Nikita Kahpeaysewat comes from a long line of residential school survivors and hundreds of years of colonial resistance.

I’ve always been curious about how things work. In high school, I got my first look behind the scenes at the technical side of one of my passions: video games.

My hometown of Farmington, N.M., is a small community with diverse cultures and families.

I’ve always preferred math and science to English and history. I enjoy things that are tangible and black and white, like engineering. 

When someone new comes over to our house, my parents drag out a video of me from the fourth or fifth grade. In the video, I introduce myself and tell everyone that my favorite subject in school is math.

I grew up in a high-crime area in suburban Baltimore. Violence, drugs, and alcoholism were rampant — a fertile recruiting ground for street gangs.

When Cristin Haase was first thinking about a career in dental health, the inequality in care available to American Indians was on her mind — she wanted to be one of the few Indigenous professionals working on closing that gap.

Mason Grimshaw never envisioned himself walking across the stage at his college graduation. Now, having recently received his bachelor’s degree in business analytics and poised to start a master’s program in the same field, he can’t imagine himself anywhere else. And it all started with a game of cards.

At 15, Caleb Dunlap thought he wanted to become a doctor, but admits his grades could have been better. His parents divorced and often, he says, there wasn’t a lot of extra money for the family of five kids living in northern Minnesota. “I’m Ojibwe from Nagaajiwanaang, the Fond du Lac Reservation 30 miles from Chi-gami [the name his people call Lake Superior],” he says.

As a 12th-grader at Menlo-Atherton High School in Northern California, Anna Quinlan is a little preoccupied. What senior isn’t? But here’s the thing: It’s all about science — heady stuff like helping people manage Type 1 and 2 diabetes through her very own invention, a low-cost, closed-loop insulin pump. She calls it an “artificial pancreas,” a breakthrough that won her the Grand Award in the 2018 National American Indian Virtual Science and Engineering Fair (NAIVSEF) sponsored by AISES.