On August 5, 2015, the rupture of the abandoned Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado, released more than three million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Animas River, turning its waters a shocking shade of yellow. In the following year, artist and anthropologist Teresa Montoya (Diné, born 1984) embarked on a road trip from Silverton to Shiprock, New Mexico, retracing the path of the contaminated water and documenting its ongoing cultural, spiritual, and material effects on the Navajo Nation and other Indigenous communities downstream.
Marking the ten-year anniversary of the disaster, The Block Museum of Art partners with Montoya to revisit this journey. Tó Łitso (Yellow Water) explores the enduring consequences of the Gold King Mine spill through photography, sound recordings, water samples, and cartographic data.
Combining documentary photographs with scientific data and poetic reflection, Tó Łitso invites viewers to consider water not only as a life-sustaining resource but also as a conduit for histories, stories, and harm. In doing so, the exhibition challenges extractive frameworks of land use, centering Indigenous knowledge and resilience. Through Montoya’s interdisciplinary practice, Tó Łitso (Yellow Water) offers a powerful meditation on environmental and cultural justice in the Southwest and beyond.
"The 2015 spill had discharged more than three million gallons of acidic mine waste fluid into Cement Creek before joining the Animas River and eventually into the San Juan River, which flows directly across the Navajo Nation. Through my photographic journey, I make explicit the enduring presence of toxicity across multiple landscapes and territories. Sometimes it appears beautiful, other times haunting. The images highlight the relationships that various communities sustain through water/tó despite the occurrence of repeated and enduring contamination from upstream locales. The Gold King Mine Spill shows us this, even in that, which cannot be readily seen." – Teresa Montoya
About Teresa Montoya
Teresa Montoya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
Her manuscript project tentatively titled, Checkered Land, Yellow Water: Struggles for Sovereignty beyond the Navajo Nation, approaches territorial dispossession and environmental toxicity as pervasive features of contemporary Indigenous life. Based on over 15 months of ethnographic research on the Navajo Nation, her research engages local modes of relating, both in its political and kinship imaginings, to understand the entanglements of checkerboard land allotment, tribal jurisdiction, and environmental contamination among Diné communities of present-day northern Arizona and New Mexico.
Her academic, political, and personal commitments are centered in Diné Bikéyah, the home that she carries with her and the home to which she always returns. She is Diné and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation.
