Stories told through time

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Emily Yates-Doerr

By Selene Lawrence, CLA Student Writer - October 23, 2024

For the first time in her career, Professor Emily Yates-Doerr of the School of Language, Culture, and Society is bringing her research home. Yates-Doerr’s previous contributions to anthropology have been centered on her extensive ethnographic research in Guatemala, as detailed in her 2015 book The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala and in her upcoming book, Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm, scheduled for open access publication in November 2024. Yates-Doerr’s current research project examines her father’s hometown in South Dakota, where a 70-year old family tragedy still has lasting impacts on the community.

Yates-Doerr’s anthropological career began at Stanford University, where she earned two bachelor’s degrees: one in anthropology and one in human biology. These would be the pillars of her specialization in medical anthropology and food studies. The opportunities for fieldwork throughout Yates-Doerr’s undergraduate program helped her realize her path. “I have known always that I wanted to be a professor,” Yates-Doerr said. “I wouldn’t want to be a researcher without being in the classroom, and I wouldn’t want to be in the classroom without being able to go into research.” 

Yates-Doerr first visited Guatemala in 1999 to learn Spanish in an immersive environment. Her linguistic skills improved along with her understanding of cultural complexity, thus beginning the years-long relationship that brought her back to the country again and again. “It was really important to see the United States from outside the United States,” she said. “The exposure that I got in Guatemala about the history of U.S. warfare there was really instrumental for me.” At Stanford, Yates-Doerr completed a master's degree in Latin American studies, something that would be pivotal for the years to come. In 2008 and 2009, Yates-Doerr lived in Guatemala with support from both the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the U.S. Fulbright Program. The research she conducted during that time became the foundation of her doctorate research in anthropology at New York University, and set her up for research on maternal health in Guatemala, which she carried out as a postdoctoral fellow and then a faculty member at the University of Amsterdam.

Yates-Doerr’s current project in South Dakota marks the start of a new chapter in her career. The project, titled “Nuclear Stories: Fallout, Scientific Truths, and Half-Life of Memory,” centers around the people of Sully County, South Dakota. In January 1955, Yates-Doerr’s paternal grandmother, Minnie, passed away at 21 years of age from a blood-related cancer that had come to light only weeks before. Minnie was not the only one in the small county to meet that tragic fate. Other young residents of Agar developed cancer in 1954, and two of Minnie’s neighbors passed away from cancer in the spring of 1955. Struggling to account for the sudden tragedy, Minnie’s family recalled the previous summer when a strange red dust seemed to coat the town for three straight days. The narrative around Minnie’s death became linked to nuclear testing.

Similar to her previous studies, in “Nuclear Stories,” Yates-Doerr will focus on cultural and community narratives around health and wellness. This project consists of different components, including archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and soil sample analysis to test for the presence of nuclear fallout. Yates-Doerr first visited Sully County, South Dakota in October 2023 to prepare for her fieldwork, which began in July 2024. “It was very moving to go and to see this piece of my family’s past,” she recalled. She will be supported in her research by both the South Dakota Humanities Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. 

Yates-Doerr’s fieldwork will explore how narratives around the summer of 1954 have shaped the region’s cultural history and current beliefs. She plans to interview the residents of Minnie’s hometown of Agar, as well as those of neighboring communities, to understand how community members interpret nuclear history and explain past events to younger generations. For her archival research, Yates-Doerr will be drawing from the nuclear history archival collection at Oregon State University's libraries. The collection contains records from notable researchers including Linus Pauling and Barton C. Hacker, both of whose work was instrumental in proving the link between atomic testing and cancer.  

Soil sample analysis will be a key part of “Nuclear Stories,” and is scheduled to take place in September 2024. Even though scientists have verified that Cold War-era nuclear testing in Nevada has impacted radiation levels across the Midwest, Sully County has never before been examined for evidence of nuclear fallout. To complete this crucial element of her research, Yates-Doerr will be collaborating with fellow College of Liberal Arts professor Dr. Leah Minc and Oregon State alumnus Alex Nyers, owner of the archaeological consulting company Northwest Archaeometrics. The team will be analyzing soil samples at OSU’s radiation center.  

“One of the exciting parts [of Nuclear Stories] is to work with a team of archaeologists to collect soil core samples and then, at the radiation center, test for the presence of nuclear radiation and other chemical contaminants. Then we’ll bring the results back to the community [of Agar] to see how they respond to whatever it is we find.” Yates-Doerr reflected.

To Yates-Doerr, the success of “Nuclear Stories” does not hinge on discovering whether or not nuclear fallout caused Minnie’s illness, but instead on learning about the lives of people in her community, both then and now. Yates-Doerr notes that many people with firsthand experience with events that summer are gone, taking many of their memories with them. She hopes that her research will help to unearth and honor their stories about the past. “Every anthropological project more or less depends on having a personal connection with the work that you do,” Yates-Doerr said. “I’ve wanted to do this project for a long time.”