Medicine was possible but difficult.

Law was possible but unusual.

Engineering, physics, aeronautics — these were fields where women were not just unwelcome but where the structures of professional training and employment had been built as if women did not exist.

For Native women, those barriers were compounded by racial barriers that operated alongside gender ones.

The overlap was not additive so much as multiplicative — each barrier reinforced the others, and the combined effect was a set of constraints that was nearly total for most women in her position.

She taught.