Revisiting Colorado's Gold King Mine Spill a Decade Later

On August 5, 2015, the rupture of the abandoned Gold King Mine near Silverton, CO in the southwestern part of the state released more than three million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Animas River turning its waters a shocking yellow.

At the time of the disaster, Diné photographer Teresa Montoya had recently moved to Window Rock, AZ on the Navajo Nation where her family is based. Montoya was born and raised in Grand Junction, CO, but spent weekends and summers growing up on the Reservation. Window Rock and the Navajo Nation are downstream of Silverton.

In the immediate aftermath, Montoya, who was in graduate school with an interest in environmental regulations, volunteered on projects researching water quality in the area. She attended community meetings in Shiprock, NM on the Navajo Nation alongside the San Juan River. The San Juan River is a large river corridor stretching across the top of what is now the Reservation in the Four Corners region.

The San Juan is a major tributary of the Colorado River. The Animas River, with Silverton and the Gold King Mine near its northern headwaters, is a tributary of the San Juan River. The Suan Juan turned yellow as well.

Water is connected.

Teresa Montoya (Diné, born 1984), ‘Tó Łitso #3 (Yellow Water #3),’ from the series ‘Tó Łitso (Yellow Water),’ 2016, printed 2024. Inkjet print. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Block Board of Advisors Endowment Fund purchase, 2024.22.3. Image copyright of the artist.

“The dismal response in the beginning,” stands out to Montoya. “There was a galvanized response with the state, but Navajo Nation was the last to find out about the spill. That speaks to a larger history of jurisdictional issues, which was what my research interests were.”

Montoya, now also a social scientist and assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago, first visited Silverton and the source point for the spill the following spring. One year after the catastrophe, in August, she returned with her camera and the intention of producing a photography project.

“What I was most surprised about is in the (Silverton) community itself, the way that (the spill) was completely normalized, that there was ongoing mine contamination,” Montoya remembers. “It wasn't just the spill event, but if you drive around, there's other streams that have that color and that's just normal to them because this is a region that's riddled with abandoned mines. During spring runoff, or if there's a storm, you're going to get that sediment turned up and that color. They're used to it; they take pride in this past mining history.”

A perverse feature of communities with mostly white residents in areas of historic or ongoing resource extraction – be that mining, drilling, or chopping – is the pride they take in those industries and histories despite the terrible human health and environmental impacts that have resulted from them.

I write from experience living in a town with a timber mill where the once acrid, choking, eye-watering smell of the mill’s operations was described as “smelling like money.” Not smelling like chronic headaches, throat irritation, or emphysema, but like “money.”

In Silverton, a year after the disaster, Montoya observed the town holding a community “fun run” to recognize the spill. Yellow powder was sprinkled on the ground as a joke. Local breweries brewed a special unfiltered yellowish Hefeweizen mimicking the color of contaminated water.

It is impossible to consider these responses outside a lens of ongoing settler colonial mindsets which perceive the land as primarily a resource to be extracted from. A profit center. Separating these responses from a mindset privileging capitalism and corporations over people and the planet is impossible.

On the other hand, “By the time (the spill) reached the Navajo Nation, the mood was very different,” Montoya said. “Even one year after the spill, there was still a heightened concern about the safety of the water and the cultural impact.”

Water is Life

Diné people on the Navajo Reservation use water from the San Juan River for agriculture, to water their livestock, and for their own drinking. Roughly 30% of Navajo Nation households don’t have running water. They source drinking water from wells. Wells susceptible to toxins on the surface.

To the Diné, rivers are also sacred, not simply for recreation or revenue. The Diné have ceremonial uses for the San Juan. The river has a spirit. Rivers across the Diné homelands have genders.

“There's a broader spectrum of ways these Diné communities along that river corridor were using and engaging with the water,” Montoya explained. “It’s a sacred male river, so having that sort of relationship with the river also produces a different sort of response (after a contamination). This is a relative, not just a stream that happens to be contaminated where you fish.”

The landscape, the rivers, the people, and their responses one year after the disaster became the focus of Montoya’s photography project, a project on view now through June 14, 2026, at the Block Museum of Art outside of Chicago on the campus of Northwestern University.

Teresa Montoya (Diné, born 1984), ‘Tó Łitso #6 (Yellow Water #6),’ from the series ‘Tó Łitso (Yellow Water),’ 2016, printed 2024. Inkjet print. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Block Board of Advisors Endowment Fund purchase, 2024.22.6. Image copyright of the artist.

“I wanted to trace the entirety of the path of the spill and to gain an understanding of what the different responses were along that spill path, which also speaks to different relationships with this water source, and how people understand their responsibility or stewardship of a water region,” Montoya said.

“Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years After the Gold King Mine” revisits Montoya’s journey from Silverton to Shiprock tracing the path of the contamination and documenting its ongoing cultural and environmental impacts through photography, sound recordings, water samples, and cartographic data compiled between 2016 and 2019. The exhibition is free to visit.

Combining photo documentary and poetic approaches, Montoya’s work reflects on the enduring presence of toxicity across landscapes and the intertwined relationships between people, other-than-human beings, and water. By centering Indigenous knowledge systems and acts of resilience, Montoya challenges extractive frameworks and invites reflection on environmental justice in the Southwest and beyond.

Same Story, Different Day

If Diné people had been fairly compensated by the United States government for all of the minerals extracted from their homelands over the past 200 years, they wouldn’t have to worry about access to drinking water, they could brush their teeth in Cristal champagne. Gold, silver, copper, coal, zinc, aluminum, oil, uranium. The minerals that came from the Four Corners region helped build the country. Built the bomb. Power the nation still.

Navajo people have profited scantly from the extraction, but they own all of the negative human health impacts. All the cancers. All the environmental catastrophe. All the air and water pollution.

As fate would have it, while Navajo Nation was bracing for the downstream impacts of the Gold King Spill, another researcher in the region found elevated levels of contamination continuing to linger in the water supply from the 1979 Church Rock Spill, the largest nuclear release in U.S. history.

“It happened just months after the Three Mile Island Spill, which got a lot more coverage; my family is downstream from the Church Rock Spill,” Montoya said. “The Gold King Mine Spill became a way to think about how contamination is visualized, and how certain sorts of contamination register more because of its visibility. Gold King Mine Spill – orange-yellow water – galvanized a larger response than this other spill because uranium elevations in drinking water produce no discernible color or smell.”

No less dangerous, however.

And perfectly predictable.

Where there is mineral extraction, be that gold, coal, uranium, or oil, there is environmental catastrophe as a result. There are terrible human health impacts as a result. They go hand in hand. Spills, pollution, collapses, dead animals, dead people. Extractive industries can not be separated from the inherent harm they cause.

Teresa Montoya (Diné, born 1984), ‘Tó Łitso #22 (Yellow Water #22),’ from the series ‘Tó Łitso (Yellow Water),’ 2016, printed 2024. Inkjet print. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Block Board of Advisors Endowment Fund purchase, 2024.22.22. Image copyright of the artist.

Broadly speaking, Indigenous communities pay more attention to the costs, white communities the benefits. A big part of that is because Indigenous communities tend to bear the brunt of the costs while white communities reap the lion’s share of the benefits. Those benefits often particularly benefitting non-Indigenous corporate types and shareholders far removed from where the extraction – and damage – most noticeably takes place.

“As time passed, (the Church Rock Spill) faded from memory (but) people were still getting sick,” Montoya said. “In 2015, right around the same time as the Gold King Mine Spill, the community of Sanders (AZ) received notifications from a Navajo PhD student doing water testing in the area and found elevations twice the EPA limit.”

Closer to Home

Anyone living nearer the Navajo Reservation and unable to visit Chicago for Montoya’s show, but interested in the subject of extractive industries and their impacts on Indigenous populations, should check out “Nuclear Past, Present, and Future: Art in Action” opening at the National Hispanic Cultural Center Visual Art Museum in Albuquerque on Friday, April 10.

New Mexico occupies a unique space in the nuclear industry’s past, present, and future as the birthplace of the atomic bomb in 1945. Through the lens of artistic expression, the exhibition examines the impact of these technologies, their devastating human and environmental toll, and the expression and activism of community members advocating for justice.

“Art in Action” features 60 artworks by 32 artists, many of whom are from communities directly affected by nuclear testing, uranium mining, and weapons production in state. The presentation is a collaboration between the NHCC and the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium who advocate on behalf of victims of the Trinty nuclear weapons test in south-central New Mexico.