A little give and take can go a long way toward reaching a satisfactory compromise

There’s no doubt that despite challenges like chronic economic disparity and a shortage of capital (both start-up and expansion), the number of Native American–owned businesses is growing across the board.

When she remembers one of the main reasons she chose to pursue her PhD in chemistry at the University of Rochester in New York, Dr. Naomi Lee can’t help but chuckle. After obtaining an undergraduate degree in biochemistry at the Rochester Institute of Technol­ogy, Dr. Lee applied to a number of graduate programs and was accepted to them all. “I chose the University of Rochester because I was afraid to leave home,” she says. “I was afraid to leave for other schools because they were far from the reservation.”

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.

When he was a high school student in Yakima, Wash., Christopher Payne knew exactly what he wanted to do for a living. His father, an electrical engineer, was an avid reader of architectural magazines, and seeing them around the house piqued Payne’s interest. “I would take the floor plans in the magazines and trace them to make my own grand house,” he recalls. “I wanted to be an architect.”

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 kid growing up on the Navajo Reservation in Shiprock, N.M., Nedlaya Francisco was animated by a single question: How do things work? “We would have broken remote control vehicles or tape players, and my cousins, sisters, and I would take them apart to see their insides and their circuits,” she remembers. “I always wanted to know how things worked but didn’t know what the circuit boards were.”

Indigenous traditional knowledge of the lands, waters, sky, and long been dismissed by Western science as anecdote , mythology, or even superstition. But thanks to the efforts of Indigenous and non-Native scientists and educators, that perspective is changing.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that a single question changed the direction of Joshua John’s life. He was studying for his undergradu­ate physics degree at Northern Arizona University when he took a quantum mechanics class. “I asked the professor how this would be used and what the applica­tions were,” recalls John, who graduated in 2005. “My professor said those are questions an engineer asks, not a physicist. He encour­aged me to go into engineer­ing after graduating.”

Deanna Burgart’s decision to change careers came about suddenly and unexpectedly. She was attending a luncheon for women in the oil and gas industry when one of the speakers quoted author Steve Farber. “She said, ‘Do what you love in the service of people who love what you do,’” remembers Burgart. “I burst into tears. I realized I wasn’t doing either.”