Yellow Fever: Uncovering the Navajo Uranium Legacy looks at the Navajo uranium boom through Tina Garnanez’s lens, providing an intimate portrait of a people’s struggle against industry, both at home and in Washington D.C., and raising awareness of issues that will affect the whole world in the coming decades.

Uranium mining began on Navajo land in the 1950s to support the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. Government supported industries dug more than 2,000 uranium mines and built four uranium-processing mills on the Navajo Nation, spanning Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Also home to more than 35,000 natural gas wells, thousands of oilrigs, refineries and mine holes, the Four Corners region has air quality comparable to downtown Los Angeles, according to Mike Eisenfeld of San Juan Citizens Alliance. Meanwhile, 40 percent of Navajos still use candlelight to light their homes, and in some regions, children avoid the outdoors for fear of radiation exposure. One hundred miles south of Garnanez’s family home near Shiprock, New Mexico, 98 million gallons of nuclear waste spilled into the Puerco River in 1979. It is the largest nuclear disaster in US history, bigger than the Three Mile Island accident.

Today, the energy industry wants to increase uranium production to meet the 2040 projected world energy demand of 40 kilowatt hours a year, according to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project). Mining companies such as Hydro Resources Inc., Strathmore Minerals and others plan to resume mining on the outskirts of the Navajo Nation despite that the Four Corners region is ripe for wind and solar energy development. A figure released by New Energy Economy shows that converting only 2.5 percent of the Southwest’s available solar radiation into electricity would match the nation’s total energy consumption for 2006.

For more information on this film, visit Vision Maker Media.