On February 7, 2026, The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University opened Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill, an exhibition by artist and anthropologist Teresa Montoya (Diné). The evening featured a keynote address by Montoya, followed by a conversation with art historian Carl Fuldner. The program was introduced by exhibition curator Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Associate Professor of Global Health Studies Beatriz Oralia Reyes

Montoya’s project began as a photographic undertaking tracing the path of the 2015 Gold King Mine spill, which released a plume of contaminated wastewater from Colorado into the Navajo Nation. The exhibition Tó Łitso (Yellow Water) brings together photographs, water samples, and sound recordings to consider how environmental harm is seen, understood, and remembered over time.

When the spill occurred, media coverage focused on images of the river running a vivid mustard yellow, striking, immediate, and widely circulated. Montoya’s work takes up what comes after, the moment the water clears and public attention moves on. Clear water, she emphasized, does not mean safe water. Visibility is not a reliable measure of harm.

Drawing on her training as a sociocultural anthropologist, Montoya challenged the tendency to treat environmental disasters as discrete events with a clear beginning and end. The Gold King Mine spill, she argued, cannot be understood apart from longer histories of resource extraction on Indigenous lands. Contamination is not a singular incident but an ongoing condition shaped by policy, infrastructure, and unequal exposure.

A sustained focus of her talk was the concept of sampling. In environmental science, samples are collected to detect and quantify contamination. Photography, she suggested, operates in a similar way, a frame selected from a continuum of time and space, asked to stand in for something larger. But Montoya remained skeptical of both. Neither water samples nor photographs are neutral. Each depends on what is measurable, what is visible, and the frameworks that make harm legible. Both can obscure slower, less spectacular forms of damage that resist easy documentation.

Her practice proposes a different orientation. Rather than approaching water as something to be tested and quantified, Montoya draws on Diné knowledge systems that understand water as relational, a living system to which people are accountable. From this perspective, documentation shifts as well. Photography becomes not a tool for extracting evidence, but a practice of care, one that holds uncertainty and does not rush toward resolution.

In conversation with Fuldner, Montoya reflected on the demands of working across multiple roles at once, as a researcher, a Diné citizen, and an image-maker. Her photographs are shaped as much by Diné storytelling traditions and ethnographic practice as by the history of documentary photography. They ask viewers to look carefully, to question assumptions, and to stay with what does not resolve easily.

Ten years after the spill, Tó Łitso makes clear that its consequences have not ended. The exhibition, and Montoya’s keynote, invite us to reconsider what we see when we look at environmental harm, and what it means to bear witness over time.