Cherokee Nation
When Leona Anderson was a young girl in Los Angeles, she knew she was part Native American, as her father always told her this. Her father was born and raised in Broken Arrow, Okla., and he would visit his hometown for a month each summer and visit the Cherokee Nation in Bixby, Okla., to spend time with his sister. Her father’s visit was about reconnecting with his sister, but it was also about providing her with much needed assistance. “My dad would help her with projects around her house and garden,” says Anderson, this year’s winner of the Blazing Flame Award. “He would help her financially as well.”
Eventually, after she was married and had children, Anderson followed in her father’s footsteps and made annual visits to see her aunt in Oklahoma. Like her dad, Anderson and her family would pitch in and help her aunt, and when they weren’t working, would learn about her family and the tribe’s history and culture. Some of the lessons were practical: after her husband burned his arm on one visit, Anderson went with her aunt to a traditional healer, who mixed up a cream with aloe vera and other natural ingredients that quickly healed the wound.
Back home in Los Angeles, Anderson’s mother also continuously reinforced the importance of helping others. “My mom just about ran the community center in our neighborhood,” she says. “Everybody knew my mom, and her door was open to everyone. Whether they needed something to eat or drink, counseling on raising kids, or help with their marriage or life in general, they knew they could come to our house.”
Anderson embraced those early lessons about serving others and made them the foundation of her career. Today, she is a human resources generalist for Engineering Test and Technology, which is part of The Boeing Company’s Defense and Space operation in Mesa, Ariz. Before joining Boeing, Anderson worked for AlliedSignal/Honeywell in Tempe, Ariz. What animated her in both positions is the same motivation her parents had. “I always knew HR was the path for me because it connects with helping others,” she says.
Anderson has secured over $30,000 for scholarships and another $30,000 to purchase laptops for students who live on reservations.
In recent years, Anderson’s focus has been on diversity and inclusion and expanding opportunities for Native students. Among other things, Anderson is a founding member of the Boeing Native American Network for the Mesa site, and a member of the its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council. In her years at Boeing, she has forged a strong partnership with AISES and ensured the company has a conspicuous presence each year at the AISES National Conference. But her advocacy for outreach and recruitment of Native students goes well beyond the conference. Anderson has secured over $30,000 for scholarships and another $30,000 to purchase laptops for students who live on reservations.
More recently, Anderson spearheaded a pilot program for Mesa’s Boeing Native American Network team that brings Boeing’s Dream-Learners paper airplane STEM build to Native students across the state. The program provides students with hands-on instruction about the basic elements of flight and what it takes to build an airplane — from the engineers who need to understand lift, weight, drag, and thrust as well as financing and supply chains. Students at Pechanga Chámmakilawish School in Temecula, Calif., were the first to experience the DreamLearners program, and Anderson plans to offer monthly events for other Native schools across Arizona.
Anderson has spent her life and career helping others. But her advice to Native students emphasizes the role they play in helping themselves by pursuing their education. “Education is something that can’t be taken away from me,” she says. “Sometimes it’s a struggle to go through high school, but you have to continue on to higher education because it’s the key to success.”
Choctaw Nation
When Tobin Beal was living in China and working as the CIO for General Motors (GM), he had an extraordinarily long to-do list. Among many other tasks, Beal was charged with developing information technology strategies and sales and marketing solutions to support the automaker’s success in a vital market and with its many joint venture partnerships with Chinese companies.
Surprisingly, one of the consistent requests Beal would get from his Chinese colleagues had nothing to do with IT. “The Chinese wanted me to teach their executives how to tell stories,” says Beal, Choctaw Nation, who is this year’s winner of the Executive Excellence Award. “That’s a skill most tribes have.”
Beal certainly has it, and the story he wants to tell after winning this award is one that has little to do with his own story and everything to do with young Native students. “What I want to put forward is that I see a world that has lots of roles and jobs and futures that I want to be as available to the youth of the nations as they have been to me,” he says. To be sure, having Beal as the storyteller may matter more than he would like to admit. In addition to his role in China, Beal’s career has included time as CIO of GM’s entire Asia operation and his work today helping to lead GM’s transition to electric vehicles — a task that he knows meshes with the long legacy of Native Americans living in harmony with the natural world.
Beal’s success at GM has put him in a position to be more than a champion of the importance of higher education to create better futures for Native students and communities. In fact, Beal recently conceived and launched an initiative to create partnerships between GM and tribes across North America. The goal of the partnerships is to expand mentoring and other connections that lead to more Native youth pursuing STEM and careers at GM.
Beal recently conceived and launched an initiative to create partnerships between GM and tribes across North America.
But some changes make these possibilities more promising than ever before. In the early days of his career, Beal would talk to young Choctaw students and encourage them to attend college. It was challenging. “Tribes have a sense of family, and if you venture out you are stepping away from your obligation to elders and your community,” he says. “I was trying to convince people to go to college, have fun, and learn, and that it’s good for their individual development. But the concept of putting yourself above your community and family is heresy.”
These days, though, the nature of work and where people can do their jobs increasingly allows for opportunities anywhere — as long as people have the right skills. In Beal’s realm of IT, it really doesn’t matter if a skilled coder works in an office in Texas or Detroit or the place they have always lived. “That opens up the ability to drive GDP back into our tribes,” he says.
This is exactly the future Beal wants to help create. “In my long-term vision, I would like to see over the next four to six years that we create a center of gravity in the nations where someone in high school sees a young Choctaw woman driving a nice car, taking care of her family, and being a part of the community while working for GM or some other company,” he says. “And I want that high school student to approach her and ask, ‘what do you do?’ and ‘how can I do that?’”