Ways of Knowing is a 25-minute immersive documentary about Navajo resilience to protect health, tradition, and land after enduring extensive uranium mining by the United States government, beginning in the late 1940s and lasting until the 1970s. Eight decades after the Manhattan Project which birthed the nuclear-industrial complex, Navajo and other Indigenous communities of the American Southwest continue to suffer from contaminated land and waterways, and scores of people sickened and killed by toxic exposure. But since long before this region became the epicenter of uranium extraction and nuclear weapons production, the landscape and its elements – including uranium – have been considered sacred. 

Ways of Knowing illuminates how, despite generations of personal and environmental trauma, there is still a profound reason for hope and healing.

Ways of Knowing started as a collaboration between traditional Diné storyteller Sunny Dooley and nuclear policy researcher Lovely Umayam to bridge policy and humanity in examining the United States’ nuclear weapons production legacy. Directed by filmmaker Kayla Briët, the film’s production was led by a due diligence process which involved multiple rounds of community feedback from a diversity of Navajo elders, scholars, students, and community organizers over the course of several years. Dooley, who is a producer of the film, envisions Ways of Knowing as a capstone to her life’s work of revitalizing Navajo story and tradition in the name of collective healing.