UM’s Native STEM Advantage
University Builds Programs to Become a Leader in Indigenous Higher Education
By Erika Fredrickson
Aaron Thomas recalls how his dad, a welding engineer, was always fixing things. If something broke, he wanted to at least try to fix it. And as a young kid, Thomas came along to grab tools and help his dad out.
“It got me interested in going into that type of field,” Thomas says. “Welding engineering wasn’t quite what appealed to me, but I liked chemistry in high school, so I decided to be a chemical engineer.”
Thomas’ dad had grown up on the Navajo reservation in a hogan with no electricity and water and endured the Indian boarding schools. But he was the first in his family to go to college and pave the way, and that helped Thomas see that kind of future for himself.
Thomas earned his B.S. in chemical engineering from Stanford and a Ph.D. from the University of Florida. He taught at the University of Idaho before transferring to UM in 2013. He was focused on NASA-based research and his own gas-and-biological-separations research when he starting noticing the first-year Native students he worked with often didn’t return the second year. Looking at UM’s statistics, Thomas saw it was as trend — especially in math and science. And he started to feel an increasing responsibility to turn that tide.
“I was thinking, I’ve been able to make it this far,” he says. “How do I help other Native kids also make it this far?”
That question led Thomas on an increasingly powerful quest to support Indigenous students in STEM research and transform UM into a model for cultural change. Over the past decade, he has helped design programs and win prestigious grants to break down barriers for Native students to earn degrees, connect to and share their cultures, and thrive.
Now the director of UM Indigenous Research and STEM Education, Thomas facilitates a staggering number of research programs and initiatives that serve this purpose with support from UM faculty and leaders. (He is the first to say he doesn’t do it alone.) The initiatives strategically engage Native K-12 students in STEM activities to cultivate interest early. Through summer programs and STEM curriculum, student cohorts participate in programs designed to teach science and math through the lens of Indigenous knowledge so when they do enter college, they are prepared. Other funding supports programs for Native students once they get to college.
The recently launched Indigenous First Year program creates cohorts of first-year Native students who participate in a freshman seminar, weekly study tables and tutoring, and mentoring by peers, faculty and tribal community members. The hope, Thomas says, is to encourage an inviting community that fosters social and academic success.
These initiatives for Native K-12 and first-year college students were funded through the Montana American Indians in Math and Science (MT AIMS) program, which Thomas launched with a $3.3 million grant five years ago and recently extended with a $250,000 gift from the Cognizant Foundation. In October 2020, Thomas helped secure a $740,000 National Science Foundation award to diversify STEM on campus. In August 2022, he procured $10 million to fund a six-state collaborative to increase representation of Alaska Native and Native Americans in STEM disciplines.
Then this past November, Thomas and several colleagues secured a prestigious $2.5 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Thomas says the money will fund childcare, emergency funding, tutoring and seminars — among other support for Native students — and guide UM in designing approaches for hiring and retaining Native faculty.
One of the most ambitious goals of the HHMI grant is infusing Indigenous knowledge into the curriculum, teaching and administrative practices at UM.
“The idea is to start with Indigenous culture first and then find the science to fit the culture,” Thomas says. “So if we think about cultural ceremony, language, song, story — start there and then find what is it in the science and the math that fits those.”
That might mean a chemistry class that studies the chemical compounds of traditional medicinal plants, but in which students also learn the ways Indigenous people have known and understood the same chemical properties.
Frederick Peck, an associate professor of mathematics at UM, works with Thomas on the MT AIMS program. He helps Native middle school kids understand mathematics through activities such as traditional games. Native games were already mathematical, he notes. By using western mathematics to illuminate the number systems, the kids come to understand the Indigenous knowledge of numbers systems, too.
MT AIMS is part outreach, part research. Using measuring instruments, Peck and his colleagues hope to answer questions about the effectiveness of this kind of outreach. What qualifies as a culturally sustaining activity, and will it help Native students in STEM fields?
Peck also works on the HHMI program on campus to foster Native support and institutional change.
“I think the institutional change activities are the ones that are the most exciting,” Peck says. “Western ways of doing science and mathematics are often presented as the way to do science and mathematics, but really it’s a way. There’s traditional ways of knowing and doing in mathematics and science that developed over many millennia. And those got marginalized through a lot of active work by western folks.”
Important to these programs is the funding and support for faculty looking to make culture changes in their classrooms. It’s a lot of work, but at the core is the idea that everyone benefits. Non-Natives are enriched by a new perspective and also can reflect on their own cultural knowledge.
“If a student comes from a ranching community they can see, ‘Oh, we were also scientists and mathematicians in our own ways as well,’” Thomas says. “And then perhaps they can identify a little bit more closely with our Native students.”
The University has seen an uptick in enrolled Native students campus-wide, and the research of some Ph.D. students is beginning to align with the rise of Indigenous STEM education programs.
Sierra Paske is a doctoral student in chemistry whose research is focused on characterizing compounds of traditional medicinal plants. She worked as a camp counselor for the MT AIMS summer camps and sees the indigenous STEM initiatives as a way to make science fun for all kids.
An enrolled member of the Standing Rock Lakota Sioux tribe, Paske grew up in a city with no direct interaction with medicinal plants. College has been a way for her to study the medicinal plants just outside her door and connect them to her Indigenous heritage. She sees her research as a piece of the puzzle that can be shared within the growing network of programs that Thomas and others are building.
“One of the reasons I love chemistry is because chemistry is in literally everything we interact with on a daily basis,” she says. “It all connects to some bigger question we’re trying answer about the world we live in. And I think that is a way you can think about implementing Native culture into these kind of science areas. Everything is interconnected regardless of where you come from.”
Opportunities to share research are vital to the vision for Indigenous STEM education. Thomas hosts the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership Program, where Native students discuss their work. Nicole Benally, a Navajo Ph.D. student in forestry, gave her Sloane presentation on Indigenous food sovereignty. Her background is in agriculture and soil science, but over the years she has seen the way western science falls short when it comes to tribal communities. Her research explores the disconnect.
“As an extension agent, I learned there wasn’t a lot of tribal-relevant science data,” she says.
A lot of her research is about getting to the root — even breaking basic definitions like the term “food sovereignty,” which is often conceived of differently in tribal communities than its use in social science programs. She is both skeptical and hopeful that academia is ready to make big changes.
“In my mind, western science is based off of Indigenous knowledge and systems,” she says. “Agriculture that’s focused on the nitrogen cycle and covered crops is based off the plains tribes’ ways of understanding that cycle. I hope the grants provide more opportunity to validate Indigenous cultures and their languages and knowledge systems and prioritize them just as much as the western science we learn now.”
It’s clear that a lot of hard work has gone into creating these initiatives, and more hard work is required to shepherd them forward. Peck is one of several people who helped Thomas build these programs with funding, but he says it’s Thomas’ persistence and vision — and his ability to build trust — that makes the engine run.
“To be a Native family and put your kid on a bus and send them to the University involves a massive amount of trust,” Peck says. “Especially given the history of not just boarding schools but universities historically taking advantage of American Indians. That trust does not happen overnight. All the money in the world wouldn’t matter if people didn’t trust Aaron.” •
