4/13/24

The Dine’ and Uranium

The presenters, Omie Baldwin and Cathy Middlecamp, will tell not one but two stories, as the title suggests. But these quickly converge, because uranium ore was found on the land of the Dine’ in the Four Corners Area of the United States. Omie Baldwin will speak about the Navajo People’s cultural history, where and how they lived, past and present, how they needed work, and the mining facilities nearby in which they found work. Cathy Middlecamp will talk about three reasons why we took uranium out of the ground, what happened when we did, and some more general stuff about radioactivity and “radiation.”

Who are these people and what are the stories of their land? What is uranium and what are the stories of uranium miners in the past? What new chapters in the story are being written today? We promise more questions than answers together with a lively romp through stories of our (slightly) radioactive planet.

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This presentation is co-sponsored with Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR)

Presenter: Omie Baldwin

Omie Baldwin is retired as the Student Service emerita in the University Counseling and consultation Service/University Health Services at UW-Madison. As a counselor and as an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, she and her colleague, Cathy Middlecamp, designed and taught the course “Uranium and American Indians. The first chemistry course, to meet the campus wide ethnic studies requirement. She is past board member of the Farley Center, She served a board member and board chair of the Farley Center for seven years.

Presenter: Cathy Middlecamp

Cathy Middlecamp is professor emerita in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and an affiliate of the Department of Chemistry. From 2015 to 2020, she also served as the director for education and research at the Office of Sustainability. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of science, people, and the planet. For her teaching and work bringing science to the general public, she has received awards at the local, state, and national levels. As a professor, she sought to engage students in learning chemistry in real-world contexts, including chemistry that related to radioactive substances. https://nelson.wisc.edu/staff/middlecamp-cathy/