Oral History | Uranium Memories Project
October 29, 2025

INTERVIEWER
Megan Vickery

INTERVIEWEE
Teracita Keyanna

Megan Vickery 00:00
Hi. My name is Megan Vickery. We are at the Moab Museum. It is October 29, 2025 and we’re recording this oral history with the Moab Museum’s Uranium Memories Project. I’m here with Teracita Keyanna. You want to introduce yourself?

Teracita Keyanna 00:21
Yes, my name is Terescita Keyanna. I come from the Red Water Pond Road community. I serve on the Red Water Pond Road Community Association Executive Committee, and I’ve been doing advocacy work for, I think, 20 plus years now.

Megan Vickery 00:39
Great, wonderful. Let’s start with when and where you were born?

Teracita Keyanna 00:46
I was born in Gallup, New Mexico. My family resided in the Red Water Pond Road community, and so I was born and raised basically in that area, and it was in 1981 and so I saw like the very, very ending of the mining area [era?] and how they were closing up just from the front door, because our home actually sat across the way from what is now called the Quivira Mine site, but it was owned by Kerr-McGee back then, and so I used to see as a kid the trucks traveling back and forth, and different type of vehicles, like just regular trucks to tractor trailers, cars. So I would see the movement, but I didn’t know what was going on.

Megan Vickery 01:48
Yeah. Yeah, great. Do you have any other memories or stories of being young and growing up in that area?

Teracita Keyanna 01:57
Yeah, so a lot of a lot of my stories are not going to be from like the actual mining industry, but seeing it from afar and not actually knowing what was going on. Because my grandmother, she had sheep, and we would follow the sheep, so that way we knew that they were safe and we knew where they were. And so sometimes we would let them go out and graze on their own. And so those were the times when we had to actually go look for them. And a lot of times they would actually be on the mine site. Because… I don’t know why. I really don’t know why they were in the area, but I think it’s a lot of the greenery, the foliage in those areas, is what attracted a lot of the animals. And back then, when I was a kid, there was no fencing or anything like that. And so there was nothing really to stop us from just walking right into those mining areas and not knowing. And so sometimes you would be following the sheep throughout the day, and sometimes you didn’t carry water or anything like that, because you were pretty close to home. But if you did get thirsty or anything like that, then sometimes, if it had rained, you would see puddles of water on the sandstone, and so you would just drink it, because it’s pretty clean. There’s nothing out there. And that’s kind of like that. The power of knowledge is basically what would have helped a lot back then, but we didn’t know. We didn’t know that there was any type of danger like uranium in that area. So that was something that my generation didn’t get to know of. So that was probably the biggest impact there.

Megan Vickery 03:54
Yeah, were there – there were no signs or markings about it being a mine?

Teracita Keyanna 03:57
No. There was no signs. There was no fencing. You just walk right in. And so that was one of the takeaways for us, is that, you know, there was actually no communication at all, especially for my generation, we didn’t, we didn’t realize the dangers, and those dangers were not told to our aunts or uncles or parents, and so they didn’t know. And so it was, it’s kind of hard to put blame on yourself or put blame on your family, even though they worked in those mines or they worked near them, you know, they didn’t know the dangers as well.

Megan Vickery 03:59
Yeah, did you you said your grandmother grazed sheep?

Teracita Keyanna 04:46
Yeah.

Megan Vickery 04:46
Did you ever notice any impacts on the sheep?

Teracita Keyanna 04:51
We didn’t notice any impacts until maybe about, I would say about 25 years ago? Maybe less? But I’m thinking it somewhere in the 20 years mark that we had a traditional ceremony coming up, and my aunt was butchering the sheep so that she could feed the medicine man and the people who came to help and assist with the ceremony and the contents of the sheep after butchering was like a tinted yellow, almost like the legal pad that you have there in the corner. And it was, it was like a bright yellow. And so you know how animals have that covering of fat, that little protection around their body? We utilize that fat as well for feeding, and so we would hold that fat up and let it dry, but that entire piece of fat was like somebody had just put a highlighter to it and colored it, because it was just it was so yellow. And then we looked further in, into the contents, and it was as if somebody decided to just put yellow dye into the sheep. Because even the meat kind of had this yellowish tint, the internal organs had a yellowish tint. And at that time, we were in connection and had this partnership with the Southwest Research Information Center, and we called one of our colleagues and allies from there. And they said, “Whatever you can cut and bag, do it and put it in the fridge as fast as you can.” And we did, we did that, and they found out that the sheep had uranium contents in in the meat, in the internal organs. I don’t remember if there was any cancer. We did feel huge tumors here and there inside some of the internal organs. And so that’s when we found out that we really couldn’t consume our livestock any longer, and we weren’t totally sure where it came into their to their body. Was it from the vegetation? Was it from the water, or was it just strictly from just being near these, these uranium mines and in the mill area.