Ways of Knowing: A Navajo Nuclear History

Mar 8, 2025

0h 22m

★ 0.0

Overview

The American Southwest holds a dark legacy as the place where nuclear weapons were invented and built. Navajo people have long held this place sacred, and continue to fight for a future that transcends historical trauma. This is their story.

Genres

Documentary

Ways of Knowing: A Navajo Nuclear History Trailers

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Cast

Sunny Dooley

Tina Garnanez

Tommy Rock

Janene Yazzie

Bobby Leonard Mason

Physicist Ted Hall is recruited to join the Manhattan Project as a teenager and goes to Los Alamos with no idea what he'll be working on. When he learns the true nature of the weapon being designed, he fears the post-war risk of a nuclear holocaust and begins to pass significant information to the Soviet Union.

7.4

Nuclear Now

Apr 28, 2023

With unprecedented access to the nuclear industry in France, Russia, and the United States, Nuclear Now explores the possibility for the global community to overcome the challenges of climate change and energy poverty to reach a brighter future through the power of nuclear energy. Beneath our feet, Uranium atoms in the Earth’s crust hold incredibly concentrated energy. Science unlocked this energy in the mid-20th century, first for bombs and then to power submarines. The United States led the effort to generate electricity from this new source. Yet in the mid-20th century as societies began the transition to nuclear power and away from fossil fuels, a long-term PR campaign to scare the public began, funded in part by coal and oil interests.

7.5

Inside Chernobyl's Mega Tomb

Dec 21, 2016

Documentary which follows the construction of a trailblazing 36,000-tonne steel structure to entomb the ruins of the nuclear power plant destroyed in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

8.0

Homeland

Oct 20, 2000

Following four Lakota families over three years, Homeland explores what it takes for the Lakota community to build a better future in the face of tribal and government corruption, scarce housing, unemployment, and alcoholism. Intimate interviews with a spiritual leader, a grandmother, an artist, and a community activist from South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation reveal how each survives through family ties, cultural tradition, humor, and a palpable yearning for self-reliance and personal freedom.

7.6

Inside Chernobyl with Ben Fogle

Mar 3, 2021

Ben Fogle spends a week living inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, gaining privileged access to the doomed Control Room 4 where the disaster first began to unfold.

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0.0

Apache

Jan 1, 1953

Short about the daily life of the Apaches, including their ceremonies.

0.0

Dakota 38

Sep 28, 2012

In the spring of 2005, Jim Miller, a Native spiritual leader and Vietnam veteran, found himself in a dream riding on horseback across the great plains of South Dakota. Just before he awoke, he arrived at a riverbank in Minnesota and saw 38 of his Dakota ancestors hanged. At the time, Jim knew nothing of the largest mass execution in United States history, ordered by Abraham Lincoln on December 26, 1862. Now, four years later, embracing the message of the dream, Jim and a group of riders retrace the 330-mile route of his dream on horseback from Lower Brule, South Dakota to Mankato, Minnesota to arrive at the hanging site on the anniversary of the execution. This is the story of their journey - the blizzards they endure, the Native and Non-Native communities that house and feed them along the way, and the dark history they are beginning to wipe away.

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6.6

American Meth

Feb 26, 2008

Actor Val Kilmer narrates this powerful film exploring the methamphetamine epidemic that's ravaged blue-collar America. Putting a human face on the problem, filmmaker Justin Hunt reveals the damage being done by this rural drug of choice, as well as the steps being taken by communities across the nation to wipe out the scourge. From Wyoming to New Mexico, Montana and Oregon, American Meth paints a picture of both devastation and hope.

6.0

We Are the Guinea Pigs

Apr 1, 1980

Farmers and parents of young children, who live in the Harrisburg, Pa., area, discuss their fears of radioactive contamination from the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident in 1979. Scientists and physicians also expound on the lethal dangers of nuclear power and the risks in containment processes.

9.0

Inhabitants

Mar 19, 2021

For millennia, Native Americans successfully stewarded and shaped their landscapes, but centuries of colonization have disrupted their ability to maintain their traditional land management practices. From deserts, coastlines, forests, mountains, and prairies, Native communities across the US are restoring their ancient relationships with the land. As the climate crisis escalates these time-tested practices of North America's original inhabitants are becoming increasingly essential in a rapidly changing world.

5.7

Broken Rainbow

May 5, 1985

Documentary chronicling the government relocation of 10,000 Navajo Indians in Arizona.

0.0

The Lost Spirits

Jan 1, 2009

The last surviving Native Americans on Long Island are the focus of The Lost Spirits. The film chronicles their struggles as an indigenous people to maintain their identity amidst relentless modernization and a heartless bureaucracy.

5.0

First Daughter and the Black Snake

Apr 15, 2017

The “Prophecy of the 7th Fire” says a “black snake” will bring destruction to the earth. For Winona LaDuke, the “black snake” is oil trains and pipelines. When she learns that Canadian-owned Enbridge plans to route a new pipeline through her tribe’s 1855 Treaty land, she and her community spring into action to save the sacred wild rice lakes and preserve their traditional indigenous way of life. Launching an annual spiritual horse ride along the proposed pipeline route, speaking at community meetings and regulatory hearings. Winona testifies that the pipeline route follows one of historical and present-day trauma. The tribe participates in the pipeline permitting process, asserting their treaty rights to protect their natural resources. LaDuke joins with her tribe and others to demand that the pipelines’ impact on tribal people’s resources be considered in the permitting process.

0.0

Jeff Weise: My Personal Documentary

Jul 9, 2010

Documentary about the Red Lake school shooting and its perpetrator, Jeff Weise.

0.0

Warrior: The Life of Leonard Peltier

Nov 1, 1991

An intimate exploration of the circumstances surrounding the incarceration of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, convicted of murder in 1977, with commentary from those involved, including Peltier himself.

7.5

NUKED

Oct 22, 2023

The US detonated 67 nuclear weapons over the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands during the Cold War, the consequences of which still reverberate down four generations to today. "NUKED," is a timely new feature documentary focussing on the human victims of the nuclear arms race, tracing the displaced Bikinian's ongoing struggle for justice and survival even as climate change poses a new existential threat. Using carefully restored archival footage to resurrect contemporaneous islanders’ voices and juxtaposing these with the full, awesome fury of the nuclear detonations, NUKED starkly contrasts the official record with the lived experience of the Bikinians themselves, serving as an important counterpoint to this summer’s Oppenheimer.

5.4

Trudell

Jan 20, 2005

A chronicle of legendary Native American poet/activist John Trudell's travels, spoken word performances, and politics.

5.0

maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore

Sep 9, 2021

An experimental look at the origin of the death myth of the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest, following two people as they navigate their own relationships to the spirit world and a place in between life and death.

6.4

Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1

Nov 16, 2011

A shocking political exposé, and an intimate ethnographic portrait of Pacific Islanders struggling for survival, dignity, and justice after decades of top-secret human radiation experiments conducted on them by the U.S. government.

5.8

Dislocation Blues

Sep 8, 2017

Filmed during the 2016 Standing Rock protests in South Dakota, Sky Hopinka's Dislocation Blues offers a portrait of the movement and its water protectors, refuting grand narratives and myth-making in favour of individual testimonials.

Ways of Knowing: A Navajo Nuclear History

Overview

Genres

Ways of Knowing: A Navajo Nuclear History Trailers