Immersive Short Documentary Film

Directed by Kayla Briët
Produced by Sunny Dooley, Lovely Umayam & Adriel Luis
Starring Sunny Dooley, Tina Garnanez, Dr. Tommy Rock, Janene Yazzie & Bobby Leonard Mason

Premiering March 2025

The American Southwest is a sprawling, mysterious landscape that holds a dark legacy as the setting for the production of the first nuclear bomb.

But this place holds a deeper and more profound history – for millennia, Navajo and other Indigenous peoples have held this area sacred, and continue to fight for the survival of their land and culture despite decades of environmental and community trauma.

Here, storytellers, scholars, artists, and community organizers have dedicated their lives to a future that transcends the shadow of nuclear history. This is their story.

 

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. 

The Garnanez family at their home in Oak Spring, AZ. Tina Garnanez (second to left) is a filmmaker whose documentary Yellow Fever discusses the affect of uranium mining on her family.

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

Producers Sunny Dooley (right) and Lovely Umayam (left) at Sunny's home in Chi Chil Tah, NM. Photo by Carmille Garcia.

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.

OUR TIMELINE

2016
Lovely Umayam and Sunny Dooley meet at a fireside chat in New Mexico, where Sunny confronts a group of nuclear policy researchers with a question: Are you human?

2017
Sunny dreams up Ways of Knowing as a film and research project. Adriel Luis, Kayla Briet, and Carmille Garcia join the team.

2017 - 2018
Ways of Knowing film team travel across Navajoland to spend time with and film Sunny Dooley, Tina Garnanez, Tommy Rock, Bobby Mason, and Janene Yazzie. The team experience epic Southwestern rainstorms, learn tough lessons in a simulation of an underground mine, and take turns carrying the 16-Go Pro camera panoramic stereo rig, endearingly named “Fry Bread” 

2019
First draft of the film complete. Organized a series of work-in-progress screenings in various classrooms, theaters, and libraries in New Mexico and Arizona for community feedback.

2020 - 2023
Paused work due to Covid-19 pandemic.

Late 2023
With community permission, resumed film editing work. Frisly Soberanis joins the team.

2024
Formed the “Elemental Study Group” to facilitate honest conversation and knowledge exchange between nuclear security experts with Indigenous and local New Mexican nuclear scholars. Finished film; composers Kino Benally , Renata Yazzie, Alan Nakagawa, Chris Marianneti join the team.

2025
SXSW World Premiere

DIRECTOR'S NOTE – KAYLA Briët

Sunny Dooley reminds us that to know who you are, you have to know your past to keep from feeling lost. In Ways of Knowing, she details the meaning of the six sacred mountains, introducing us to another thread that ties Diné to this land. Her storytelling and cadence gives the world rhythm.

I feel immense gratitude for those we’ve met along the journey of Ways of Knowing, not only for sharing their world view and relationship with the land, but for teaching me more about celebrating the roots I have and owning them as part of my identity.

As a filmmaker, I feel an urgency to not only create space for this story to exist in the VR medium, but more importantly, to highlight pre-existing work by and for the Diné community surrounding nuclear issues. By uniting technology and nature, we can together define the future of this medium by inviting others to look inward and ask themselves “What do we want to see our world look like?”

-Kayla Briët 

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER'S NOTE – Sunny dooley

My Diné language is powerful! Speaking this language as my primary voice, I understand its transformative nature:  Hadeesdzih - to speak is to put in motion the energy to create change. The ending of this word, “zih” indicates, “still here/surviving with vitality/living.”  It is with this understanding, Ways of Knowing is presenting stories of Diné resilience. The 80-year legacy of uranium extraction has not been positive for the landscape, or for the five fingered people who live in these lands.  Yet, each story presented in this film is woven with the undeniable purpose to persevere. The powerful word, Náyííłzii, to heal, is the underlying force expressed by these powerful storytellers as they continue to live vibrant lives. To speak, hadeesdzih, is to activate the power to heal, náyííłzii.

-Sunny Dooley 

PRODUCER'S NOTE – lovely umayam

Ways of Knowing is not just a project, but a practice of unlearning and rediscovering my connection with the Earth and what it means to protect it. As a nuclear policy researcher, I was taught the notion of “security” and “safety” through the prism of geopolitics, which prioritizes the authority of governments and the identity of nation states above all else, erasing communities, families, our landmasses and waterways. This lens reduces relationships among people and nature into transaction and extraction. This is how I first learned about uranium mining in Navajoland in my studies – a marginal piece of history, overshadowed by the grander narrative  of the atomic bomb and the sacrifices that had to be made for the greater good to “end all wars.”

 Little did I know that my conversations with Sunny Dooley in 2016, which blossomed into a friendship and inspired Ways of Knowing, would profoundly reshape my worldview. It illuminated the ways in which the atom bomb need not be detonated to inflict unforgivable violence to people, animals, water, and land. This violence already began with the act of unearthing a sacred mineral from the ground, and will fester for millennia if left unacknowledged and unaddressed. 

Ways of Knowing humbled and challenged me to consider the tenets of care, reciprocity, and kinship in what I do. As a producer of Ways of Knowing, I learned about community care and due diligence, which is not taught or exercised in the nuclear policy field. I had to let go of expectations and demands from my peers – and at times break from common knowledge –  to understand, respect, and help achieve Sunny’s vision. It has been many years since the beginning of Ways of Knowing, and I am still constantly learning. It is an honor to be part of it, to call Sunny my friend, and to share this journey with you. 

-Lovely Umayam 

Experience

ELEMENTAL STUDY GROUP

RESEARCH + REFLECTIONS