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.

By the age of six Joseph Peters had spent countless hours on his father’s salmon fishing boat and knew he was meant to follow in the footsteps of his ancestors. Members of his Squaxin Island Tribe are descendants of people who for millennia lived on the shores and watersheds of Puget Sound, and Peters wants to continue the family tradition of working on and with the water. Having recently graduated with a master’s degree in natural resources, Peters feels more prepared than ever to help his tribe in the conservation and sustainable management of their land and water. 

Dominque Pablito grew up in the small town of Aneth, Utah, on the Navajo Nation, and in New Mexico on the Zuni Reservation. She lived in a four-bedroom house with 13 family members, sharing a bedroom with her mother and brother, and visited relatives for extended stays. “I spent time with my great-grandmother, whose house had no running water or electricity,” she says. Because her grandparents did not speak English, Pablito learned the Zuni and Navajo languages. Pablito says that her father, an alcoholic, came in and out of her life.

Former high school dropout Christopher Villarruel is about to graduate with a BS in forest hydrology. He gives a lot of credit for his personal turnaround to the grandmother who raised him. “My grandmother, Lillian Lego, was a very strong woman,”hes ays.“She was Ajumawiand Atsuge on her mother’s side and Madesi on her father’s side. She raised many of us grandchildren, and some of my first cousins are just like my siblings.” 

The same month when Joe Akin was set to defend his PhD dissertation in Boston, his grandmother was to be honored on her 100th birthday in Oklahoma. Akin really wanted to be there, but didn’t see how he could manage the time or finances to make the trip possible. His brother wisely reminded him there was no way he was not coming, and together they managed to get Akin there to witness the ceremonial presentation of a Cherokee communal handsewn quilt to his grandmother. 

A recent graduate of Kamehameha High School on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Nalani Miller is poised to start college at the University of Rochester with a dream of becoming a biologist and finding a cure for cancer.

Cedric Mannie grew up in a small rural community called Kinlichee on the Navajo Reservation.

The first Native American to complete a doctoral engineering degree at Cornell University, Dr. Grace Bulltail is as committed to building bridges between students and potential mentors as she is to promoting education.