Models matter.

They matter not because they tell you what you will do, but because they tell you what is possible.

The question “has someone like me done this?” is not a trivial question.

It is a question that shapes what young people imagine they can become, and what they imagine is bounded by what they know has happened.

Mary Ross expanded the boundary of what Native women — and particularly Cherokee women, and particularly Native women in mathematics and science — knew had happened.

She expanded it not by simplifying her story into an inspiration poster but by living it in its full complexity: the years of teaching, the wartime move, the computational work, the engineering license, the classified projects, the technical handbook, the retirement advocacy, the ninety-nine years of a life that began in the age of the wagon and ended in the age of the Mars rover.