Chien-Shiung Wu, First Lady of Physics

She was one of the greatest experimental physicists of her era, publishing influential papers before she was even out of graduate school. She made multiple major contributions to the field during her career, and became known as the Chinese Marie Curie.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we have some very exciting news. Our trip
to Paris was a great success. We had an amazing time.
So we are planning another trip, this time to Rome
and Florence. It is from May fourteen. Folks from the
US will depart on I guess if you're coming from
somewhere else in the America's you would also depart on

(00:20):
the thirteenth. We will spend four nights in Rome and
three nights in Tuscany. Some highlights of what are in
the plans the Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's David, and
the Chinqui Chetta, among others. Plus you're gonna have some
free time to explore both Roman Tuscany on your own.
So to get more information about this trip, go to
defined Destinations dot com. That's D E F I N

(00:43):
E D destinations all one word dot com. Scroll down
to our trip right there on the home page and
it'll have all the information about the itinerary, the pricing,
how to reserve a spot, all of that. Welcome to
stuff you missed in history last the production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

(01:11):
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Today we
are going to talk about she and Chung Wu and
she was one of the greatest experimental physicists of her era.
She published papers that were influential before she was even
out of graduate school and made multiple major contributions to
the field during her career. In China, she became known
as the Chinese Marie Curry. There's been a little debate

(01:33):
about that nickname though, because in some folks minds, she
and Curie were equals, so it was really apt. But
to others whose work and her influence were beyond what
Marie Curry was doing, and that makes the name Chinese
Marie Curry a little maybe deprecating in some ways. Uh.
And we have a note on names. Here you will

(01:53):
see whose name both in the American style with her
family name last, and in the Chinese style with the
family name place first. Most English language sources in the
United States and Europe used Shan Jung Woo, and she
often styled her own name C. S. Woo. But she
was born in China, she grew up there, and when
you read about her family members and her friends in China,

(02:16):
it's pretty much always the other way around, so when
we were talking about her upbringing in China and her
Chinese family will have their family names first rather than last,
as well as hers, just so it's not weirdly inconsistent
in that first chapter of the episode. Woo Chia Chung
was born in Leohu, which is northeast of Shanghai, China,
on mat one of nineteen twelve, that is April twenty

(02:39):
nine on the lunar calendar. Her parents were Woo zong
ki and Fan Fuhua. She was the middle of their
three children, and she was their only daughter. Who's father
was an engineer with a military background, and he had
really progressive ideals. When he was in school, he had
read a lot of Western material about the principles of
equality and democracy. These publications are actually banned in China

(03:02):
at the time, but in reading them, he really wanted
to put these concepts that he found into practice. These
were turbulent years, though the Shinhai Revolution also called the
Chinese Revolution of nineteen eleven overthrew the Qing dynasty and
established China as a republic. The region where the Wu
family was living also had a bandit problem, and when
Wu Chang Shuing was still a baby, her father established

(03:26):
a militia to help deal with that problem. Once that
was handled, though, he started turning his attention to his
daughter's education. When and where they were living, it wasn't
common for girls to be educated, especially highly educated, but
Wuzani thought that educating girls would not only benefit the
girls themselves, but would also help dispel prejudice against women,

(03:47):
so he established the ming Do Women's Vocational School specifically
to provide an education for girls and young women in
the area. The first students at this school were relatives
and friends of the Wu family. It eventually went on
to have more than fifty female students from Leah and
neighboring towns. The girls learned practical skills that they were

(04:08):
likely to need in their later lives, including things like
sewing and gardening, along with academic subjects like language, classical
Chinese literature, science, and math. Wuchi and Seong, of course,
started her education at this school and was described as
a thoughtful, quiet child, but by the time she turned eleven,
she had really gotten to the end of the school's curriculum.

(04:29):
So in ninety three, she applied for admission into a
boarding school that was the Studio Women's Normal School Number two.
This school had two tracks. There was a regular high
school and a teacher training program. The teacher training program
was considered to be more prestigious, so that's the one
that we applied for, and she placed ninth among ten
thousand applicants to the school. Once she started attending, though,

(04:53):
she learned that the regular school program had more in
depth instruction in English, math, chemistry, and physics, so she
started borrowing textbooks from her classmates to teach herself these
subjects in her off hours. She graduated at the top
of her class in nineteen nine, and she basically completed
two different tracks at the school, one of them being

(05:14):
studied that she was doing on her own. Because Wu
had chosen the teacher training program, she normally would have
been expected to spend a year teaching after she graduated,
but she was a truly exceptional student. She was described
as just brilliant, but also not arrogant and extremely devoted
to her studies. So instead of teaching, she was recommended

(05:34):
as a student at the National Central University which is
now Southeast University in Nanjing, China. She started out as
a math major, but in nineteen thirty, she switched to physics.
She was partially inspired by a biography of Marie Cury
that she had read as a team. But aside from that,
there was a lot of groundbreaking work happening in physics
at the time. Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus in

(05:57):
nineteen eleven, with Neil's Boors model of the atom following.
A few years later. Einstein published his theory of general
relativity in nineteen sixteen. These and other discoveries were still
very new, and physics just seemed like an exciting, dynamic,
and rapidly evolving field, so that is where Wu wanted
to be. We studied at the university until nineteen thirty four,

(06:19):
and during these years she was also called on by
her classmates to act as a leader during student demonstrations.
The social, political, and military climate of China was still
really turbulent, especially in the context of escalating tensions between
China and Japan. Japan invaded Manchuria on September eighteenth of
nineteen thirty one while we were still a student at

(06:40):
the university, and that led to students in China demanding
that the nation declare war on Japan. Wood did not
really think of herself as an activist or a revolutionary.
Her classmates looked to her for leadership because several factors
made it seem less likely that she'd be punished or
penalized for what she was doing. She was a truly

(07:00):
exceptional student, and people thought that the university was going
to be less likely to penalize one of its best
and brightest for their political involvement. Her father's own background
in political views also made it seem like her family
might be more supportive of her actions than other students
families might. She was also very careful about how she
planned these demonstrations, one of which was a peaceful sit

(07:22):
in outside the presidential Palace. She intentionally chose locations where
they were less likely to encounter police or the press.
She also liked to choose dates that were just before holidays,
reasoning that people would be eager to get home and
so the protest would break up before things got too
heated or do too much attention from law enforcement or
the university. She really seems to have been trying to

(07:44):
strike a balance between the expectations of her fellow students
on her and her more pragmatic side. After graduating, in
nineteen thirty four. She spent some time as a teaching
assistant at a university before becoming a research assistant at
Academia Seneca, which is a research academy in Taiwan. Her
mentor there was another woman, goujing Wai, who had returned

(08:04):
to China after earning her PhD in the United States,
and she strongly encouraged Wou to pursue a similar course
for herself. So in August of nine thirty six, Wo
left China for the United States. Since there was not
any passenger air service between China and the US yet,
she and a friend planned to travel by boat, but
they ran into a problem. They only had enough money

(08:25):
to pay a second class fair, but the second class
cabins were all sold out. Their only option was the
one remaining first class cabin, which they really couldn't afford.
Woo couldn't wait for a later sailing, so she negotiated
for the two of them to be allowed to share
the first class cabin while paying only the second class fair,
as long as they only ate in the second class

(08:47):
dining room, and this was fine with them. The first
class cabin required formal dress for dinner, which they didn't
really want to do. Woo dressed very elegantly her whole life,
but dressing up for dinner every night was just too much.
On this boat trip, Yeah, they were not. They were like,
that's it, that's fine, it's fine if we do that.
When we got to the US, though, things didn't go
exactly as she had planned before leaving, and we will

(09:08):
get to why after a sponsor break. When she left China,
she planned to pursue a pH d at the University
of Michigan and then to go back to China once
she had finished her studies. She had secured financial support
from the university, as well as some help from an

(09:28):
uncle to make this happen, but first she planned to
spend a week visiting a former classmate who lived in
San Francisco. The classmate's husband worked at the University of
California at Berkeley, so while she was in San Francisco,
Wo got a tour of the campus, including the Chinese
Students Association. One of the students there heard about her
plans to study physics and introduced her to Luke Yuan,

(09:50):
who was also from China and was studying physics at Berkeley.
You once showed Wu through the university's physics research facilities,
and Wu was very impressed. Berkeley had a radiation lab
and a cyclotron and other new, cutting edge facilities that
would offer a just incredible opportunity for research. Berkeley's physics
faculty was also extremely impressive and included theoretical physicist Jay

(10:14):
Robert Oppenheimer, as well as Ernest Lawrence, who would go
on to be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in nine.
There was also Emilio Sega, who would later be awarded
a Nobel Prize and had also studied under Enrico Fermi.
Ernest Lawrence was extremely impressed with Wu, so much so
that he encouraged her to stay at Berkeley rather than
going on to Michigan as planned, and this was definitely

(10:37):
a special case. Berkeley's academic calendar was ahead of Michigan's
and classes had already been going on for a couple
of weeks, but even so Wu decided that she would stay.
In addition to her opinion of the facilities and the faculty,
Will also realized that Berkeley was much more liberal than
Michigan was likely to be, and she thought she might
face less discrimination there. The university for her a comparable

(11:01):
financial assistance package to the one that she'd had in Michigan.
While she was at u C. Berkeley, who was described
as kind, brilliant, thoughtful, and just really devoted to her studies,
she immersed herself in the English language and American culture,
but she also stuck to parts of her Chinese roots.
She mostly ate Chinese food. She made arrangements with a

(11:21):
local Chinese restaurant for her and three other students to
eat there for twenty five cents a meal apiece. As
part of this deal, they weren't ordering their own food,
they were being served whatever the restaurant had extra of
that day, plus as much rice as they wanted. She
also mainly wore cepaw, which is a fitted high necked
gown that was introduced in Shanghai in the nineties. That's

(11:43):
also called h hansm. We made her own when she
couldn't get them from China. For her entire academic career
to this point, we had really focused on her studies,
refusing to allow herself to be distracted by romantic relationships,
and that changed at Berkeley. She dated a few and
fairly steadily, eventually becoming more serious about Lukuan, who she

(12:04):
had met during that earlier tour. By nine they were exclusive,
although by that point he had transferred to another university
because he had been receiving less financial aid than his peers,
something that he attributed to discrimination. During her pH d work,
Wo developed a reputation for just relentless accuracy and precision,

(12:24):
something that she put into play for the entirety of
her career and experimental physics. If she needed different materials
to get more precise results, she used to them, and
if she needed different or better equipment to get consistent
enough measurements to answer the question she was trying to answer,
she got them, sometimes figuring out for herself what specifically
needed to be adjusted to get a fine enough level

(12:45):
of accuracy. She proved herself to be truly masterful at
designing the right experiment to test a particular theory and
to get results that weren't muddied by inaccuracy or unclear data.
Whose PhD research focused on the products of uranium fission,
and she identified to xenon isotopes that were part of
the process in uranium decay. She finished her PhD in

(13:07):
nineteen forty. Her published thesis was regarded as way ahead
of other PhD work. As a side note, previous podcast
subject Luis Alvarez was at Berkeley for postdoctoral work while
she was there, and he was on her thesis defense committee.
Although she had planned to return to China after finishing
her pH d work, when the time came, she couldn't.

(13:28):
The Second Sino Japanese War had started in July of
nineteen thirty seven, and that made returning home just impossible.
By the time she finished her PhD, a lot of
Europe was also at war with Germany, so she stayed
in Berkeley for a while, but the university wouldn't offer
her a faculty position. At the time, there were not
any women on the physics faculty in the top twenty

(13:49):
research universities in the United States, and in general, universities
were reluctant to hire women, as well as racial, ethnic,
or religious minorities wose Chinese nationality was a particular issue
with this. The United States had banned immigration from China
completely in the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty two,
and by nineteen forty, when she was graduating with her PhD,

(14:11):
there were still strict quotas on immigration from China, with
Chinese immigrants also banned from becoming US citizens. Eventually, though
she was hired at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Lukewan
had finished a PhD from the California Institute of Technology
and was offered a job at r c A near Princeton,
New Jersey. They married on May ninety two and moved east.

(14:36):
Who was not really happy at Smith though she really
missed Berkeley and her friends and the California weather. There's
a lot of snow on the ground in Massachusetts right now,
is a recording this, So I understand that she also
missed doing research. This was a teaching position and not
a research position, and she missed her husband. Northampton and
Princeton are just hours apart by car. Eventually, Ernest Lawrence

(15:00):
was at this point a Nobel laureate, wrote letters of
recommendation to several universities on her behalf, and after that
she was offered multiple jobs, including one at Princeton, which
she took so that she could join her husband. She
was the first female physics instructor at Princeton. In ninety four,
Wu became part of the Manhattan Project at the Columbia
University Substitute Alloy Materials lab. Her work there was primarily

(15:23):
related to the development of radiation detectors, as well as
the separation of uranium two thirty five and to thirty
eight from uranium, or in other words, enriching uranium into
a usable fuel. This and her earlier work on nuclear
fission folded into the development of the atomic bomb. Wood
didn't talk much about how she felt about this aspect

(15:44):
of her work. I mean, scientists who were part of
the Manhattan Project and the development of the bomb all
had their own opinions and feelings on this. On the
one hand, having grown up in China, she was acutely
aware of Japan's wartime atrocities towards China and the need
to bring World War Two to a swift end. On
the other hand, she also thought the power of the
atomic bomb was just too immensely destructive, and she hoped

(16:07):
that one day the world could live together peacefully rather
than needing that kind of weaponry. During these same years,
WU helped troubleshoot an issue with the nuclear reactor at
the Hanford site in Washington, which was part of the
Manhattan Project as well. After being shut down, it took
the reactor much longer than expected to restart, and it
was not clear why this was happening. Wu helped pinpoint

(16:30):
the problem as zenon one thirty five, which was one
of the fission products of the reactor's uranium, and that
was poisoning the process. That circled back to some of
her pH d work. In March of ninety four, We
started working as a senior scientist at Columbia University. This
made her the first woman to hold a tenured faculty
position in Columbia's physics department. This was also her return

(16:52):
to academic research after spending time teaching at Smith and Princeton.
She started studying beta decay, becoming one of the world's
leading authorities on that subject, including experimentally proving Enrico Fermi's
beita decay theories. In addition to her research work, she
also taught, and she was described as having extremely high
expectations of her students. She was also described as having

(17:15):
a deeply loving and sweet relationship with her husband, one
that did not follow the stereotypes of the time. Wu
was extremely dedicated to her career and she was sometimes
in the lab at all hours, so her husband did
a lot of the cooking and housework, although Woo would
cook if she had time or if they were having company. Yeah,
they were both physicists, both working as physicists in their careers,

(17:39):
and uh, he was maybe even doing more of the
share of the household labor than she was. On February fifteenth, seven,
they had a son, who they named Vincent, who's labor
was really long and difficult, and she finally delivered via
C section. In the process of all this, she lost
a lot of blood and had to stay in the
hospital for three weeks after. While she was there, Albert

(18:01):
Einstein visited her. His sister was actually being treated in
the same hospital. Wu and her husband were still hoping
to return to China someday, but after the Communist Party
came to power in nineteen nine, they decided to stay
in the US. They did not want their son to
be raised in a communist country, and soon the Korean
War and increasing anti communist sentiment in the US made

(18:23):
it impossible to even visit China. At some points, they
hadn't even been able to send or receive mail from home.
During the Sino Japanese War, for example, mail service was
completely disrupted at this point, they had both come to
the US to go to graduate school, and neither had
been able to go back. By the nineteen fifties, though,
they both needed to travel for their jobs, and they

(18:44):
were having difficulty getting the necessary visas. Because of all
the governmental changes and upheaval that China had gone through,
their passports were no longer recognized as valid, so they
went through a long immigration process. By this point, Chinese
people could become US citizens, but there were still really
tight quotas in place. We was naturalized as a US
citizen in nineteen fifty four. Her most famous accomplishment was

(19:07):
still to come, though, and we'll talk more about that.
After we first paused for a little sponsor break. In
nineteen fifty six, to scientists both born in China and
working in the US came to chen Chung Wu for help.
They were named Sung Down Lee and chen Ning Yang.

(19:29):
They had noticed that no one had tested whether parody
was conserved in beta decay, and they thought that it
might not be. They wanted Wu to design an experiment
to prove whether or not it was okay. So beta
decay is a type of radioactive decay, which is when
one of the sub atomic particles in an Adams nucleus
breaks down, specifically, in beta decay, a neutron decays into

(19:51):
a proton, an electron, and an anti neutrino, or a
proton decays into a neutron, a positron, and a neutrino.
The electrons and positrons that are part of this are
known as beta particles, and this type of decay is
possible thanks to the weak nuclear force, which is one
of the four fundamental forces in physics and parity in

(20:12):
an extremely basic sense, is about the mathematical depiction of
a sub atomic system as in a graph. Essentially, the
universe does not really care whether one of these systems
is spacing to the left or to the right. Everything
going on in that system should still work the same way,
and there should be no detectable difference in the graphs

(20:33):
representing the left hand in the right hand version. The
graph of each should just be a mirror image of
the other. If you're thinking about this and it's making
your mind hurt a little, please don't feel bad. Uh.
Folks have probably heard about things like the law of
conservation of mass and the law of conservation of energy. Basically,
the idea that you cannot create or destroy mass or

(20:54):
energy by normal chemical or physical means. Similarly, the conservation
of parity was a fundamental understanding and quantum mechanics, just
like the laws of conservation of mass and energy, are
an accepted and fundamental part of basic physics. So the
idea that maybe parody wasn't conserved in beta decay was
potentially earth shattering. It was also hotly discussed among physicists,

(21:18):
with some of them placing bets that nobody would ever
prove that parity was not conserved. One even said that
he would eat his hat if anyone ever did. Wu
was so eager to study this question that she canceled
a vacation with her husband to work on the project.
At the time, the National Bureau of Standards in Washington

(21:39):
was doing some work related to the polarization of nuclear systems,
and Wu teamed up with the NBS to study beta
decay using radioactive cobalt sixty. In this experiment, they cooled
the cobalt down to an extremely cold temperature, as in
barely above absolute zero, so that the atoms were moving
as slowly as possible, and then they polarized to those

(22:00):
atoms so that all of their nuclei were spinning in
the same direction. Then they observed which way the beta
particles went when they were admitted from the nuclei of
the cobalt atoms. If the beta particles had symmetrical distribution,
regardless of the polarity, parody was conserved. It turned out
that they didn't. Most of the beta particles went in

(22:20):
the opposite direction of the nuclear spin, and that means
if you graph these results, you would see an obvious
difference between the experiment and its mirror image. In other words,
parody was not conserved. I'm gonna say again, if your
mind still hurts my mind as too, it's okay. Louse
experiment was the first to prove that parody was not

(22:41):
conserved during beta decay, and she did this definitively. I mean,
it was an unquestionable result. At the same time, though,
there were people who were absolutely sure that parody was
always conserved, and they were convinced that she had just
made an error. Soon afterward, though, other experiments took place
and they had the same results. We published a paper

(23:01):
called Experimental Test of parity conservation in Beta decay in
nineteen fifty seven, and that described what came to be
known as the Wu experiment, and this was a huge development.
It was regarded as the decade's biggest achievement in the
world of physics. Lee and Yang were awarded the nineteen
fifty seven Nobel Prize in Physics as a consequence. Sometimes

(23:24):
this comes up as an instance of men getting credit
for women's work undeservedly, but that's not exactly what happened.
Wu created the first experiment that proved definitively Lee and
Yang's theoretical work. That experiment and the theory were two
different parts of the same discovery. And there were also
some frustrations around the paper that she wrote. We wrote

(23:46):
it herself without input from the four scientists of the
National Bureau of Standards who had been part of this work.
They had all thought they were equal partners with her
in this experiment, but when Wu wrote the paper herself
without consulting them, she they real eyes that she had
been considering them as sort of her support team with
her as the lead. That said, there were absolutely people

(24:06):
who believed that Wu should have been included in that
nineteen fifty seven Nobel Prize for Physics, including Jay Robert Oppenheimer,
who said in a speech that Woo, Lee, and Yang
should have all been recognized rather than just Lie and Yang. Yeah,
they were all doing different but related work about the
same question. It was not that Woo did something that

(24:28):
Lie and Yang claimed that they had done, like, which
is sort of how it's presented sometimes in articles on
the internet about times that women did work that man
got credit for. Right. They had figured this out, but
they needed proof, and she was like the mechanism that
provided the proof, right, right. So yeah, there's totally an
argument about how the Nobel could have included all three

(24:50):
of them, but they like, they were doing two different
aspects of the same thing. Wu continued on with their
teaching and her experimental work after this, including becoming a
full professor or at Columbia. She applied her nuclear physics
research to the study of sickle cell anemia at the
atomic level, and she contributed to medical understanding of how
that condition works in nineteen fifty eight. In nineteen sixty two,

(25:12):
she and her husband made their first trip back to Asia,
visiting Taiwan to deliver lectures, attend receptions, except awards, and
just tour the region. By this point, both Wu's parents
and her elder brother had all died. She had never
seen them again after leaving for graduate school, and she
had not been able to attend their funerals. In nineteen

(25:32):
sixty six, her book Beta Decay was published, which she
co authored with Stephen Masnowski of u c l A.
This continues to be a fundamental text on that subject.
As US diplomatic relationships with China improved, Wu made her
first of several visits back there. In nineteen seventy three.
She learned that her parents tombs had been desecrated during

(25:53):
the Cultural Revolution, something that she received an official apology for.
In nineteen seventy five, who became the first woman to
serve as President of the American Physical Society. Although she
was still doing research and teaching, she started spending more
time working on social issues in the seventies as well,
specifically on educational opportunities for women and on getting women

(26:16):
into physics and other scientific fields. She was very critical
of the fact that women still had so many fewer
educational opportunities in a lot of the world than men did,
and at one point she said quote, the world would
be a happier and safer place to live if we
had more women in science. She had applied this focus
to her own work as well. She always insisted on

(26:36):
equal pay with her male colleagues, and she corrected people
when they called her by her husband's name. In ninety eight,
who became the first person to be awarded the Wolf
Prize in Physics, which is an international award by the
Wolf Foundation in Israel. During her career, she was also
awarded the National Medal of Science, the Comstock Prize, and
many many other awards. She became the first woman to

(26:59):
be a at an honorary doctorate from Princeton University. She
was also the first Chinese American person in the United
States National Academy of Science. During her career, she had
also worked at some of the most notable research facilities
in Europe and Asia, including it CERN. In night, Wu
made a trip to China for what would have been
her father's one hundredth birthday, and while there she established

(27:21):
a memorial foundation to help fund scholarships and the library.
She also campaigned for human rights and improved opportunities for
girls in China. Chin Chung Wu died on February sixteenth,
nine seven, at the age of eighty four at her request.
Her cremated remains were scattered at the school that her
father had founded. Today, asteroid two seven five to Woo

(27:43):
Chien Shung is named after her. The citation at the
I A U Minor Planet Center reads quote named in
honor of Woo Chiang Shun. Born in China and currently
pupin Professor Emerita at Columbia University. She is renowned for
her work in nuclear physics, particularly in the experimental study
of the beta decay of radioactive atomic nuclei. The precision

(28:05):
and elegance of her experiments have earned her the title
of greatest living woman physicist with co workers, she made
her most famous contribution in ninety six with a critical
experiment on polarized cobalt sixty beta decay. The result of
this work, which substantiated the theory of Lee and Yang,
shocked the world of physics and overthrew the concept of

(28:25):
parody conservation in weak interactions. There's also a Chance Hung
Wu Memorial Hall at her alma mater in Southeast University,
and in she was inducted into the American National Women's
Hall of Fame. In the words of Sun Dao Le
Quote c. S. Wu was one of the giants of
physics in the field of beta decay. She had no equal.

(28:47):
I find her to be really incredible. Yeah, she's fantastic. Um,
do you have a little bit of listener mail to
go with this? I do. This is from Stacy and Stacy.
He says, Happy Thanksgiving, Holly and Tracy. This came in
on Thanksgiving Day. I wanted to share how excited I

(29:07):
was to see your episodes on the occupation of Alcatraz
pop up on my feed. I worked as a teacher
at a tribal school in the Pacific Northwest for a year,
and several of my colleagues from our culture department traveled
to Alcatraz with our school canoe to participate in a
paddle to Alcatraz to commemorate the anniversary. There was a
pow wow and they got as many of the original
occupiers as they could manage to get there. Once on Alcatraz,

(29:29):
they gathered at the prison and sang a blessing song.
The video is so deeply moving. The tribes in the
Puget Sound area do a major canoe paddle in the
Sound every summer, and I believe some of the tribes
around the Bay area want to start something similar in
the future. It was so amazing to see the photos
and stories my colleagues brought back from that weekend. Another

(29:49):
movement that definitely helped to fuel the occupation was the
fishing wars here in the Pacific Northwest, which started early
mid sixties. It was a movement of tribes in the
area to finally access their treaty right. It's to fish,
and they're accustomed places. There's a member of the tribe
that I worked with who tells a powerful story about
fishing with her family when she was four or five
and having to be quickly taken away from the river

(30:10):
by her grandma who tried to shield her eyes because
the game wardens were there and arresting everyone who was fishing,
her parents included. The area tribes won a landmark case
in nineteen seventy four that finally granted them their treaty
fishing rights. Uh. Stacy's email continues on on a more
personal note, So I'm just gonna end what we're reading
today there. Thank you so much, Stacy for this note. Um.

(30:31):
I wanted to read it for a couple of reasons. One,
I'm glad that somebody wrote in with a connection to
some of the folks that went out to Alcatraz for
the anniversary this year. And also, uh, if all goes
according to plan, the Fishing Wars and the Fishing Movement
UM is going to be part of an episode after

(30:51):
the first of the year. So fingers crossed that my
plan does come to fruition UM folks will get to
hear about that a little later on. So you so much, Stacy.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast where History podcasts at I heart
radio dot com. That's a new email address that we
have started getting some email from, So thanks, folks for

(31:12):
updating your your address books if we're in there. We
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(31:34):
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