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Color aerial photograph of a desert with a dark pentagonal structure and a river with vegetation
Shiprock Disposal Cell, Shiprock, New Mexico, Navajo Nation, from the series Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition
Color aerial photograph of a desert with a dark pentagonal structure and a river with vegetation

Shiprock Disposal Cell, Shiprock, New Mexico, Navajo Nation, from the series Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition

Artist (Diné/Bilagaana, born 1969)
Date2020
MediumInkjet print, pigment-based
Dimensionsimage: 18 × 24 1/8 in. (45.7 × 61.3 cm)
sheet: 21 × 27 in. (53.3 × 68.6 cm)
ClassificationPhotograph
Credit LineMary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, purchase funds provided by the Andra S. and Irwin Press Collections Fund
Object number2021.8.2
Text Entries

One Book One Northwestern, 2021–22

Rays of light stream across a seemingly endless landscape, its natural topography interrupted by industrial interventions. At center is a pentagonal structure that covers an area of approximately 77 acres—a uranium disposal cell encapsulating radioactive materials. The site is one of the over 500 abandoned uranium mines located on Navajo Nation that artist Will Wilson plans to document in his series Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition. While aerial photography is often used as a means to surveil or to identify resources that can be exploited, here Wilson uses the strategy to bear witness to violence against a community.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, between 1944 and 1986 nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from Navajo Nation. Uranium was an essential resource during the nuclear arms race of the Cold War and is now largely used to produce energy in nuclear reactors that source about 20 percent of electricity in the United States. As mentioned in The Story of More, nuclear power has decreased in popularity after high-profile disasters such as Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986), and an increased awareness of the mismanagement of toxic waste generated by the process. In addition to destroying ancestral lands, Indigenous communities were exposed to toxic materials, and water sources were poisoned with elevated levels of radiation.

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