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This study explores success among Native Americans in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and careers. We investigate how identities are negotiated as individuals navigate educational, professional, and community landscapes, as well as the historical legacy of the detrimental way that Western science has positioned Native culture. We conducted interviews with Native STEM professionals and we found that a common factor in their experience is the strength of their self-identity as Native people. Contradicting both mainstream beliefs that STEM expertise requires a Western sensibility and common attitudes in Native communities that pursuing a career in STEM is antithetical to Native cultural affiliation, it is the depth of their Native identity that gives interviewees a platform for success in science.

Native peoples (Native American, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian) are underrepresented in academia; they represent 2% of the US population but 0.01% of enrolled undergraduate students. Native peoples share the experiences of colonization and forced assimilation, resulting in the loss of ancestral knowledge, language, and cultural identity. Recognizing history and the literature on social integration and mentorship, we followed 100 Native science and engineering scholars across a year of participation in the hybrid American Indian Science and Engineering Society mentorship program. The results showed that high-quality faculty mentorship predicted persistence a year later. Furthermore, mentors who shared knowledge of Native culture—through experience or shared heritage—uniquely contributed to the Native scholars’ social integration and persistence through scientific community values in particular. Therefore, Native scholars may benefit from mentorship supporting the integration of their Native culture and discipline rather than assimilation into the dominant disciplinary culture.

Expanding interest in community engagement and participation in research by universities, researchers, community members and funders reflects a dramatic paradigm shift in the way that we understand the research enterprise. In this article, we share our experience of a collaborative project between a non-profit membership organisation and researchers from two universities. We focus on the importance of infrastructure development for moving towards truly equitable partnerships that expand forms of participation and bring together researchers and practitioners in ways that blur traditional power boundaries (Gutiérrez & Penuel 2014;Penuel 2015). Our collective work sits at the intersection of health research, STEM education research, and culturally based teaching and learning.The interdisciplinary nature of our team has allowed for the blending of community-engaged methodologies, which is reflected in our discussion of values in research, below. VALUING COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AND PARTICIPATION IN RESEARCHIn a review of 20 community-engaged studies, Cook (2008) found that an engagement approach helped to integrate research and action, and that studies focusing on issues identified as priorities by the community and incorporating qualitative methods were more likely to lead to action. In health research, engaged research

This paper focuses on the undergraduate experiences in computer sciences (CS) disciplines of eight Native women and two-spirit undergraduates and how their values and experiences around the communal goal of giving back enable them to persist in computing. The paper draws from a one-year study that included participants across the U.S.A from predominantly White institutions, Native serving institutions, and tribal colleges. Utilizing the decolonizing and participant-centered methods of photo elicitation, our interviews used photographs taken by participants as starting points for conversations. This method resulted in deep understandings of participants’ experiences of the supports and barriers in their CS programs, and of the importance of giving back for persistence. We adapt Page-Reeves and colleagues’ 2019 framework for giving back and Native students in STEM—particularly the concepts of giving back as a Native value and giving back in the context of CS education—to illuminate the ways in which participants persisted and navigated their identities as Native students and emergent computer scientists. We also introduce a new concept, culturally connected giving back, to describe the ways in which Native undergraduates in computing contributed, or planned to contribute, towards technology sovereignty and cultural preservation. CS, like many STEM fields, is typically viewed as highly individualistic and not aligned with communal goals of helping others. However, Native participants in this study identified computing as having the potential for giving back. They incorporated a broad range of giving back actions into their computing professional identities through teaching, mentoring, serving as role models, creating counterspaces, or preserving their cultures using their computing skills. Through giving back, participants fulfilled a sense of obligation to their communities or counteracted negative stereotypes about Native learners. Beneficiaries of these acts of giving back included Native and other minoritized peers, younger students, home communities, and other Native communities. Importantly, opportunities to give back served as strong motivators to persist in CS in spite of challenges. We discuss the implications of these findings for policy and practice and also explore the implications for how institutions and CS departments can support Native student recruitment, retention, and success.