It is not enough to reconstruct those contributions in the specific detail that the history of American aerospace would ideally contain.

The questions that remain open are not a reason for false modesty about what she achieved.

They are a reason for accurate modesty about what can be claimed.

And accurate modesty, in this case, leaves room for a very substantial assessment of her place in the history of American aerospace.

What She Left Behind

The most concrete things she left behind are the technical publications she is documented as having contributed to, the scholarship programs she funded, and the memory — in the communities she spoke to, in the students she influenced, in the organizations she participated in — of a Cherokee woman who had been inside American aerospace at its most advanced and who was willing to use that standing to advocate for the people who deserved access to similar opportunities.

The least concrete but perhaps most significant thing she left behind is what she represented — the specific example of a Native woman in mathematics and aerospace engineering, documented well enough to be real, complex enough to be understood honestly rather than reduced to a symbol, significant enough to matter to the people looking for models of what was possible.