Mary Ross retired from Lockheed in 1973.

She was sixty-four years old.

She had spent three decades inside one of the most technically advanced aerospace environments in the world.

She had the kind of depth of knowledge that only comes from spending that much time on problems that hard.

In retirement, she did not withdraw.

She turned her attention to something she had clearly been thinking about for a long time: the extraordinary underrepresentation of Native Americans — and especially Native women — in the fields of mathematics, science, and engineering.

The statistics were not complicated.