Oglala Sioux
➼ Dr. Otakuye Conroy-Ben’s environmental consciousness was awakened at a very young age. Growing up in Porcupine, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, she could literally taste and smell the impacts people were — or were not — making on the natural world around her.
“I can still taste the water from the reservation. It was clean and not disinfected, and there were no chemicals in it,” says Dr. Conroy-Ben, Oglala Sioux. “I also saw the downside of pollution, where we didn’t have solid waste management and allowed garbage pits to be burned. I remember how much that would burn my eyes and nose.”
Though she didn’t know it as a young child, Dr. Conroy-Ben would devote her life work to researching human impact on the natural world and, in the process, using that understanding to promote the sustainable management of natural resources and better health. Today, Dr. Conroy-Ben is assistant professor of sustainable engineering and the built environment at Arizona State University, a tenure track position that combines teaching, research, and service. A former member of the AISES Board of Directors and an AISES Sequoyah Fellow, Dr. Conroy-Ben is this year’s recipient of the Technical Excellence award.
A focus of Dr. Conroy-Ben’s research is wastewater, a topic she initially became interested in while she was obtaining her PhD in chemical and environmental engineering at the University of Arizona. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allows municipalities and tribes to discharge sewage into surface water as long as a few contaminants are treated. “I wanted to see about unregulated contaminants that get back into the water cycle because it’s discharged and possibly pulled into drinking water or could impact aquatic animals and recreation,” she says. “There are so many pollutants we don’t know a lot about.”
Dr. Conroy-Ben’s research into wastewater and other topics has been published in a range of respected scientific journals, including Chemosphere, Science of the Total Environment, and Environmental Science and Technology. It also is relevant to policymakers, tribal leaders, regulators, and the general public. “It’s very important in the Southwest and Northwest. As tribes manage more wastewater, it’s important to know the environmental impacts,” she says. “In the Northwest there are tribes that rely heavily on fish as their industry and for consumption. It’s known there are fish that can accumulate pollutants, and so tribes are concerned about wastewater effluent impacting their fish.” Dr. Conroy-Ben does her best to work with tribes so they understand the possible impacts of wastewater, including sharing her findings with the Intertribal Council of Arizona, which runs the largest tribal community wastewater training program.
“IT’S VERY IMPORTANT IN THE SOUTHWEST AND NORTHWEST. AS TRIBES MANAGE MORE WASTEWATER, IT’S IMPORTANT TO KNOW THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS.”
From an early age, Dr. Conroy-Ben knew a few things for sure: that her talent in math and science would lead her to college and that she eventually wanted to do meaningful work. “As I progressed in my academic career, I wanted to study something that would benefit tribal communities,” says Dr. Conroy-Ben. “I didn’t know what, but I knew it would be in the science and engineering field.”
Dr. Conroy-Ben’s parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles always made it clear that the only real option for her was to go to college. “It was expected,” she says. “If you are good in school, you are going to go far.” An adventurous spirit and desire to see more of the world prompted her to go to South Bend, Ind., where she earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Notre Dame. Because there was no AISES chapter on campus, Dr. Conroy-Ben built her own community with the few other Native science and engineering students as well as with other minority students in the sciences.
By the time she was ready for graduate school, Dr. Conroy-Ben wanted to make sure she would be a member of a larger Native student community. “I only applied out West and selected the University of Arizona, which has a lot of Native students pursuing graduate education and plenty of undergrads to mentor,” she says. “That really helped me, not only to talk to others whenever I was struggling in grad school but to have that sense of community, like having drum groups on the quad, and things that remind me of home.”
Today, Dr. Conroy-Ben makes mentoring Native students a top priority, both as a participant in the AISES Lighting the Pathways to Faculty Careers for Natives in STEM program and by bringing in as many Native students as possible to conduct research with her. Even when mentoring and other service projects add to her already extensive workload, Dr. Conroy-Ben doesn’t mind. “It’s important to have a diverse group of mentees in the field, which tends to be white and male,” she says. “I always want to make sure there is a mentor for women and underrepresented minorities, which is why I go out of my way to recruit them into my lab.”
Navajo
➼ Sheila Lopez still vividly recalls the first time she fully shared her life story in front of an audience. A member of the Navajo tribe, Lopez was the first in her family to attend college. While an undergraduate pursuing a degree in electrical engineering at Northern Arizona University, Lopez worked in the school’s multicultural engineering program office.
During her time there, Lopez met with a group of high school students and their mothers who had traveled up from Phoenix. She and others took time to collectively talk about their lives with this group. “There were five of us talking to them, and the first four of them talked about how great everything is,” recalls Lopez, this year’s winner of the AISES Blazing Flame award. “Then I said, ‘My story is nothing like that.’ I talked about how I got pregnant in high school and wasn’t prepared to go to college and all the struggles I was having.”
It’s a story that Lopez has shared countless times since, not to elicit sympathy but to let others — especially young Native students — know that struggles are inevitable and overcoming them is possible. “When I talk to Native students, I share my life and struggles. I know I don’t have a fluffy story — it was challenging,” she says. “But I always kept my focus on how to take care of my children and that I want to leave the world better for my kids. When you share that, students can relate to you.”
That willingness to share her story and encourage others to overcome the challenges in their lives has come in handy in Lopez’s past role as diversity staffing program manager at tech giant Intel. For the past seven years, it has been Lopez’s mission to develop and manage staffing programs to help Intel achieve its goals in hiring underrepresented minorities and females in technical roles. It’s a job Lopez flourished in, helping Intel reach full representation — meaning that the percentage of women and underrepresented minority employees at the company now equals the percentage indicated in the U.S. skilled labor market as a whole — a full two years ahead of schedule.
While part of Lopez’s story is about overcoming the unavoidable challenges that come with being a Native and Hispanic woman pursuing a degree in a field dominated by white males, it’s also about the amazing possibilities that come in STEM fields. Indeed, before Lopez began working in human resources, she had a long and successful run in a variety of technical positions at both HP and Intel.
“WHEN I TALK TO NATIVE STUDENTS, I SHARE MY LIFE AND STRUGGLES. I KNOW I DON’T HAVE A FLUFFY STORY — IT WAS CHALLENGING.”
Her first job after graduating from college was at HP as a manufacturing engineer, a position that allowed her and her family to live in Singapore for four months. Later, Lopez held positions in everything from software testing and validation to work in semiconductor fabrication. “I went from manufacturing wafers all the way to the end where you test the chips,” she says. “It’s surreal what I’ve been able to do. If I could tell that little girl I once was all the things that she would do, she would have laughed at me.”
Paving the way for others to follow the same unlikely path she has blazed has been a constant priority for Lopez, both in her professional role at Intel and as a long-time member of the Phoenix AISES Professional Chapter and as a mentor to and teacher of countless Native students. While she worked as a visiting scientist at HP, Lopez would visit schools and Girl Scout troops to teach and demonstrate STEM experiments. “I knew that I could be a role model as a Native person and a female in the STEM field. I really wanted to encourage females to think about STEM,” she says.
Since joining Intel, she has helped the Sacaton (Gila River Indian Reservation) Middle School students prepare for national science fairs, and Lopez led the Phoenix AISES Professional Chapter to get involved with the Kyrene School District’s NAPAC (Native American Parent Advisory Committee) family days to include STEM activities.
More recently, Lopez was named Intel’s veterans and LGBTQ program manager, charged with replicating her success bringing more women and underrepresented minorities to Intel. It’s a very personal quest. “My two adult children came out as gay, and when they did, I didn’t understand and was ignorant about the community and what it meant,” she says. “I found out about a lot of possible challenges for my kids and saw the statistics about suicide and said, ‘This is not OK.’ I want to educate others because it shouldn’t be this way.”
As with the other aspects of her life, Lopez has embraced this new mission with zeal, helping to lead to the creation of the first PFLAG (an LGBTQ advocacy group) chapter focusing on Native Americans. “This past March, we had the first-ever two-spirit powwow in Arizona with Native PFLAG, and that was huge,” she says. “I’m just so excited about the chance to connect with parents who might not understand what their children need. I feel like this is the job I’m meant to do right now.”
Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians
➼ Yona Wade is not the type of person who waits for things to happen. It’s an impulse he has been cultivating since he was very young. “As a kid, I always was the one who wanted to be in charge and run the show and make whatever I needed to happen actually happen,” he says. “I never had time to wait for others.”
A member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Wade grew up in both North Carolina and Oklahoma. Today, he works for the Cherokee Central Schools as director of community affairs overseeing the Chief Joyce Dugan Cultural Arts Center in Cherokee, N.C., a center designed to bring cultural experiences to the children of the Eastern Band of Cherokee.
Wade comes by his instinct for action naturally, something he inherited from his mother. “She hasn’t always had an easy life,” says Wade, this year’s winner of the Indigenous Excellence award. “She worked in factories and restaurants, put herself through college, and got a degree in social work. My father drowned and my stepfather was an alcoholic, but she always pushed through to provide a life for me and my sisters and did whatever it took to make things happen.”
In both his personal life and in his career, Wade has very much been his mother’s son. After earning an undergraduate degree in voice from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Wade decided the transient gig-to-gig nature of opera performance was not for him. So he returned to his alma mater to get an MFA in performing arts management. It was an important step that allowed Wade to both live in a small, rural community like Cherokee (population just over 2,000) and still enjoy the culture and arts one would find in a much larger city. “It allowed me to do the things I wanted to do and create what I wanted to see happen,” he says. “If I wanted to live in a beautiful rural area and have access to things you find in a city, I knew I had to make them happen.”
OPENING UP NEW EXPERIENCES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE HAS BEEN CENTRAL TO WADE’S LIFE.
Which is exactly what Wade has been doing and continues to do as the director of community affairs, which includes the Cultural Arts Center, featuring a 1,000-plus seat theater, a 350-seat facility in the round, a dance studio, contemporary art gallery, and two production labs. These are important canvases for Wade and his colleagues at the Cherokee Central Schools to create cultural experiences for the community, particularly its young people. “When I look at the programming we are presenting, I want to make sure that when students leave our school and go to a program in college and if it’s a jazz trio, they know what that is,” he says. “I don’t want them to have that first experience when they’re 20, but when they are 5 or 10 or 12 because those experiences impact what they do as an adult and what they believe is possible.”
Opening up new experiences for young people has been central to Wade’s life. Besides his work at school, Wade is a founding member of the Qualla Education Collaborative, a group of educators, tribal community leaders, and others who work to improve educational outcomes for Eastern Band of Cherokee students from cradle to career. Among other roles, the QEC supports introducing STEM activities such as AISES, SPRK-ing Interest in STEM, and computer science. The ultimate vision for the QEC is to provide a pipeline of talent for the tribe. He also served on the board of the Right Path Adult Leadership Program, created to provide avenues for learning Cherokee history and culture, as well as developing leadership.
Combining STEM and the arts comes naturally to Wade. These days, that means students at the school combine the arts with a focus on STEM classes. “Technology has always interested me, and being mechanical I’ve always enjoyed taking things apart and putting them together,” says Wade, who comes from a long line of basket makers. “The arts go hand in hand with that because you have to learn to be creative in order to improve things. Schools pulled arts out of the classroom and are now putting them back in because they’re missing that creative component. We use ESTEAM (entrepreneurship, science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) to do that. You just can’t have one without the other.”
