Museum Sound Design – Audio Tour Treatment

Description 

This audio tour provides supporting historical context for the documentary images presented by Teresa Montoya for her To Listo exhibition. It is comprised of four different stops. The first stop explores the plight of the Ute Native American tribe surrounding Gold King Mine and Mayflower Mill in Silverton, Colorado. My goal is to make a connection between the actions of settler-colonialist American miners in the 19th century and its present day tourist industry to set the stage for understanding the Gold King Mine wastewater spill of 2015. The latter three stops are organized thematically: Stop two connects the plight of the Ute to the modern Navajo struggle, confronting how and why the attitudes exalting Silverton’s mining industry contributes to the invisibilization of this nation — especially in the environmental travesties contaminating their lands. Stop three would trace back historically to Navajo harvesting practices, and explore the ways in which contamination and cultural imperialism disrupted their agricultural methods and continuing way of life. The last stop would explore the future through Montoya's — What hidden gestures do Montoya’s photographs reveal that could help restore the dignity and political capital long-swindled from these Native nations?

Goals  

The Tour aims to historically contextualize signifiers and thematic structures embedded in Montoya’s photographs. Using her own words and exhibition guides as reference points, is there a narrative through-line unifying these photographs and the plights of these Native nations that can illuminate a concrete, equitable path forward?

Audience 

The exhibit itself defines the intended audience — it is documentarian in nature, reflective yet clearly seeking to illuminate the damages caused by environmental disasters onto historically Native lands. As an audio tour guide curator, I conceive of my job as one that clarifies Montoya’s intentions — to uncover and educate museum goers about the out-of-sight/out-of-mind Native American diaspora. These photographs intend to make accessible abstract concepts about land and property ownership while arguing in favor of justice for these Native tribes. My tour guide seeks to provide clarifying context.

Voices 

The voice you are hearing is my own, and my voice is sympathetic to the content of Montoya’s exhibition. Since I am inhabiting the role of both curator and tour guide simultaneously, my involved research is furthered to support her narrative as I understand it, citing her words directly but admittedly without her direct input. I would not want my research here to be considered a part of the fabric of her exhibition, but simply supporting historical context to help museum goers more concretely understand her work on its own terms. As such, I intend to let the voices I cite speak for themselves, yet frame them with a kind of objectivity in reference to Montoya’s photographs as portals into the real history revealed in these documented snapshots in time.

Map/Wayfinding 

Between figures 3-4, 9-10, and 13-14, and 17-18, respectively [TO BE UPLOADED SOON]

Script

Ravens and piñon jays bicker aloft elks bugling through the cavernous mountainscape. High whistle winds squeeze through the ghostly Arrastra Gulch. Snowmelt splashes rock like a woodblock percussion ensemble. These are the natural sounds of the San Juan mountainside, the region near the Gold King Mine (1887-1922) – and later Mayflower Mill (1930-1991) – of Silverton, Colorado.

For centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution, it was the rightful home of the Ute Native American people. The Northern Ute inhabiting this San Juan County region historically lived in tepees, movable homes made primarily from elk hide. They were an agricultural society that did not conceive of property ownership in the same way as American settler-colonialists. For example, to claim wealth in Ute culture referred to one having many friends, not property. 

The Brunot Agreement of 1873 was orchestrated coercively by the U.S. government to force the Ute people to sell their land under the threat of violence. Felix Brunot, the government's Chairman of the Board of Indian Commissioners forced territorial boundaries along the Uncompahgre River so that they could extract resources from the land, and pay the entire Ute community a relatively minor sum of $25,000 per year to relocate exclusively to the Muache and Capote territory immediately south. The Ute's relationship with the land would be forcibly changed by these expansionist conceptions of resource ownership, extraction, and the subsequent environmental degradation gradually sown into the landscape of San Juan County for generations.

Today, the Gold King Mine and Mayflower Mill are defunct, celebrated as National Historical Landmarks through the legacy of gold and silver extraction along the American frontier. This site is home to over 100,000 tourists every year. Terms of efficiency and economic production were incompatible to the Ute way of life, yet the mine's integrated tramlines and mining infrastructure provide the backbone for Silverton's modern tourist economy.

A visitor to the San Juan Mountains today sees a beautiful, sparse landscape colored red and yellow by mineral stains and acid mine discharge. To those unfamiliar with its history, this may seem natural alongside a quirky, historical mining town. However, a great part of this land's legacy is the removal of Ute people from their land, by the United States, to further the economic promise of the American frontier. The relationship that our modern society continues to have with this land will inform the kind of values we receive from it.

(NPR Radio Interview)

Lucas Brady Woods (Reporter): Michael Badback and other Ute who live at White Mesa would be happier if the mill wasn’t there at all.

Michael Badback: This is still virgin land. And we want it to remain that way. That’s how our ancestors used to walk on this land. And we want to walk on it like that and leave the legacy up to our grandchildren.

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Bibliography:

Animas River Mine Water Spill Briefing Report for the Radioactive and Hazardous Materials

Committee. 2015.

Arts Partnership. (2025). White Mesa Community of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe: Grandfather Song. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWXICBdPhZs 

Brunot Agreement | Colorado Encyclopedia, coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/brunot-agreement. 

Accessed 20 Mar. 2026

Northwestern Block Museum. (2026). Teresa Montoya’s Tó Listo (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill. Evanston, IL; Northwestern Block Museum of Art. 

Pettit J., . (1982). Utes. Colorado Springs, Colo: Century One Press.

Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. (2015, July 20). Bugling Elk. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzn0EovMhT4

San Juan County Historical Society - Silverton, CO. “Mayflower Gold Mill - Silverton,

Colorado.” YouTube, 19 Mar. 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-1Bwqc38iw. Accessed 20

Mar. 2026.

Woods, L. B. (2022, July 6). A U.S. uranium mill is near this tribe. A study may reveal if it poses a health risk. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/06/1109518597/native-tribe-utah-u-s-uranium-mill-affects-health 

YouTube. (2015). Amusing calls of a Common Raven - eigenartige Rufe eines Kolkraben. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQgPy79Oxx4&t=4s