Demon Mineral
DEMON MINERAL documents the Indigenous struggle for vital living space in the radioactive desert of the American Southwest. Spanning the breadth of the Navajo Nation, in a landscape perforated by abandoned uranium mines, the film unearths the thousand-years-long project of reclaiming sacred homeland.
DEMON MINERAL is a feature film project by a collective of emerging and established practitioners in the fields of cinema, performance, ecology, poetry, and indigenous law. Shot over the course of 4 years with Diné (Navajo) community members, the film examines the legacy of uranium extraction from the perspectives of the landscape and its inhabitants. Framed entirely by indigenous voices, DEMON MINERAL is an “anti-Western” that tells the story of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation (Diné Bikeyah) and the women-lead, trans-generational, struggle for remediation.
Today, there are over 500 abandoned mines in Diné Bikeyah. As we see in the film, the movement to clean up these sites is spearheaded by women and their allies, drawing on the long legacy of matriarchal leadership in Diné culture.
Through interviews, textual interventions, archival footage, and infrared cinematography, a complex and overlapping historical narrative takes shape. The film is composed around extended scenes of life in these landscapes: Native women taking geiger readings of their radioactive homelands; truck drivers delivering water to contaminated houses; grandmothers and their daughters on the frontlines against reopening the mines. This story is voiced, exclusively, by members of the community, in Diné and English.
The film is at certain moments meditative, capturing the slow, expansive temporalities of an ancient landscape. At other times, it erupts with simmering rage. DEMON MINERAL traces uranium’s path from sites of production to medical laboratories to world destroying arsenals.