For Classified: Mary Golda Ross, Cherokee Aerospace Engineer I often get asked, ‘Oh, how did you come up with this topic to write about Mary?’
Mary and I are both Cherokee Nation citizens, we grew up within the Cherokee Nation, after Oklahoma statehood, which was a very different reality than prior to Oklahoma statehood. We are raised with Cherokee values.
And she was in a lot of women in STEM anthologies and surveys, and they would mention that she was Cherokee and that her great-great grandfather had been the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.
I’m reading about Mary and what she’s done and how she was a mentor to others and what her colleagues were saying about her, and I thought, everything tells me she is living out her Cherokee values. She walked into math class in college and none of these guys want to sit next to her, right, she’s the only woman.
She was like, ‘Okay, fine. I’ll do better than you.’ That is not a typical response in that timeframe, and certainly not as someone who is not even a young white woman, right. But it comes from the fact that she grew up in a community where there was no difference between the importance for education and developing of the mind between boys and girls, there just isn’t.
I met with one of Mary’s first cousins and he directed me to her undergrad alma mater where they had donated everything when she had passed, her papers and things like that. That was a treasure trove — her notebooks of her beautiful handwriting, all of her equations and calculations. So I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to need help with this.’
So I contacted Native engineers who worked for NASA and said, ‘Can you help me understand like what is related to a plane? What’s related to a rocket here? Because I want to be able to help Natasha Donovan, who is the illustrator, I’m going to send her all the pictures that I’m taking here in these archives so that she can create the art.’
And of course Natasha is an incredibly gifted artist. And I just love how she’s depicted Mary and, again, woven in all of these things that are Cherokee related as well as Mary’s professional life with STEM throughout the book. It’s wonderful.
A few weeks before she passed, she did an interview with our tribal newspaper, and in that she talks about ‘the Indian values that I grew up with’ as well as her firm foundation in mathematics ‘paved the way for the life that she had.’
So you see that quote in the very beginning of the book. It was very much like she was living out her values, and that’s how she walked throughout the world.
And that’s the part of the story about Mary that I didn’t see in the other books, and I knew that I could contribute that for young people. That you can walk into any space you’re in as your whole person, like who you are, you bring those identities with you. Other people have already laid that foundation, and Mary is one of those people. Everywhere she walked she was a Cherokee person.