06/18/2026
In 1838, the United States government forced tens of thousands of Cherokee people from their ancestral homeland in the southern Appalachians and marched them to Oklahoma. Thousands died along the way. History calls it the Trail of Tears.
The man who led the Cherokee through it was Principal Chief John Ross.
When they arrived in Oklahoma — dispossessed, devastated, rebuilding from nothing — John Ross insisted on building schools. For boys and girls equally.
The Cherokee Female Seminary opened in 1851, just 12 years after the forced relocation — one of the first institutions of higher learning west of the Mississippi. HISTORY
Seventy-three years later, one of John Ross's great-great-granddaughters walked through its doors.
Mary Golda Ross was born on August 9, 1908, in Park Hill, Oklahoma. She grew up in the Cherokee tradition — as she later said: "I was brought up in the Cherokee tradition of equal education for boys and girls." Katie Couric
Math was simply more interesting to her than anything else. At sixteen, she enrolled in Northeastern State Teachers College — the institution built on the same ground where her ancestor's seminary had stood. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1928, at age twenty. archivesbbci
In 1928, there weren't many places for a woman with a math degree to go.
She taught math and science through the Great Depression, and traveled every summer to take classes toward a master's degree, taking every astronomy course she could find. She was fascinated by space. By what might be possible beyond Earth. She earned her master's degree in Mathematics in 1938. HISTORYbbci
Then World War II changed everything.
On the advice of her father, Ross moved to California in 1941 and was hired as a mathematician by Lockheed Aircraft in 1942. She worked on the P-38 Lightning — one of the fastest aircraft in the world. Her research on the effects of pressure on the fighter plane helped solve problems related to high speed flight and aeroelasticity. CBS NewsCBS News
When the war ended and companies laid off women to make room for returning servicemen, Lockheed recognized something rare. They sent Mary to UCLA to earn a professional certificate in engineering. She became the first known Native American woman to work as an engineer in the U.S. space program. OZY
Then, in 1952, came the call.
Lockheed was forming a top-secret division called the Advanced Development Projects — popularly known as Skunk Works — which would become the American aerospace industry's leading military aircraft and space developer. OZY
Mary Ross was one of the 40 founding engineers. The only woman. The only Native American. CBS News
For two decades, she worked on projects so classified that she could barely speak of them. Even in 1994, when an interviewer asked about her career, she remained coy: "I was the pencil pusher, doing a lot of research. My state of the art tools were a slide rule and a Friden computer." CBS News
What we know: she contributed to early concepts of orbiting satellites, crewed and uncrewed Earth-orbiting flights, and preliminary designs for Venus and Mars flyby missions. She was one of the authors of the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook Vol. III — mapping spacecraft routes to Mars and Venus. NBC Learn
A slide rule and a Friden computer. Planning routes to other planets.
She retired from Lockheed in 1973 after 31 years — and then spent the next 35 doing what her great-great-grandfather had believed in. OZY
She became a charter member of the Society of Women Engineers. She supported Native American engineering programs. She spoke at schools. She funded scholarships. She mentored young people who had never seen someone who looked like them at the frontier of science.
In 2004, at ninety-six years old, she attended the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian — wearing a traditional Cherokee dress sewn by her niece. archives
"This museum will tell the true story of the Indian," she said. "Not just the story of the past, but an ongoing story."
She died on April 29, 2008, in Los Altos, California — three months and eleven days before her hundredth birthday. She left a $400,000 endowment to the museum. bbciarchives
In 2019, the U.S. Mint featured Mary Golda Ross on the Native American $1 Coin — a Cherokee woman writing calculations, an Atlas-Agena rocket launching behind her. bbci
From the Trail of Tears to a U.S. coin.
From a seminary built in 1851 to the edge of interplanetary space.
From a great-great-grandfather who built schools after losing everything — to a great-great-granddaughter who used those schools to reach the stars.
She called herself "just a pencil pusher."
The pencil was pointed at Mars.
