JUNETEENTH SHOWS HOW FAR WE ARE FROM EQUITY page 4
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COUGAR WRESTLER WINS ALL-AMERICAN SCHOLAR AWARD page 7
vol. 74 no. 32
The Student Voice Since 1960
Veterans call for more women-specific resources NICOLE BOYD copy editor
Women veterans are more likely to experience unique challenges such as infertility and military sexual trauma, but often have difficulty finding resources specifically for them. Yasin Jackson, an Army veteran and program coordinator for Veterans Upward Bound, said one of the biggest resources women veterans need is infertility treatments, but that it seems to be a conversation no one other than female veterans wants to have. “People talk about sexual trauma and PTSD, and those things are very important, but they are not the biggest issue among female veterans: it’s actually infertility. All the things that we’re exposed to, even the symptomless soldier that’s doing admin work, is still exposed to lots of other contaminants just in training. Those like myself, or a CBRN officer, stands for Chemical Biological Radioactive Nuclear officer, just [in] the training you’re exposed to gases and chemicals that would make your average person infertile,” Jackson said. Jackson said infertility services are very limited for women veterans, and it is difficult to get treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs. “The system is set up to where it’s nearly impossible to prove it, but the numbers of infertility among women veterans make it so that there is no other reason for all of us to be infertile or have infertility issues other than our service,” Jackson said. Amanda Depew, an Air Force veteran and graduate student in social work from Centralia, Illinois, said the VA doesn’t offer a lot of the specific health care that women need, such as mam-
mograms. While she said some offer women’s clinics, those clinics usually cannot be found in rural areas. “As we continue to farm out processes and procedures that can easily be done in the VA, that’s costing money. The VA wants to privatize their health care anyway … but it is a big deal when we don’t know anywhere else to go, when VA health care is our only insurance,” Depew said. Depew said in regard to military sexual trauma, the Depart-
ment of Defense only acknowledged the definition of military sexual assault within the last 10 years, and does not acknowledge sexual harassment as sexual trauma, whereas the VA does. Depew also said generally, the higher the rank, the less women will be in that rank, but higher-ranking positions have the authority to carry out the punishment for offenses such as sexual assault. While the military has judge advocate generals, who have law degrees and can
determine whether or not someone has committed an offense and what the punishment should be, commanders can determine whether or not to administer that punishment. “Let’s say she actually has the gall to report [an assault] … does the rape testing if that’s required or if necessary, and then it starts going through the process of, ‘Are we going to punish this person for assaulting this other person?’ The JAG will follow the law and [say], ‘Yes, this per-
son should be punished and this is what the regulations say the punishment should be for that.’ Now the commander can decide whether or not to actually punish said person,” Depew said. “So he can go against what someone with a law degree has said should be done. The commander has the command authority to say, ‘Yes, let’s punish this person,’ or, ‘No,’ and there’ll be some sort of crazy stupid stipulation as to why not.” see VETERANS on page 3
Anthropology group finishes multiple year long excavation in Missouri KRISTINA JOHNSON sports editor
Almost three years ago anthropology Assistant Professor Corey Ragsdale and a team of his students began the process of excavating a buried cemetery from the 1850s — which they finished in early June. In 2018, Ragsdale said a retired teacher from a Missouri school district reached out to SIUE’s anthropology department for help in identifying and preserving the remains of a local cemetery, which had been vandalized and buried with greenery. “To contract outside [help] can be really expensive and the school district didn’t really have any money,” Ragsdale said. “I said we can do all these things and let me bring some students out there for a day and we’ll check it out.” Each year, Ragsdale said his mortuary archaeology class gets in-the-field experience with uncovering potential archaeo-
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logical items — some of which are artificial with plastic skeletons and others can be human remains. “In mortuary archeology we do a lot of work with cemeteries — finding cemeteries, mapping and documenting, preserving and in some cases even recovering human remains when they are in danger or when they need to be removed,” Ragsdale said. After going out to check on the site, Ragsdale said the cemetery would need weeks of work and he wasn’t able to dedicate time for the project at the time. Every year since, he and a team of anthropology students have gone out to work on the site. Anthropology graduate and field assistant Megan Walsh, of Toledo, Illinois, has been part of Ragsdale’s class as a student and now as his field assistant. She said the requirement for anthropology students to have experiential learning in the field was a boost for her future in graduate school @alestlelive
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applications. “It’s almost unheard of for an undergraduate to have any sort of excavation or field school [experience] without going out of the country and spending thousands of dollars,” Walsh said. “SIUE making it a requirement for me to graduate and then me being able to talk about that in interviews was super huge for me. I had six weeks in the field and then working with Dr. Ragsdale for these weeks has made me way more experienced than other applicants.” When it comes to participating in the field, Ragsdale said having eight students to look over at an excavation site can become difficult — especially when students uncover potential artifacts — so having Walsh as his field assistant, who has been previously trained, helped a long way. “Being a field assistant means I’m Dr. Ragsdale’s second hand, which means I do a lot of sitting and observing, answering @Online Editor Alestle
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questions,” Walsh said. “When you are on an archaeological site you fill up a bucket of dirt and sometimes small artifacts are missed when you’re troweling or shoveling. We pour [the dirt] through a mesh screen and shake the dirt through. Anything that’s left could potentially be an artifact.” Each person participating in the excavation site can have different jobs. For anthropology senior Nicholas Marsh of Troy, Illinois, his main focus was researching and testing samples which other students or himself took. “Our tasks we have each day can change,” Marsh said. “It could be screening the dirt coming out from the people excavating, using shovels to level the trenches or troweling to look at the soil profiles to look for any defects. There’s a lot of mapping as well — using a stadia rod see EXCAVATION on page 3
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