8 Native American Scientists You Should Know
From the NASA astronaut to the accomplished archaeologist, these Indigenous innovators led inspiring lives.
By Marisa Sloan Nov 16, 2021 4:30 PM
Former NASA astronaut John Herrington, of Chickasaw heritage, smiles in the Quest Airlock on the International Space Station in 2002. (Credit: NASA on The Commons/Wikimedia Commons)
November is Native American Heritage Month, also commonly referred to as American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month. It's a time to celebrate the many traditions and histories of Native people, and we're taking the opportunity to highlight the important contributions that they have made to science. In many instances, these Indigenous innovators — including physicians, engineers, anthropologists, archaeologists and astronauts — overcame challenges unique to all tribal citizens, both historic and current.
Susan La Flesche Picotte
Born in 1865 on the Omaha reservation in northeastern Nebraska, Susan La Flesche Picotte is the first Native American woman to receive a medical degree. According to Picotte, she became inspired to enter the medical field as a child, after watching an Indigenous woman die because the local white doctor refused to treat her illness. After completing only two years of a three-year program at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (the first medical school in the country established for women), she graduated valedictorian at the age of 24. After some time she returned home, where she provided health care to some 1,200 Omaha people over more than 400 square miles. Prior to her death in 1915, Picotte had served both white and Indigenous people at her own private practice in nearby Bancroft and opened the first non-government funded reservation hospital in Walthill, Nebraska.
Ella Cara Deloria
Anthropologist Ella Cara Deloria, also known as Anpetu Wastéwin (“Beautiful Day Woman” in Lakota), was born in 1889 on the Yankton Sioux Reservation and raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. While attending Columbia University’s Teachers College, she became close with “father of American anthropology” Frank Boaz and helped him to research and translate Native American languages for the next 15 years. Her own body of scholarly work — including interviews with tribal elders, Dakota grammar books, translated ceremonial texts and a partially finished Lakota dictionary — became an important foundation for the study of Sioux dialects and culture. She also wrote the novel Waterlily, published posthumously in 1988, about the daily life of a Teton Sioux woman in an attempt to introduce Native American culture to the non-Native public.
Fred Begay
Fred Begay, also known as Clever Fox, is the first Navajo to earn a Ph.D. in physics. He was born on the Ute Mountain Indian Reservation in Colorado in 1932 and learned traditional Navajo ceremonies from his parents, who were healers and spiritual leaders. After being forced to learn English and farming at a government-run boarding school, Begay later took classes at the University of New Mexico during the day (eventually pursuing his undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees there) and at a local high school in the evenings to catch up. He joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1972, researching controlled thermonuclear fusion as a potential clean and unlimited energy source. Until his death in 2013, Begay maintained that the Navajo culture helped prepare him to think more abstractly in science.
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