George Thomas, a Cherokee and an eager young graduate student at the University of Oklahoma in the 1970s, was discouraged to learn that American Indian students were openly discouraged from pursuing areas of higher education that involved “hard science.”
Thomas had been recruited by the university to serve as the director of its new program, “FATE,” First Americans — Tomorrow’s Engineers. The program goal was to bring more American Indians to the university’s engineering school. At the time, only two American Indian students were enrolled in engineering. As he traveled the state enthusiastically promoting engineering as a career choice, Thomas was dismayed at the paternal attitude of high school and college instructors who sought to protect students from failure, steering them away from disciplines that required mastery of mathematics and towards more vocational pursuits. More insidious was the belief among students that they could not do math or science. That was 30 years ago.
Today, Thomas, who went on to cofound AISES, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, is proud to report that the organization has helped take “the legs off the myth that American Indians can’t do math and science.”
From Six to 2,000
AISES was founded in 1977 by six American Indian engineers, scientists and educators who shared the passionate belief that American Indians are capable of and belong in all aspects of STEM-related careers. The six met through their individual networking processes of working to bring more American Indians into math, science and engineering fields. They convened a meeting at the Winthrop Rockefeller Center at Petit Jean Mountain in Arkansas where AISES was officially born. Their mission statement then is much like the organization’s current statement: “The American Indian Science and Engineering Society’s (AISES) mission is to substantially increase the representation of American Indian and Alaskan Natives in engineering, science and other related technology disciplines.”
One of the founders, Al Qoyawayma, a Hopi engineer and artist and a current Smithsonian research fellow in Hopi ceramics, remembers that in the first meeting participants tacitly agreed to “leave our egos at the door. There is an unwritten aspect in the mission statement of AISES that we are a family. It’s a very strong emotional underpinning of the organization,” says Qoyawayma.
