Three words. The question Oneida High School Principal Artley Skenandore asks his students has just three words: “What’s your goal?” When new teens come to his school, he puts his question to each of them. If one replies, “I don’t have one” or “My goal is to graduate,” Skenandore says his usual comeback is “We’re going to work on that because that’s not a goal. That’s a stop along the way.”

People who grow up in a strong family that’s grounded in tradition are doubly fortunate, and Solomon Vargas Jr. knows how lucky he is. “I am blessed to come from a big family who take part in our traditional ways,” he says. He grew up in Canton, a small community — population 464 — in northwestern Oklahoma, where his family owns three houses next to each other on their tribal land. “My late great-grandmother Ida Lena Nibbs Williams and the late Kenneth Williams raised 13 kids and held many ceremonial sweats and peyote meetings at our family homeplace for many years,” Vargas explains.

How does it work? For John Desjarlais, that question led him to a concentration in mechanical engineering at the University of Saskatchewan. Still, he didn’t come to that decision until several years after high school, so he was 31 by the time he completed his first degree. Desjarlais, Cree-Métis, had already earned a certificate in radiation environmental monitoring and worked professionally. But his childhood interest in the physical world and how things move — how they work — coupled with his enjoyment of math and physics, brought him back to mechanical engineering.

Connecting the dots among tribal lands, government agencies, and entities interested in tribal land resources is at the heart of what drives Dr. Lydia Jennings. In 2020 she completed her PhD in soil microbiology with a minor in American Indian policy at the University of Arizona. Dr. Jennings, Pascua Yaqui, is currently pursuing a post-doctoral fellowship in community, environment, and policy at the university’s College of Public Health.

It’s not surprising that Hannah Funke has more than a passing interest in fire. She grew up in northwest Montana, where there is a prevalent fire season. When she was young, she and her father would chase wildfires, observing the crews managing them. Both her parents fought fires — her mom’s desire to become a smokejumper was interrupted when she got pregnant with Hannah. Her father went on to become a welder and her mother went back to school to become a paralegal and later a nurse. Neither continued their fire fighting as Funke grew older. 

Lee Johnson hunts bugs. Not the kind with six legs, but flaws in computer code. He’s living his life’s dream as a security engineer working on MuleSoft, a Salesforce product, in Phoenix. “This is my passion. I’ve always loved trying to hack into things,” says Johnson.

Dr. Benjamin Parker recently became the first Indigenous student to earn a PhD in mathematical sciences from Portland State University. He joins a list of only 37 Indigenous people with a doctorate in math. While a career in academia supporting students as an ombudsman may be in the cards for the future, Parker is currently content in his new role with Intel as a software research and development engineer.

Amaiya Bearpaw has always loved the outdoors. Preserving and improving the land that her family and community are part of has been a force in her life. Now, as she gets ready for her senior year in geography and sustainability studies at Northeastern State University, Bearpaw is even closer to her goal of making a difference in her community — and to the land that her community calls home.

It would be an understatement to say Clara Sockabasin felt alienated when she first left her small New Brunswick community of Tobique First Nation for university halfway across Canada. Adapting to rigorous classwork at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, a top engineering school, was a harsh reality check. “Starting school, I was already behind,” recalls Sockabasin.

“A wild ride.” That’s how Paul Flores, tribal administrator for the Pit River Tribe in Burney, Calif., describes his life. “Be open to any opportunity, because you don’t know where it’s going to lead,” he says. A member of the Gila River Indian Community, Flores grew up in Arizona, dropped out of high school, joined the Army, and became an infantryman. During the second Iraq war, in the battle-ravaged town of Ramadi, a hidden bomb exploded and wounded him. “I expected to be jumping out of airplanes and fast roping off helicopters for 20 years,” he says. “Didn’t happen that way.”