She described it as the result of specific preparation, specific opportunity, specific support, and specific persistence — all of which could be made more available to more Native students if the educational and social structures were changed in specific ways.

That pragmatic understanding of structural change is, in its way, as sophisticated as the mathematics she spent her career doing.

Both require the ability to see the system as a whole, to identify the variables that matter, to understand how changing one variable affects the others, and to work toward the state of the system you want to produce rather than merely describing the state it is in.

She spent the first thirty-one years of her professional life applying that thinking to aerospace mathematics.