In the early days of the pandemic, in-person contact suddenly became risky, but human interactions for business, education, medical, and social reasons remained as important as ever. That fact explains why now, more than a year later, we all have more experience than most of us would like with platforms like Zoom. 

As COVID slowly recedes, it’s increasingly clear that health care in Indian Country has been severely stressed. The system had a unique set of challenges before — and during — the crisis, which in many communities has highlighted persistent inequalities resulting from insufficient funding and resources. 

As a young girl, Kate Rahbari wasn’t sure she was smart enough to pursue an education in the sciences, let alone in medicine. “I was my own obstacle,” she says, explaining the “imposter syndrome” that gave rise to years of self-doubt. But today Rahbari has proven to herself — and the world — that she can reach ambitious goals. She now is well on her way to completing a joint MD/PhD program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).

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.