Teehooltsodii Still Remembers: Ten Years After the Gold King Mine Water Spill
At first, it looked like sunrise had blended into the water. A strange gold shimmer moved through the Animas, catching light in unnatural ways. Children stared. Farmers paused. Elders watched in silence. Some people took photos; others just stood still. No alarms rang. No sirens sounded. But a rupture was felt somewhere between the banks of the San Juan and the sound of rustling cottonwood leaves—an old wound tore open.
This August will be ten years since the Animas River ran yellow. Ten years since the Gold King Mine Spill pushed a pulse of acid and heavy metals through sacred water. The EPA says the river has recovered. Their reports are filled; the metal counts are low. But if we ask the people whose lives braid into its currents—whose cornfields once drank from it, whose prayers rose over it—you might just hear something different. Because who decides when a river is healed? Who decides if it is still holy? As environmental protections unravel again under new federal priorities, the boundary between what is polluted and what is desecrated is not merely scientific. It is spiritual. Legal. Historical. And for many, it is still deeply personal.
I didn’t know much about the San Juan when the spill occurred. I had never seen the water in person. It was just work. I remember the photos: the water ran the color of rust, not a river. It looked wounded. I approached the research with distance and a loose interpretation of the facts, implementing an “all hazards perspective,” an “approach to disaster prevention, protection, mitigation, response and recovery that addresses a full range of threats and hazards.” I didn’t know then what I know now—that this was more than a spill. More than another report. It was a story unraveling. A spiritual ledger gone unbalanced.
In August 2015, a crew contracted by the Environmental Protection Agency breached a long-abandoned mine near Silverton, Colorado, accidentally releasing over three million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Animas River. Orange with iron, laced with arsenic, lead, and aluminum, the contaminated flow cascaded to the San Juan and Colorado Rivers—waters that sustain entire ecosystems and communities, including the Navajo Nation. The agency responsible for safeguarding the environment had, through miscalculation and mismanagement, poisoned it. And while the plume eventually faded from view, the cultural and spiritual damage remained—unmeasured and largely unacknowledged.
The Navajo Nation spans more than 27,000 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah—larger than ten U.S states. It is a sovereign entity with its own executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Yet, the federal government maintains a legal trust responsibility to support its wellbeing. For many Diné families, the rivers are more than water—they are kin. When the water is poisoned, it isn’t just a contamination event. It was a spiritual rupture. While the EPA measured parts per million, the Diné felt what was unmeasurable. And that difference—between what the government sees and what the people know—has defined the last ten years.
In the days after the spill, the Navajo Nation reached out to the federal government for help. What they received was silence—or worse, denial. The Federal Emergency Management Agency declined their request for disaster aid, stating that because the Environmental Protection Agency caused the spill, it would handle the cleanup. But response or mitigation to greater harm to the one it had already occurred isn’t the same as justice. And for a sovereign tribal nation, the bureaucratic deflection revealed a deeper betrayal.
The federal government, which holds a legal obligation and has charged itself with moral obligations of the highest responsibility and trust towards Indian tribes, failed to act as a trustee. This federal Indian trust responsibility is a legally enforceable fiduciary obligation on the part of the United States to protect tribal treaty rights, lands, assets, and resources. It did not protect; it did not repair. The systems in place to respond to disasters—staffed by agencies founded to protect both people and land—had no plan for a crisis that contaminated not just a water source but a worldview. The National Planning Framework for Disaster Response does not recognize spiritual harm; therefore, the spiritual connection and impact of the disaster were not assessed when a risk assessment was conducted from the federal government’s perspective. There was no space for community-led healing, ceremonies, or the long shadow of mistrust that followed. The framework was written for systems, not for spirits. When your government’s framework doesn’t recognize spiritual harm, it just doesn’t fail you—it erases you.
To the EPA, the damage was chemical. It could be filtered, diluted, declared safe again. But what of the rituals that relied on the water? The prayers? The generational trust in a river as a relative, not a resource? Western science quantifies. But for the Navajo and many other Indigenous communities, desecration isn’t measured—it’s felt. When a river is tainted, it’s not just polluted. It’s broken. It’s grieving. And science, for all its tools, does not yet know how to measure the spiritual weight of harm. Nor does it know how to clean it.
For the Diné, the world is bounded by four sacred mountains—each aligned with a cardinal direction, a sacred color, and a spiritual force. Sisnaasjini, the white shell mountain, rises in the east as Blanca Peak. Tsoodził, the turquoise mountain, stands in the south as Mt. Taylor. To the west, Dook’o’oosłííd, the abalone shell mountain, forms the San Francisco Peaks, and Dibé Nitsaa—Mount Hesperus—anchors the black of sacred the north. These mountains don’t just encircle Diné lands, they form the architecture of belief, the sacred geography through which the past, present, and future are woven. They are a gift from the Creator of All Life; the Four Corners region contains divine powers that predate contemporary knowledge and time.
The same is true for water. Four sacred rivers mirror the mountain directions, each flowing with directional energy, sacred color, and spiritual presence. The Rio Grande in the east, the Little Colorado in the south, the Colorado River in the west, and the San Juan to the north—each carries memory, story, and ceremony. The San Juan holds profound meaning: a powerful elder spirit, protector, and witness, described by some as an old man with white hair, moving like a snake through the desert with flashes of lighting to shield the Diné from harm. Its waters are not taken for granted. Many still offer corn pollen to its surface in exchange for good health and guidance. People plead with its holy being, ask for help, speak to it, to its soul.
From this worldview—where every element is interwoven with story and responsibility—fish from the San Juan were once considered taboo. Consuming them risks offending the holy beings associated with water. Even raccoons, seen washing food in its banks, were regarded as healers. In Diné thought, everything is connected, and water is at the center of all. Traditions speak of the Water People and the Teehooltsodii—the Water Monster, the One Who Grabs in Deep Water—so powerful that he once flooded the world and sent people fleeing. He is set to dwell in the depths of the ocean to the east, also known as the Atlantic Ocean, Chief of the Water People, capable of both giving and taking life. Usually, children are taught to approach water as they would an elder—with reverence, respect, and the knowledge that it remembers.
Water also plays a ceremonial role. The Waterway ceremony was born from the mythological story in which a man visited the Water Monster in the depths of the ocean and begged him to release his drowned grandson. The Monster relented, and man and child were returned—alive but covered in green slime. The Frog, Turtle, Otter, Beaver, and Thunder People gathered to perform a bathing ritual to cleanse them of the slime that lingered. That ceremony remains part of the Diné today—used for those who have drowned, nearly drowned, or even dream of drowning. It is not superstition. It is memory.
The tragedy of the Gold King Mine Spill threatened more than physical wellbeing. It polluted waters that are inseparable from Diné belief systems and creation stories. The San Juan, traditionally a male river, and the Colorado, a female one, come together near Rainbow Bridge—a sacred convergence of water, mountain, and arch. In Diné cosmology, this is the place where clouds and moisture were first created. Contaminating these rivers meant more than violating the ecosystem. It was a desecration of balance. A permanent spiritual wound.
Ten years have passed since the San Juan ran yellow. Yet, the federal government’s relationship to sacred lands and water remains essentially unchanged. If anything, the lines between extraction and eradication have grown thinner. Under the Trump administration’s return to office, environmental regulations have been gutted under a banner of economic revitalization. Critical mineral production has been fast-tracked. Permitting processes once meant to ensure tribal consultation have been weakened, often reframed as “obstacles” to national progress.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the renewed effort to shrink protections around Bears Ears National Monument—a landscape co-managed by five tribal nations, rich in archeological and spiritual significance. The legal fights over Bear Ears are not just about land. They are about whose definition of sacred counts under federal law. And while mines are opened and leases signed, Indigenous concerns are once again treated as footnotes.
Across Indian Country, rivers continue to be diverted, drilled beneath, or poisoned without consent. In Alaska, tribal opposition to uranium mining has been dismissed as a regional inconvenience. In the Southwest, oil and gas development encroaches on ceremonial sites. Still, federal frameworks fail to account for what pollution means in a community where the lands are not property but a relative—where the desecration of a river is not simply a public health issue but spiritual trauma.
If a church had been flooded with acid, it would have made national headlines. If uranium dust coated the prayer mats of a mosque or a synagogue’s holy texts were soaked with mine waste, it would be called what it is: desecration. Likely even a hate crime. And yet, when the rivers that hold the same sacred meaning to Indigenous communities are poisoned, the legal system calls it a spill, a mistake, an externality. There are laws that protect buildings, relics, and institutions of worship—but no consistent recognition for rivers, mountains, or deserts as sacred spaces. Even laws like the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act have failed to protect Indigenous sacred sites because their definition of religion remains rooted in Western, building-bound traditions. It rarely offers enforceable remedies for the protection of Indigenous sacred sites because the sacred is not walled in—it lives in the water, sky, and soil. How do we quantify what is religious enough? Who decides which sanctity counts under the law? Shouldn’t a river that predates every cathedral be worthy of at least as much protection as the stone laid by human hands?
And yet, even in the face of repeating harms, the frameworks we rely on remain unequipped to name what’s truly been lost. The National Planning Framework for Disaster Response does not account for desecration. It doesn’t ask what happens if the site of origin of the clouds and moisture is poisoned. It does not measure trust, ritual, or grief offered to the rivers. When policy fails to recognize relationships, it cannot provide real protection. And when cleanup is treated as closure, it risks mistaking silence for healing.
A decade and the river looks clean again. But healing is not clarity. It is not transparency or turbidity levels, or the absence of a headline. Healing is trust restored, ceremony resumed, and a child being taught to offer pollen without fear. And we are not there yet. The water runs, but the story does not. In Diné, everything has life, including sources of harm. If we are to move forward, we cannot simply treat pollution as a technical failure. We must see the broken relationship—one that demands more than remediation. It demands recognition. Not just of what is damaged but of what is sacred. Only then can we begin to ask—not whether the river is clean, but whether it has forgiven us. Whether we’ve learned to listen to what it still carries.
Pico's Note: This essay marks ten years since the Gold King Mine Water Spill. It is part of an ongoing effort on The Pico Papers to explore the intersection of environmental harm, spiritual rupture, and federal neglect. Written with reverence for the land, the people, and the stories that persist– this piece honors what science cannot measure and what the law still forgets.
