Susan Flowers

Tyson Education, Outreach, and DEAI Coordinator
Co-Principal Investigator, Team Humans

Susan Flowers has spent 30 years working for Washington University, with most of those years at Tyson. This summer, as Co-Principal Investigator, Team Humans has uncovered hundreds of years of Tyson’s past.

“Suzanne [Loui] and I deeply understand that science is a human experience. We have to recognize how much humans have impacted our landscape, for better or for worse. At Tyson that human history is embodied in space just as much as it is embodied in human memory. I knew that we needed to dig into that and that we needed to verify the historical artifacts that we see all over Tyson. I had to find colleagues who are experts in history and archaeology and talk them into helping us out!

Natalie Mueller [Assistant Professor of Archaeology], Kelly Schmidt [Reparative Public Historian], and our team went in the field and we uncovered stone tools of Indigenous people who inhabited this property, which was a huge deal! We are learning so much more about Tyson’s past. And it turns out there is a legacy of enslavement through the land owners. Our property was also a military base and housed ammunition shipped across the world for use during World War II. How do we reconcile that this is a space once used as a means of harming other humans?

The reparative history work we are doing is hard but it is necessary. And it is far from done. That’s why I can never retire!”