It survived the boarding school era, the BIA’s management of tribal affairs, the long decades during which tribal governance was suppressed or ignored.

That commitment to education was part of the inheritance Mary Ross carried.

Her family’s connection to John Ross — the nineteenth-century Principal Chief — was real but also something more than genealogical.

It was a connection to a tradition of Cherokee leadership that had always understood education as survival, that had built schools when it had the resources and fought for schools when the resources were taken, that had never accepted the idea that Cherokee people were incapable of or unentitled to the best education available.

Mary Ross embodied that tradition in a specific and contemporary form.