Mary Ross was born into that aftermath.

The Cherokee Nation she was born into was not the full-sovereignty Cherokee Nation of the pre-Civil War period.

It was a community maintaining its culture and its educational values and its sense of collective identity under conditions where the formal political structures that had supported those things had been stripped away.

The persistence of those values — the continued emphasis on education, the continued sense of Cherokee identity as something worth maintaining and transmitting — in those conditions reflects something important about the specific resilience of the community she came from.

She carried that resilience into a career that required exactly the kind of persistent pursuit of something demanding under conditions that were not designed to support it.