Devon Parfait is grounded. Not in a bad way. As the future chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, he wants to protect his people’s land. His tribes live among the bayous of southern Louisiana. Each year 30 square miles of their fragile ecosystem wash away due to habitat destruction caused by hurricanes and other forces. 

Worse, his Native communities lose land at twice the rate of other low-lying areas. 

When Victor “SALSA” Lopez was a high school junior in Houston, he had two competing summer internships to consider. One was a NASA Pathways Internship at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The other was helping to produce a video for an emerging local rapper. At age 16, Lopez was all about the video shoot. But the project fell apart, and fortunately, NASA was still an option. At Goddard he worked on research trying to predict landslides and earthquakes — an experience that fundamentally shifted his future path.

When she was young, Connor Keane’s mother moved more than 2,000 miles from her home community of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, to find work that would support her family. Through perseverance and determination, Keane’s mother overcame the challenges of being uprooted from her home and opened a store in Yellowknife to sell a variety of goods to the local community. 

Calvin Foster took the Second Fleet to “war” a few months ago. As deputy battle director, this U.S. Navy captain supported his admiral in the command of warships, submarines, aircraft, and unmanned systems. But the war game wasn’t staged in the Atlantic — it took place in cyberspace at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla. “We simulated operating several hundred assets. Getting to see that big picture and applying it across the whole naval spectrum was pretty exciting,” says Foster, a member of the Muscogee Nation who graduated from the U.S.

Melissa Anderson says her academic work at the University of Manitoba is right in line with her “extreme interest” in engineering and physics. Anderson is Ininew, from the Fox Lake Cree Nation in northern Manitoba, and her path into higher education reflects her consistent passion for STEM studies. 

Luke Schrimsher is using alignment lasers to build an optical X-ray system. “That’s the fun part of the job,” he says. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Schrimsher works as an engineering technical associate in the Nondestructive Evaluation Group at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. 

He may have been raised in the city, but Dr. Clint Carroll has always felt most at home in the woods. From Texas to Arkansas, and Oklahoma to Colorado, Dr. Carroll’s love of the land developed at a young age. Now an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, Dr. Carroll, Cherokee Nation, uses his knowledge of the land to address tribal environmental issues.

For Tyler Rust, the Black Hills region of South Dakota was a natural geology lab. As a boy he camped in the Badlands with his grandfather, studying the astonishing formations and fossils. “From then on I had a persistent yearning to understand myself and my place in the universe,” he says. 

Rust and his mom moved around a lot. When they were living with his mother’s parents, his grandfather taught him Lakota traditions and language. Eventually Rust and his mother moved to Black Hawk, S.D.

Danielle Boyer always has loved “cooking up” robots. So when she started public high school in her hometown of Troy, Mich., after years of homeschooling and volunteering as a science instructor and mentor to younger kids, she immediately joined a FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics team. It didn’t go exactly as Boyer hoped. In fact, it was a very difficult period for her. “I was a girl, and a coder, and the guys made it clear they really didn’t want me there.”

I am Water’s Edge born for Red Running into Water. My maternal grandfather’s first clan is Mexican Clan, and my paternal grandfather’s first clan is Water’s Edge Clan. In this way, I am a Navajo woman.