining arrived on Native American land in 1944, there was absolutely no question that working in a uranium mine posed lethal threats to laborers.
Yet miners were provided no personal protective equipment, mines were equipped with little to no ventilation, and miners’ families were often moved to temporary housing adjacent to the mine, exposing them to radioactive aerial particulates, tailings piles, and contaminated water2021. Navajo women often washed the miners’ soiled clothing by hand, exposing themselves to the embedded toxic earth materials22. The same thing happened at Laguna Pueblo.
Neither the mining companies, nor the federal government said a word to Indigenous communities about the documented dangers of this work.
In Wastelanding, Traci Brynne Voyles cites a dizzying number of statistics about the dangers that uranium miners face.
Uranium miners contract lung cancer at rates 56 times higher than the national average, and stomach cancer at rates 82 times higher. They’re 50 times more likely to get prostate cancer and 200 times more likely to contract cancer of the liver.
Their average life expectancy? Forty-six years23.
When miners dig out uranium, its decay process yields radium, which releases a radioactive gas called radon. And as radon decays, it releases its own byproducts called radon daughter isotopes, which are inhaled and lodge into the lungs adjacent to sensitive cells. There, they release high doses of radiation, which are absorbed by the body, and can cause cancer24.
What could have significantly reduced the volume of radon daughters entering the miners’ lungs? Proper ventilation, and personal protective equipment.
The Atomic Energy Commission and the Public Health Service knew that radon levels in American mines would cause cancer25. But the AEC elected not to impose safety standards, opting instead to—would you believe this?—leave that decision up to the individual states where mines were located.
The Navajo are indeed the largest single tribe in the United States. Close to half a million people identify as Diné. That’s roughly 0.13% of the US population. About one out of every 750 people.
During the years of guaranteed government uranium purchasing—again, 1948 to 1971—there were an estimated 12,000 uranium miners working in the United States. One out of every four were Navajo2627.
“My grandfather was a World War II vet. He came back and started working uranium mines. He used to blow stuff up, blasting, and hauling out ore. He did that for many years.
It killed him. He died from cancer. He’s long gone.”
In June 2024, I met up with Dr. Tommy Rock at the Welcome Center in Monument Valley, on the Navajo Nation, where towering red sandstone buttes rise from the desert floor. Earlier that year, I’d read a 2019 piece he authored for Outrider, “Uranium Mining and My Family’s Story.”
Today, Dr. Rock is an assistant research professor at Northern Arizona University, where he is part of the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society in the Department of Geography. His research focuses on the environmental and health impacts that uranium has had upon the Navajo Nation—the place where he grew up, where he spends his time off from teaching, where his family lives.
“There are many families here that have family members—their grandfathers or uncles—that worked uranium mines, either in this area or other parts of the region. And they all lost their lives to cancer. Just recently, at the beginning of April, one of my uncles passed away from cancer. He was a former uranium miner himself. It caught up with him and killed him.”
Dr. Rock monitors radiation in Monument Valley and beyond, testing water, dust, and plant life. He previously worked with the Diné Uranium Remediation Advisory Commission and co-wrote and appeared in Hadley Austin’s 2023 documentary Demon Mineral.
Gouging the earth for uranium didn’t just harm mine laborers—it poisoned the land. Across Diné Bikéyah, abandoned mines have contaminated precious desert water sources, endangering communities for generations.
“During the summer, you've probably seen this already, but you’ll see people driving around with trucks with 250, to 500, to 1000-gallons tanks that they haul around. And they will get water from a regulated watering point, not only for the livestock, but for themselves as well.
Those regulated water sources are tested, confirmed as uncontaminated, and deemed safe for consumption. But in the summer months, as temperatures soar in the Southwest, demand for water increases tremendously.
“Some of those regulated water points that are designated, it gets stressed to the point where they have to go turn that off, so it does not disrupt the water infrastructure that we do have.
And when that happens, then people have to go to these unregulated water sources to get water for their livestock—and in some cases for human consumption. You also need to be aware that a lot of the elders, they are on a fixed income, and some of them don't have vehicles or the trucks to haul the water as well.
So, some of these unregulated water sources, there are signs that say ‘For Livestock Use Only.’ But in times like that, during the summer, or with elders, they have no choice but to go to this water source. Because if you're thirsty, you're going to get water that's near you, what's available to you.”
Dr. Rock was raised by his grandparents. They lived in what he describes as a shack with no electricity or running water in Monument Valley’s Copper Canyon28. In the summer months, they’d move out to a summer camp in the Canyon. His grandfather frequently used an inhaler, though as a kid, Dr. Rock didn’t know why.
“He worked some here, in Monument Valley, and he talked about Colorado quite a bit.”
Dr. Rock went away for college at Arizona State, then earned masters at Northern Arizona University. Each time he returned home to Monument Valley in those years, his grandfather was sicker, eventually hauling around an oxygen tank. Now an adult, he understood why.
He was pursuing his PhD at Northern Arizona University when his sister called. His grandfather passed while Dr. Rock was halfway home. The family buried him in Copper Canyon.
By the time Dr. Rock was born, most of the uranium outfits had abandoned their mines29. Sometimes, entrances to mines would be blocked with piles of rocks. Besides that, little effort was made to warn the Navajo that the mines were still very radioactive, and would be, essentially, forever.
“As a kid, we heard that it was dangerous. But there were no signs. We were not well informed, and the communities were not well informed of the harmful effect that uranium has on a human body. So, a lot of us went out and explored a lot of these mines. And nowadays some of my peers that I went to high school with, some of them who had been exposed to to that, some of them have passed. And and that really shapes what I do for a living, from my grandfather and family’s past, being involved with uranium mining.”
Uranium milling processes leave behind massive amounts of radioactive waste known as tailings, which are a fine, sand-like material, laced with heavy metals and radium. Ideally, tailings are buried in capped disposal cells, or at least submerged in lined ponds to prevent wind-borne contamination. But on the Navajo Nation, they were often left in massive, exposed piles—radioactive hills.
Imagine, for a moment, needing to construct a home, but lacking costly building materials. You find a garage, filled with lumber and sheetrock, abandoned for years, but in fine shape. Eventually, you’d take it.
For Navajo communities that employ earthen architecture, tailings piles looked like free building material. Many unwittingly built homes with that radioactive sand, inadvertently exposing themselves and future generations to the cumulative effects of radiation30.
Those who didn’t gather tailings weren’t necessarily safer. A 2017 study sampled dust from 600 Navajo homes. Eighty-five percent contained uranium, arsenic, and lead, carried into their homes on the wind.
And every single person tested—even babies—had uranium in their bodies, sometimes at dangerously high levels31.
Such callous exposures, though, were not limited to the Navajo tribe.
Eldon Francisco is in his eighties. He remembers clearly when the mine arrived on Laguna Pueblo in 1952.
“The mine did both good and bad, with the habits. I mean, it provided jobs that paid hourly. And when they first opened up the mine, you had to have a governor’s consent. The villages were very much involved as to who could work there.
It was late May of 2024, and I was sitting in the back of an extended cab pickup truck, circling the former Jackpile-Paguate Mine, which is jaw-dropping in scale. Managed by the Anaconda Minerals Company, a subsidiary of ARCO, Jackpile was, for decades, one of the largest open-pit uranium mine in the worlds32. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that, over three decades, Anaconda ultimately ripped open more than 2,500 acres of earth33.
The partially remediated site abuts the village of Paguate, where Eldon grew up. Paguate is part of the Laguna Pueblo, home to the Laguna people, one of several Pueblo tribes who have continuously occupied their ancestral lands since before Spanish colonization.
About 40 miles west of Albuquerque, the broader Laguna Pueblo sits within a uranium-rich landscape commonly called the Grants Mineral Belt, which stretches north into the Navajo Nation.
In the 1950s, mining corporations descended upon this place like locusts, bringing jobs, but also, as they did to the Navajo, radically upending the Laguna way of life. Eldon Francisco discussed an early byproduct of hard wage labor on the people of Laguna.
“One of the worst things that it did was increase our desire for alcohol. I mean, beer, beer, beer. And, of course, it stopped all gardening, all types of agricultural work.
Eldon’s son, Curtis Francisco, added, “Yeah, you’ve got to be with the sheep every day. You can’t let them roam around for themselves.”
Curtis is a geologist and Laguna community historian. We connected through Chris Taylor, who runs the Land Arts of the American West program out of Texas Tech in Lubbock. Chris brings his students to meet with Curtis, who introduces them to a less savory genre of large-scale land manipulations.
Curtis is driving the pickup today. Eldon is blind from retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease; it forced him to retire from his longtime job as a school administrator. His sister also has the disease.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, retinitis pigmentosa affects about one out of every 4,000 people. That’s just 0.025% of people34.
According to Curtis, in their village of Paguate, population 1750, they’ve got 30 cases. That would be a frequency 68 times higher than the average. He cites the proximity of their village to the Jackpile mine as the culprit.
And I cannot stress enough how proximate that proximity is. As Curtis drove us up into the village of Paguate, it became apparent that you could literally step off the edge of someone’s yard and fall into the mine. Curtis described how the boundaries between the mine and Paguate had been blurred over the decades.
“But the thing I wanted to show you here is, from this point, you can look out and the mine is directly below us . This is the edge of the village.
They started knocking down some of these walls. But you can see the blocks, that are more angular, and look fresher? Those were hauled out of the mine. The stuff down towards the bottom, that looks rounded and really weathered, those were gathered in-situ. And so these houses here are all built from this local sandstone. And this is the Paguate [uranium] unit. The village sits on it, but the mine is right there.
The old road goes right along the base here. And, the mine comes right up to the edge of it.
Before ascending up into Paguate, Curtis had pulled the truck over on the side of the road, near a large escarpment. There, Eldon recounted how the arrival of the Anaconda Mineral Company quickly changed his family’s way of life.
“My father first sold his sheep herd in 1954. But we kept our cattle down on the Montano Association, which is the Rio Puerco, north of I-40.”
That’s the same Rio Puerco—the Puerco River—poisoned by the Church Rock uranium spill in 1979.
Back in 1954, Eldon’s parents found themselves in a dispute. His mother had wanted to hold onto the sheep. His father wanted to sell them. Eldon says his father’s persistence won out.
“We finally made a decision and he sold out the sheep, and then went to work at the mine. Because, with cattle, you could just go check on them on weekends, and so forth. But, we belonged to an association, which shared work. But anyways, I’ll let Curtis take over.”
Curtis pointed out the window to the rocky wall beside us.
“The area that we're stopping at right now is the entrance into the mine. That site is out of the mine. This site is in the mine. There used to be a guard shack right here, and that's where my grandpa was always at.”
He continued describing dozens of elements of the mining operation, all of which would have been within view just from where we were parked. And we’d barely seen any of it yet. Again, the scale of this operation is overwhelming.
“That was where they used to load the ore. You can still see what remains of the tracks coming across here up on that other side. And that structure was where they loaded all the ore. And so this mine ran 24/7/365. It never shut down.”
Then, in 1982, after three decades, the mine finally did shut down, having gouged more than 400 million tons of rocks from the earth, and having shipped out some 25 million tons of uranium ore via the Santa Fe Railroad to the Bluewater Mill, operated by Anaconda35.
Their remediation efforts, Curtis says, were superficial. Surplus ore was simply buried back on-site, and covered. But the material they used doesn’t support plant growth.
“And the reason is that the soil came from at-depth. There's no nutritional value in it. They seeded it with buffalo grass, and they got it to grow at first, because they were pumping water to it. The nutrients in the water was what kept it growing. But then, when they stopped pumping water to it, it all died.”
Beyond the mine, there is diverse desert plant life growing all over Laguna Pueblo’s half a million acres. But not at Jackpile.
“The only thing we get now is a little bit of tumbleweed and a few other measly weeds that grow in.”
What they capped the mine with is closer to clay than soil, which, though not supportive of vegetation, makes for a decent seal—if you keep it moist. But out here under the May sun in New Mexico, the surface layer is desiccated, visibly cracking. Then, in monsoon season, when it does storm, rainwater unleashes the materials that are supposed to be kept in because, as Curtis told me, “uranium loves to go into solution.”
Snaking through the arid minescape, though, is a reliable trickle: Paguate Creek. Curtis explained the paradox that this creates.
You can see the water flowing down here? It kind of has a turquoise green color. If you were to pull a sample of that and take it to a lab, you're going to get a screaming hot value for uranium.”
And at Laguna Pueblo, Curtis identified the same issues that Dr. Tommy Rock and Will Wilson mentioned on the Navajo Nation.
“Here in the Southwest, we don't have a lot of potable water and people would drink from that. So, that's a source of drinking water as well as livestock water. In the old days, you know, you’d drink where your animals were.”
And you do not want to drink this water, Curtis says. He also mentioned that it has impacted native plants that are used for medicinal purposes. They bioaccumulate uranium.
A few miles later, Curtis showed me a reservoir that was used for irrigation.
“You don't want to eat a radioactive chili, you don't want to eat radioactive corn, you don't want to eat radioactive squash. And you see there's another dead cow over there on the road, where it splits into a Y? There's a cow and a calf. You can see the bodies laying there.”
While up in Paguate, Curtis drove us over to Eldon’s childhood home. It sits abandoned. Eldon sighed.
“Yeah, I grew up here. But, I mean, our house was so radioactive. One of the reasons I didn’t get cancer, I think, was that every morning, my mom used to open all the windows and let the air flow through. And this was wind, rain, or shine.”
Before Eldon’s parents passed, they encouraged him and his siblings to keep the house, so that they could live right here in Paguate, where they grew up.
“We know nobody's going to live here anymore. And, uh, we hate to say it, but, you know, when parents go, they say, ‘Be happy, live joyfully there.’
But this house, right?”
Curtis chimed in.
“It’s caused a lot of contention. This is the house that has the highest radon level of any house that's been tested in the village.”
As we drove away, I asked, just to clarify, if the house we’d just visited was built by Eldon’s father. Curtis confirmed.
“Yeah, my grandpa built that. And he used rock that came out of the mine. He went to work at the mine. And after he was able to get enough money to buy a truck, he would go to the tailings pile and load it up every night and bring a truckload of rocks over. And when he got enough piled up, he could start building. It was easy to get. They were readily available. And because he worked there, they didn't say, ‘You can't have them.’ A lot of guys did that.”
At the end of our afternoon together, Curtis drove us up onto one of the southeastern fingers of Mount Taylor, which provided a spectacular view of a sublime high desert landscape.
Curtis pointed out the barely visible buildings of Paguate, perched along a ridge. Beyond the village, to the south and east, was an impressive gorge that seemed to unfold endlessly.
With the wind whipping and the sun blazing down on us, I gestured to the other side of Paguate, and asked Curtis what, in hindsight, was a naive question: Which part was the mine?
Curtis stared out over the chasm, and frowned.
“All of it.”
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