Ojibwe
The Ojibwe language is known as Anishinaabemowin or Ojibwemowin and is the fourth-most spoken Native language.
Danielle Boyer always has loved “cooking up” robots. So when she started public high school in her hometown of Troy, Mich., after years of homeschooling and volunteering as a science instructor and mentor to younger kids, she immediately joined a FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics team. It didn’t go exactly as Boyer hoped. In fact, it was a very difficult period for her. “I was a girl, and a coder, and the guys made it clear they really didn’t want me there.”
She tried a robotics team at a different high school. The experience was the same, but Boyer persevered. She started a volunteer elementary school STEAM program called Benzene Buddies, and she learned a lot about the world of robotics competitions. Today, she mentors 35 FIRST robotics teams, two of them all girls. Yet the landscape really hasn’t changed much. “People will still tell me that girls are not supposed to be in engineering,” Boyer says. “But my experiences taught me how to stand up for myself, fight for other girls, and fight for the changes I want to see.”
When Boyer was 17, she attended her first world robotics conference. She was the only one from her high school team to show up — everyone else went to the prom. Boyer was approached by a representative from SOLID-WORKS, a 3-D software that she and her team were certified to use. “I was so excited to tell the representative about our projects and kept asking her to hold on so I could show her one more thing, and then one more thing.”
While robot kits often cost over $500 to manufacture, Boyer figured out how to create an educational robotics kit for $18.95 and has already distributed over 4,500 kits to children for free.
It was the beginning of a meaningful relationship with SOLIDWORKS and its parent company, Dassault Systèmes. The company featured Boyer in an Instagram story from the conference. The next month SOLIDWORKS featured her in a “Women in Engineering” series. That was followed by invitations to keynote a national conference and speak on podcasts and panels. “They are the reason I am able to do what I do now,” Boyer says.
She decided to take some time off after graduation before pursuing mechanical and electrical engineering degrees and ultimately a PhD in biorobotics. Boyer’s initial goal was to widen her reach by teaching Indigenous, minority, and underrepresented communities through the books she writes and curriculum and robots she creates. “I thought, why not design an organization that would outlast me — one where people who care about the same things I do, particularly diversity, can participate?”
In 2019, Boyer started her nonprofit, The STEAM Connection. After getting her domain name and designing a logo, she moved her classes, books, and robot designs to the site. Her flagship project is EKGAR, Every Kid Gets a Robot. While robot kits often cost over $500 to manufacture, Boyer figured out how to create an educational robotics kit for $18.95 and has already distributed over 4,500 kits to children for free, primarily to girls and BIPOC students. The kit is a game changer in rural and Indigenous locations without internet because Boyer created a way for the robot to work without Wi-Fi. “We need to consider and address the gaps,” she says. “And we need to pay attention to what the teachers are saying. If they are asking for funding or books or robots, we have to listen and get involved.”
In November, Boyer celebrated her 20th birthday by releasing a new educational robot she invented, aptly named TWENTY. Open source and available for free on STEAM Connection’s website, TWENTY is 3-D printed, uses cereal boxes, and even has a glowing eye.
“Dress it up, make it fun, make it creepy-looking!” Boyer says.
Another project just underway is a photo series that will showcase minorities in STEAM and their projects. “I know it makes a difference when you can see someone in your culture doing interesting work in science and robotics,” she says. “I hope it will help a lot of students feel they belong in STEAM.”
In 2020, Boyer was recognized for her service and advocacy by several prestigious organizations, including being named a L’Oréal Paris Women of Worth. That award came with a cash prize that Boyer donated to AISES. “I asked myself, when do I feel like a Women of Worth?” she explains. “And the answer 100 percent is when I am within the AISES community, having that beautiful intertribal community where the focus is on STEM.”
—Ann S. Boor
OGLALA LAKOTA TRIBE
The Badlands and grassy prairies of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota are home to the Oglala Lakota Tribe. The reservation, which comprises 2.1 million acres, is home to about 20,000 people.
For Tyler Rust, the Black Hills region of South Dakota was a natural geology lab. As a boy he camped in the Badlands with his grandfather, studying the astonishing formations and fossils. “From then on I had a persistent yearning to understand myself and my place in the universe,” he says.
Rust and his mom moved around a lot. When they were living with his mother’s parents, his grandfather taught him Lakota traditions and language. Eventually Rust and his mother moved to Black Hawk, S.D.
“Winters were brutal,” recalls Rust. “I spent the greater portion of the year inside reading and trying to understand a world I felt detached from.” A counselor in high school encouraged Rust to go to college for computer science. But a few months before graduation, an acquaintance threw some fireworks into a car on campus. Rust was accused and offered a search of his vehicle to prove his innocence. A single live bullet was found under the rear seat of his car. As Rust had never owned a gun, it must have belonged to the previous owner of the car. Despite the perpetrator of the crime taking full responsibility and regardless of a parking lot always full of pickups with gun racks and loaded shotguns, Rust was expelled for “possession of explosives.”
Without the necessary GPA or letters of recommendation, going to college for computer science was no longer an option. “That experience changed the entire trajectory of my life,” he says. “If I had gone, I doubt I would have studied earth science. I probably would have acquired some money but not fulfillment.”
Without a credit-worthy cosigner for student loans, Rust had to postpone college until he could borrow on his own. At age 25 he applied to South Dakota School of Mines & Technology (SDSMT) and got in on his ACT math score. His loans didn’t cover room and board, so he lived in his mother’s basement 20 miles away, often spending all his money on gas. “Friends would sneak me a slice of pizza from the dining hall to keep me from starving,” he says.
The course load at SDSMT is notoriously challenging. “This is not a party school,” says Rust. “Every night was an all-nighter — for homework.” He found relief in the Tiospaye Program (“family” in Lakota), which offers academic support and financial assistance for Native students. He was involved in other student organizations, including AISES. “AISES helped me in ways no other institution could ever hope to,” says Rust. “AISES is healing.” Attending AISES conferences energized him, and AISES provided scholarships and financial assistance for travel.
“A lot of my success came from people believing in me, especially when I didn’t.”
A Gilman Scholarship sent Rust to Turkey, to study the relationship between geology and human health, which set him on the path toward environmental geochemistry. The Pine Ridge Reservation, where he spent so much time with his grandfather, also helped chart his path. Good grades at SDSMT helped him land a job with an NSF research collaborative studying how elements in the soil and water affect health on Pine Ridge. “I knew that the best course I could take in life is to do something I love, something I am good at, and something that could benefit the world,” he says.
Rust is currently a fifth-year PhD candidate at the State University of New York (SUNY) Binghamton, where he found the cultural expectations quite different. There’s no AISES chapter or Native community. “Nobody had any interest in what my world is about,” he says.
Besides the cultural disconnect, the biggest change from undergraduate studies for Rust has been the shift from absorbing to creating knowledge. “This is not homework that you turn in to have your answers checked,” he says. “You are creating the answers.” With a project well beyond his knowledge base, Rust endured and taught himself what he needed to know.
His tenacity, traditional knowledge, and professors have helped him succeed. “I have been trained in excellent skills in scientific research and writing,” he says. “My professors did more for me than I ever could repay. My elders in AISES filled in all the cracks I could not cover, or even see. A lot of my success came from people believing in me, especially when I didn’t.”
For Rust, geology is a stepping stone. “The ultimate goal is to become an elder,” he says. “A teacher of science and spirit. A modernday Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk).” His shorter-term goal is to become a professor at a tribal college or university, so that he can teach others to translate the language of nature and solve issues of the Earth system. “We can create our own reality,” he says. “We as Native peoples can create the reality we desire and deserve.”
—DJ Pollard