As President Donald Trump and multi-national corporations push to dig the first new uranium mines in New Mexico in more than 50 years, Shayla Blatchford’s exhibit opening today in Santa Fe seeks to equip people, particularly Indigenous people, with the tools to fight back.
Blatchford (Diné) — a photographer, artist and activist — told Source New Mexico in an interview that the complicated and obscure world of uranium mining can make activism difficult, especially given that the legacy of uranium mining in Indigenous communities here started as a clandestine project.
“It feels intimidating. And I think that was the intention of the federal government, to make it this censored thing, because it was a secret to begin with,” she said.
The Friday opening of the Anti-Uranium Mapping Project at CENTER in Santa Fe seeks to, among other objectives, counteract that censorship and intimidation. And it represents a grand unveiling of years of intense work and lifelong curiosity about Blatchford’s roots to the Navajo Nation and its landscape.
While she’s given various presentations and held exhibits in other states, the homecoming to CENTER is the first time she’s had full creative control over how the project is displayed. And it’s in Santa Fe, where she has lived more than a decade.
The exhibit opens amid a renewed push for uranium mining in New Mexico and shortly after the Navajo Nation reached an agreement with Energy Fuels, a global mining company, to transport uranium across the nation from a mine near the Grand Canyon to a mill in Utah.
On the New Mexico side of the Navajo Nation, the federal government has recently prioritized several uranium mine proposals here that have been pending for more than a decade. The projects are near Mount Taylor, a sacred mountain to several pueblos in New Mexico, as well as the Navajo people.
Blatchford moved to Santa Fe from California more than a decade ago to attend the Santa Fe Institute of Art and Design. After her mother began a genealogical investigation into her birth parents in the early 1990s, Blatchford as a child visited Santa Fe and reconnected with her aunt and uncle on the Navajo Nation.
Her interest in the hidden world of uranium mining began shortly after she moved here for college. Once settled, she began poring over satellite imagery of the Navajo Nation to find her aunt’s house, where she had idyllic memories of visiting as a kid.
“I was just trying to get to my aunt’s house from memory without having to call my mom and get directions. And through that, I was on Google Earth, and that’s when I found this, like, weird black smear, and kind of, like, geometric shapes in the landscape beyond the hills where I remember going on that motorcycle ride with my uncle.”
The “smear” was a giant coal mine, she said. The horror of that discovery led her down a rabbit hole that eventually ended at uranium. Since at least 2011, she’s been gathering photos and maps and stories, along with compiling resources, for a website and in-person exhibit.
Part of her goal is to reclaim the maps used as a tool to plunder resources. Maps are central to the public’s understanding of uranium, she said, but they are also “top down” and “clinical,” showing enforced borders and sterile data.
“But I feel like, once you come down to the 45-degree angle, and you see the landscape, you get this middle ground of information between the two worlds,” she said. “ And I feel like intuitively, you just have more of a connection and empathy is being instilled. As you’re gathering new information, you’re still kind of grounded somehow.”
Visitors can expect that immersive view of the landscape and people, including photos and videos, and educational material as part of the month-long exhibit. It will focus primarily on the Church Rock spill of 1979.
On Aug. 14, Blatchford will also host a “counter mapping workshop.” As part of that, she asks participants to annotate top-down maps of the Four Corners region, with the boundaries of tribes and pueblo reservations outlined.
Among the questions she asks:
“Have you or someone you know been impacted by uranium mining? If so, please mark the location on the map and write what feels comfortable to share,” and;
“How have maps enforced colonial conquest and the imposition of capitalist property relations around the world?”
A participant at a recent workshop at the University of New Mexico responded: “Maps carry the sense of ‘free land’ that must be ‘claimed’ by people of power who don’t care about community and respect, but rather see land and want it for the power and resources.”
