The cutting-edge work of Native American aerospace engineer Mary Golda Ross

John Yang:

As Native American Heritage Month draws to a close this week, we look at the life and legacy of the nation's first female Native American engineer. That's tonight's Hidden Histories.

John Yang:

Mary Golda Ross was a pioneering figure of the space age, the first Native American woman to be an engineer, achievements she attributed to the Cherokee emphasis on education and on educating boys and girls equally.

She was born in 1908 in Park Hill, Oklahoma to a family with a proud Cherokee Heritage. Her great, great grandfather John Ross was chief of the Cherokee Nation during the turbulent and traumatic era of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Thousands of Cherokee people were forced to leave their ancestral lands in the American southeast and walk to Indian Territory and what is now Oklahoma, a route known as the Trail of Tears.

As a child, Ross sent to live with their grandparents in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the one time capital of the Cherokee Nation so she could attend school. After high school, Ross earned a math degree from Northeastern State Teachers College in Tahlequah was the successor to the Cherokee Female Seminary, which are great, great grandfather that helped establish.

Ross taught math and science is in Cherokee schools in Oklahoma and was assigned to the government run Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. She was a girl's advisor at the boarding school, a native American role model for Indian girls separated from their parents and families.

Gayle Ross, Relative of Mary Golda Ross: You cannot understate her passion for teaching others, to talking to other Indian kids about science, technology, engineering and math.

John Yang:

During breaks, Ross took enough classes to earn a master's degree in math in 1938 from what is now the University of Northern Colorado. At the time, academic and industrial labs employed few women. Teaching was one of the only careers in which a woman like Ross trained in math or sciences could use their knowledge to earn a living.

But during World War II as industry geared up for wartime production and young men went off to fight, technically trained women were in demand. In 1942, Ross went to work for Lockheed Aircraft. She helped design the P-38 Lightning, an innovative, fast and powerful fighter that made its mark in both the European and Pacific theatres.

After the war, many women engineers were laid off to make room for the men returning home. But Lockheed kept Ross on the job, even sending her to UCLA for her professional certification in engineering, the first Native American woman to earn that credential.

Ross was one of the early members of Lockheed famed skunkworks, the top secret advanced development division that worked on cutting edge breakthrough aerospace technology. She was the only woman and the only Native American at the skunkworks. Much of her work still can't be discussed publicly.

Gayle Ross:

If so much of her work had not been classified, she would have won a Nobel Prize. That's how innovative. That's how important the work that she did was.

John Yang:

Some of the work that is public now includes the Polaris submarine launch missile, and the Egina rocket which carried numerous satellites into Earth orbit.

Ross also contributed to NASA's interplanetary flight book which detailed spacecraft flight plans to Mars and Venus.

Gayle Ross:

What she really wanted to do was be the woman behind the first woman in space. And she did that.

John Yang:

After Ross retired from Lockheed in 1973, she devoted the rest of her life to encouraging young women and Native Americans to pursue careers in science, engineering and math. Ross died in 2008, three months shy of her 100th birthday. And 2019, the U.S. Mint honored grace by putting her image on a Sacagawea $1 coin.