On May 14, the Master of Arts in Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine hosted artist and anthropologist Teresa Montoya (Diné, born 1984) for its 5th Annual Carlos Montezuma Native Health Lecture, co-sponsored by The Block and the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR). The lecture series is named for Carlos Montezuma, the first Native American graduate of Northwestern’s medical school.
In her talk, Thresholds: The Politics of Environmental Regulation and Exposure on the Navajo Nation, Montoya traced the enduring legacies of uranium contamination across Diné homelands, drawing on ethnographic work with communities downstream from the 1979 Church Rock uranium mill tailings spill. She examined how federal environmental standards can render chronic exposure both visible and dismissible, classifying the same contaminated water as “unsafe” or “safe” depending on shifting criteria. The talk connected closely to her current Block exhibition, Teresa Montoya’s Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill.
Block Museum Student Associate and graduating senior Symone Harris (SESP ’26), who is on the pre-med track, attended the lecture and shares her reflection below.
Teresa Montoya’s Montezuma Lecture focused on the effects of harmful environmental regulation and exposure on the Navajo Nation. Inspired by the inhumanity done to neighboring indigenous communities following the 2015 Gold King Mine rupture in Silverton, Colorado, Montoya discussed how “thresholds” of safe exposure to cancerous contaminants became arbitrary and caused the deaths of many indigenous individuals. Listeners were encouraged to question the safety standards set by public health officials and subvert limiting frameworks of Western scientific binaries that mislead and ultimately control indigenous populations. Further, in conversation with Montoya’s current Block Museum exhibition, Teresa Montoya’s Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill, she calls for museum-goers to also consider settler colonial determinants of health. These are the ongoing impacts that colonization continues to have on the healthspan of indigenous communities nationally.
This is a dynamic and archival approach to documenting health that has a future within public healthcare. Within Montoya’s work we are confronted by the imbalance of who is responsible for defining standards of health and the indigenous communities that experience the consequences of those standards. We can see the effects of inequitable care medically and politically. While our systems of care are flawed, humanizing interventions with the potential to amend structural inequities give promise to the future of public healthcare. As a pre-med Block Museum Student Associate, I am inspired by the potential that Montoya’s ethnographic photography has to invoke new ideas about how determinants of health and harm can be validated.
