WAYS OF KNOWING Film Screening

Monday, October 20 7 PM. Free. The American Southwest holds a dark legacy as the setting for the production of the first atom bomb, followed by extensive uranium mining in Indigenous lands to build the foundation of the American nuclear weapons and energy program. But Navajo people have long held this area sacred, and continue to fight for a future that transcends environmental trauma. This is their story.

Ways of Knowing is an immersive short documentary about Navajo resilience to protect health, tradition, and land after enduring extensive uranium mining by the United States, leaving abandoned mines and other nuclear legacy sites containing toxic waste. This film challenges us to think differently about our relationship with land, and illuminates a path towards hope and healing

Eight decades after the Manhattan Project, which birthed the nuclear military-industrial complex, Indigenous communities across the American Southwest continue to live among contaminated land and waterways, inflicting harm on communities, ecologies, and traditional culture. But the landscape and the elements deep in the ground — including uranium — have been considered sacred long before this history. Presented in both 360 and ultrawide formats, Ways of Knowing features footage of the breathtaking landscapes of Diné Bikéyah (Navajoland) which are sites of nuclear history, yet of great importance to the people who have called it home for millennia.

It begins in Chi Chil Tah, New Mexico, where Diné traditional storyteller Sunny Dooley calls home. As she prepares a fire in her hogan, she offers a counternarrative to a region often described as “the middle of nowhere,” by describing how the ecosystem’s mountains, trees, animals, and people are intimately connected. Hers is the first of four other testimonials by Navajo people who hold distinct roles in their communities and unique personal connections with nuclear history on their homeland: Tina Garnanez, a filmmaker from Oak Spring, Arizona, who reflects on her family and the memory of her grandfather who died from cancer caused by exposure as a uranium miner; Tommy Rock, a scientist from Flagstaff, Arizona who utilizes Traditional Ecological Knowledge to empower communities to petition against contamination in their drinking water; Janene Yazzie, an educator and organizer from Lupton, Arizona whose work straddles local action around food security and global advocacy for Indigenous rights; and Bobby Mason, an environmental activist from Lukachukai, Arizona whose work links emerging technology with traditional knowledge to collect data on the government’s continued violations on the land. Through these voices, Ways of Knowing serves as a reminder that nuclear weapons are not just made of secrecy, science, and steel; their power is in part derived from a naturally occurring element extracted from the Earth at the expense of Indigenous lives.

Ways of Knowing started as a collaboration between Dooley and nuclear policy researcher Lovely Umayam to bridge policy and humanity in examining the United States’ nuclear legacy. Directed by filmmaker Kayla Briët, the film’s production was led by a due diligence process which involved multiple rounds of community feedback from a diversity of Navajo elders, scholars, students, and community organizers over the course of several years. Dooley, who is a producer of the film, envisions Ways of Knowing as a capstone to her life’s work of revitalizing Navajo story and tradition in the name of collective healing.

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