The Navajo Nation has struck landmark agreement with a uranium mining company that’s pulling the valuable mineral out of the earth near the Grand Canyon.
They need to get the ore from the Pinyon Plain Mine, to their processing plant in Blanding, Utah. And they need to go across Navajo land to do it.
But, when they started hauling the ore without notifying the tribal government last summer, the tribe was outraged. There are hundreds of abandoned uranium mines on Navajo land that have yet to be cleaned up, and the legacy of the industry on tribal lands still haunts these talks. The new hauling agreement has angered activists who say the decision to allow it is a betrayal.
Sabrina Manygoats, a Diné activist and artist who makes jewelry out of antique uranium glass to raise awareness about the issue, grew up here in the Valley not knowing about the fraught history of uranium mining that has affected generations of her family. But, that all changed when she was a teenager visiting her grandma on the Navajo reservation and she saw a sign on the side of the road.
Manygoats joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
SABRINA MANYGOATS: It was the summer of 2016. We were just driving down the road, the 89, and there is a new sign, very shiny, reads, “Radioactive contamination kills. It is time to clean up the mines.”
And that really just took me and my sister by surprise, and we're like rowdy teenagers. What is that? What is that? What is that? And just yeah, it's giving me kind of like goosebumps just thinking about it. Sorry.
LAUREN GILGER: It's OK. Take a moment.
MANYGOATS: But just being so, I guess oblivious to it and being so taken aback and not knowing what it truly meant and having grandma turn back and tell us the story.
GILGER: What did she tell you?
MANYGOATS: She was telling us essentially, yeah, there's about 500 abandoned uranium mines, and family has gotten sick. And you could tell that her demeanor shifted and she didn't want to talk about it either. And it was painful for her.
GILGER: That's part of Diné culture, right? Like to not talk about misfortunes or death, things like that because you might bring it upon yourself. Do you think that's part of the reason you didn't know?
MANYGOATS: Yeah, most definitely.
GILGER: What do you think about that now?
MANYGOATS: Growing up in the Valley and being exposed to different culture than family in the rez, very oblivious to the fact that we were visiting the rez so often and we knew that my Nelly did not have running water, and it was just a fact of life that she would struggle, you know, during the drier months and not having water, but like to not talk that, that water she could have had would be contaminated or just thinking of the slow poisoning she was enduring.
To me It kind of, it feels like it's a battle between two worlds. The modern world where you're a modern Indigenous person, and also when you visit family, you're, you know, within the culture within the tradition. So that's what it kind of felt like, it all came to.
GILGER: Did you feel guilty?
MANYGOATS: I did. I still do. I'm telling people about it and the same kind of realization comes across their face, too, like, wait, this happened? And I'm like, yep, it's currently still happening.
GILGER: And you've had family get sick family who have gotten cancer from this, this kind of thing.
MANYGOATS: Yeah, and everyone on the rez, honestly, everyone's going to have a story. It's that common.
GILGER: It's that common. So tell me how uranium glass came into the story here for you as an artist, right? Because you are an activist as well. Now you, you try to educate people about this, this exact issue, but the art side of it is, it is super interesting as well because you use that uranium glass to make art and to make jewelry that people can wear.
That seems a little ironic maybe is the word, right? Like wearing something that has been so harmful to the people that you come from.
MANYGOATS: Exactly. It's a piece of jewelry that someone will look at, not know the story behind it, kind of like when you visit Monument Valley and you see this hallowed land and you just can't help but think of what goes beyond these walls, these pillars, and not knowing that that in fact is poisoned land as well, and something so beautiful holds something so tragic and so dark.
GILGER: So when did you first come across uranium glass? It's this looks, by the way, like kind of old vases, beautiful kind of pieces of, of maybe Depression-era glass, something like my grandmother probably had, right? You found them in antique stores?
MANYGOATS: Yeah, I was quite a big antiquer. My grandma and I and my sister, we would go out and we go looking for junk.
GILGER: The best.
MANYGOATS: So, I think we definitely passed by a few pieces, but not knowing what it actually held. But in the pandemic, sitting at home, scrolling through TikTok, and bam, there is this piece of glass that was so contradictory or it was like a punch in the gut. It is so, I would say mesmerizing.
It is very ethereal looking under black light and it just gives off this glow. And it just grabs your attention immediately.
GILGER: And it literally glows.
MANYGOATS: It literally glows under UV and it's kind of like twinkling away and you can't help but like look at it and be mesmerized by it. But then I don't have that opportunity to be ignorant to it because I know what lies behind that ethereal glow.
GILGER: So you started making your own artwork with it. Why?
MANYGOATS: Because I saw how it captured other people's attention. So knowing the power behind that and behind the story of an item and connecting it quite literally in front of people, that is the best way to have something stick in someone's mind, and that is the best way to teach a story, is to have people live it with you and physically, it's tangible to someone.
GILGER: Yeah. So tell us about the work that you make with this uranium glass. You use beads, right?
MANYGOATS: Yes, I use uranium glass beads and I also pair it with traditional Navajo medicine. So, we have this thing called the juniper berry, and that is used in ceremony. It is used for healing. They also call it the ghost berry.
For me, it ties in together perfectly because we have uranium, the ghost that's still haunting us, and we have the healing aspect, and bringing them together is something that we can use to help go forward and teach, quite literally, teach. That's all this journey has been. teaching people.
GILGER: It's OK. It's emotional for you.
MANYGOATS: It really is.
GILGER: You're wearing it right now.
MANYGOATS: I know, yeah,
GILGER: So how do you feel when you wear it, right? What does it feel like? Like a reclaiming?
MANYGOATS: It does. It definitely is reclaiming.
GILGER: So let me ask you about what's happening now because as you've referred to, this is an ongoing story on the Navajo Nation. Right now we're seeing the Navajo government just agreed to allow uranium hauling across part of the reservation from a company that's mining uranium right near the Grand Canyon.
That got mixed reaction from many people, but the government essentially said, you know, I'm not sure we had any other choice. What do you think about that?
MANYGOATS: It definitely makes me feel disgusted, angry, how could we betray our tribal relatives when we have seen firsthand what has occurred? How could we do that?
They say they're taking safety measures and, and they, the Navajo Nation government did get a lot of cleanup involved in this from that company to go clean up some of those abandoned mines you mentioned.
GILGER: Is that a silver lining for you?
MANYGOATS: It is not. It, it feels like we need to finish what we started, which is cleaning up those mines. We can't move forward from such an exploitative thing that happened to us. We can't move forward unless we fix it entirely.
GILGER: So what message do you want to send with the work that you're doing at the moment that you're doing it, right, in which this is still so contentious, still happening, people are still very upset about it. What do you want people to know?
MANYGOATS: I want people to keep it in the forefront of conversations. That's also the idea behind the jewelry, just keeping the conversation alive because the moment we forget about what has happened previously with our elders and our sickness, that's the moment that we're just going to continue exploiting the land and continue poisoning the land and poisoning ourselves.
