MADISON – The president of the Navajo Nation called it genocide.
Hundreds of Navajos in the American Southwest fell victim to cancer and other serious diseases in the latter half of the 20th century after unknowingly exposing themselves to a deadly health risk of which many doctors and federal officials were well aware.
They were uranium miners, and their tragic story is told - often in their own words - in a book published in 2006 by the University of New Mexico Press.
The book's lead editor, Doug Brugge, will speak about the tragedy and its implications for the future in a free public lecture at 7:00 p.m. Wednesday, February 27, in 180 Science Hall, 550 N. Park St. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His topic: "Nuclear Power's Dirty Little Secret: Uranium Mining."
Brugge, an associate professor of pubic health and family medicine at Tufts University, and collaborators have documented the devastating health and social impacts of uranium mining and processing on Navajo miners and their families during the past 60 years.
An advocate of community-based participatory research, Brugge uses focus groups, oral histories, surveys, environmental sampling, and clinical assessment to study and address public health issues. Besides working with Navajo people, he has collaborated with neighborhoods in Boston and with other Native American communities in Oklahoma and New Mexico.
His UW-Madison talk, part of the Gaylord Nelson Lecture Series, honoring the late Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator, is sponsored by the Nelson Institute with support from the Holstrom-Kineke Environmental Studies Fund and additional support from the Ho-Chunk Nation. Environmental justice is the theme of this year's Nelson lecture series.
For more information about the lecture, contact Molly Schwebach, 265-6712, mayoung3@wisc.edu.