My fiancée’s work took us to Gallup, New Mexico two weeks ago so I built a small itinerary around her schedule: Canyon de Chelly, the petrified forest, the ice cave in the throat of Bandera volcano, the arch at La Ventana. At the same time, just northeast of Gallup, the federal government, Navajo Nation, and United Nuclear held a groundbreaking ceremony.1
Groundbreakings usually follow a familiar script: officials in hard hats they will wear for eleven minutes, ceremonial shovels, remarks about partnerships. A celebration of development, they are meant to mark the moment something moves from an idea to reality. What broke ground outside Gallup that Thursday was the opposite operation: the removal of roughly a million cubic yards of radioactive waste rock from the Northeast Church Rock mine, formerly operated by United Nuclear Corporation, a General Electric subsidiary. Between 1944 and 1986, companies pulled nearly thirty million tons of uranium ore out of Navajo lands under leases with the Navajo Nation, first for the bomb program and then for the reactor era.2 When the ore ran out, the companies moved on, leaving behind only the waste and the families who had to live with it. In 1979, the dam at United Nuclear’s Church Rock mill failed, releasing more than ninety million gallons of radioactive tailings solution into the Puerco River, among the largest releases of radioactive material in United States history. It came four months after Three Mile Island but drew a fraction of the attention. Edith Hood, who has lived in the area for decades and worked at a nearby mine, told a reporter that no official warned residents of the danger during the peak years of extraction. Three medicine men lived in her valley. “These things started happening,” she said, “and they started passing.”3
So this ceremony inaugurates the un-breaking of ground, four decades late. The cleanup will cost nearly $63 million, with General Electric covering only 70 percent and the Department of Energy assuming responsibility for the site in perpetuity.4 And the waste is not going far: it will be moved from the mine to the old United Nuclear mill site, just across the road from Navajo Nation land.
Across the road.
A few days later we walked the base of El Morro, the sandstone headland southeast of Gallup that travelers have written on for centuries. Petroglyphs cut by the ancestors of the people whose pueblo still crowns the summit. Then Juan de Oñate in 1605, pasó por aquí, passed by here: an inscription of passage that functioned as an inscription of possession. In 1849, a year after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, United States Army surveyors added their names. Then, in 1906, the Antiquities Act made El Morro a national monument and any further inscription a federal offense.
Each regime recorded its claim on the same rock. Monument status may be the most democratic arrangement El Morro has ever had. But it rests on the cancellation of every arrangement that came before. That is one of the things monuments do: they turn a living dispute over ownership into a finished exhibit about the past.
I had watched a documentary on the flight in about Reies López Tijerina, the preacher who spent the 1960s organizing dispossessed land grant heirs in northern New Mexico.5 In June 1967, Reies López Tijerina and members of his Alianza entered the Rio Arriba County courthouse in Tierra Amarilla intending to free several arrested comrades and make a citizen’s arrest of District Attorney Alfonso Sánchez, whom they accused of illegally suppressing an Alianza meeting two days earlier. Tijerina reportedly wanted the action carried out without bloodshed and instructed his followers not to shoot. But Sánchez was not at the courthouse, and the detained Alianza members had already been released. In the confusion that followed, gunfire wounded two law enforcement officers and the raiders fled with two hostages. The incident triggered one of the largest manhunts in New Mexico history. Tijerina became a national figure with coverage centering on the incident instead of his lifelong struggle over dispossessed land grants.
The Alianza demanded the restoration of the ejido commons promised to land-grant communities under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It may have been the closest thing the postwar United States produced to a mass movement organized around the decommodification of land. The courts treated the question of title as settled. Tijerina’s entire politics consisted of insisting that it was not. There were trials for storming the courthouse, but none for dispossessing the communities that sent them there. I arrived, in other words, already looking for the question.
At El Morro, the question of ownership sits behind a railing. In Tierra Amarilla, it was denied a hearing. And outside Gallup that Thursday, nothing got settled except the dust on their lapels. Stephen Etsitty, director of the Navajo Nation’s environmental agency, refused to let it disappear. The Navajo community wanted the waste gone; instead, the official plan leaves it in their backyard, trusted to engineering promises no one will be alive to keep. Etsitty called the plan an improvement without mistaking it for a resolution.6
Nobody at that groundbreaking chose the arrangement they were operating inside. That is what makes it an arrangement rather than a decision. A million cubic yards will move, which is not nothing to the families who have lived beside it for forty years, but every part of the remedy operates inside the property arrangement that produced the harm.
Tijerina's insistence, the one the courts declined to hear, was that the arrangement itself was the injury. What the Alianza demanded was not that the land be placed beyond claim, which is what El Morro accomplished by extinguishing every party to the contest. It was that the claim be returned to the people holding it in common. The shovels went into the ground in good faith. They were never going to dig that deep.
Micaela DePauli, "Long-awaited cleanup begins at radioactive uranium mine on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico," KRQE, July 24, 2026, https://www.krqe.com/news/new-mexico/long-awaited-cleanup-begins-at-radioactive-uranium-mine-on-the-navajo-nation-in-new-mexico/.
"Navajo Nation: Cleaning Up Abandoned Uranium Mines," United States Environmental Protection Agency, https://www.epa.gov/navajo-nation-uranium-cleanup.
DePauli, "Long-awaited cleanup begins."
"United Nuclear Corporation and General Electric to Perform $63 Million Cleanup of Uranium Mine Waste at Northeast Church Rock Mine in Navajo Nation," United States Environmental Protection Agency news release, September 2025, https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/united-nuclear-corporation-and-general-electric-perform-63-million-cleanup-uranium.
"'King Tiger' The Reies Lopez Tijeria [sic] Story," YouTube video, posted by NELA TV, October 26, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5uHP-yq8Wk.
DePauli, "Long-awaited cleanup begins."