The Buried Story of the Uranium Beneath the Navajo Nation

Between 1944 and 1986, nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were carried out of Navajo land to arm the American nuclear arsenal. For most of those years the only legal buyer was the Atomic Energy Commission, the agency that built the bombs. The men who did the digging were Navajo, working small, unventilated mines for wages they could walk to from home. They were never told that the air underground carried radon, a danger documented in the mining records of Europe for half a century. And in the early 1950s, the same government that needed their ore sent the Public Health Service to study their lungs while telling them nothing. This documentary follows the uranium from the canyons of Cove and Monument Valley to the weapons plants, then traces what it left behind: contaminated homes and water, the 1979 tailings-dam failure at Church Rock that became the largest accidental release of radioactive material in U.S. history, a federal apology that arrived in 1990 wrapped in paperwork the families could not produce, and the 523 abandoned mines that still sit on Navajo land today. As of 2025, the compensation fight is back in Congress and back in the news.