Mary Golda Ross

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Mary Golda Ross

Native American engineer

Written by Timothy Lake

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Born:: August 9, 1908, Park Hill, Oklahoma, U.S.

Died:: April 29, 2008, Los Altos, California (aged 99)

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Mary Golda Ross (born August 9, 1908, Park Hill, Oklahoma, U.S.—died April 29, 2008, Los Altos, California) was a Cherokee mathematician who was the first Native woman to work as an engineer in the U.S. space program. She made history as the first female and only Native member of a highly secret team of the Advanced Development Projects, also known as Skunk Works, at Lockheed Aircraft Company (now the Lockheed Martin Corporation). She is known for her contributions in the fields of space exploration and aerospace engineering.

Cherokee family and education

Ross was born to Mary Henrietta Moore Ross and William Wallace Ross, Jr., both citizens of the Cherokee Nation. She was the great-great-granddaughter of John Ross, the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation who in the 1830s spearheaded legal actions fighting the Indian Removal Act. His efforts did not succeed, and the U.S. federal government under Pres. Andrew Jackson forcibly evicted the Cherokees from Georgia and compelled them to travel to present-day Oklahoma in what would later come to be known as the Trail of Tears.

So that Ross could attend school, her family sent her to live with her grandparents in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the former capital of the Cherokee Nation. She had several Native teachers during her time in primary school and high school, including her high-school math teacher, who was Cherokee. Ross excelled in math and science as a student, and in 1928 she earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Northeastern State Teachers College (now Northeastern State University) in Tahlequah.

For about a decade after graduating, Ross taught mathematics and science in Oklahoma public schools. In 1936 she began working as a statistical clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior Building in Washington, D.C. In 1937 the bureau assigned her to work as an adviser to girls at the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. She continued to pursue her own education throughout this time, taking summer classes for several years and feeding her interest in astronomy. In 1938 she graduated from Colorado State College of Education (now the University of Northern Colorado) with a master’s degree in mathematics.

Career and space engineering

In 1941 Ross moved to California, just before the United States entered World War II. It had been difficult for women to find work as mathematicians and scientists in industrial laboratories, but the war increased the need for their skills, which provided Ross with an opportunity to work outside of education. In 1942 she was hired by Lockheed as a mathematician, where she concentrated on improving the design—and, specifically, the aerodynamics—of the P-38 Lightning, a fighter plane used throughout the war. After World War II ended, and men who had been part of the war effort returned to civilian life, many women struggled to keep their jobs. However, Ross’s abilities convinced Lockheed supervisors to retain her. They arranged for her to attend the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) to obtain a certification in aeronautical engineering, and in 1949 she became a registered professional engineer. That made her, by many accounts, the first Native woman to become an engineer.

In 1952 Ross became one of the original members, and the only female member, of Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects unit, popularly known as Skunk Works, which became the American aerospace industry’s leading military aircraft developer. Although the breadth of Ross’s contributions remain a secret, it is known that some of her work included creating design concepts for interplanetary travel, developing operational guidelines for spacecraft and orbiting satellites, and theorizing about the logistics of potential space travel to Mars and Venus. As Cold War tensions developed in the wake of World War II, Ross worked on several missile-related projects at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. She retired from Lockheed in 1973.

Legacy

As a key member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Women Engineers, Ross was known for her commitment to improving educational opportunities for women and for all Native people, especially in the field of engineering. As she recalled in an interview with Laurel M. Sheppard of Lash Publications, “There is a lot of ancient wisdom from Indian culture that would help solve the problems of today.” She also financially supported the development of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. In 2019 Ross was featured on a commemorative U.S. dollar coin that celebrates the contributions made by Native people to the U.S. space program. Ross is considered a “hidden figure,” as she is one of the female mathematicians whose contributions to American aerospace engineering have historically been unrecognized.

Timothy Lake The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Native American

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Culture areas of the Indigenous peoples of North America

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Distribution of American Subarctic cultures

Distribution of Northeast American peoples

Distribution of Indigenous peoples of the American Southeast

Distribution of Indigenous peoples of the North American Plains

Distribution of the Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest

Native American

Indigenous peoples of Canada and United States

Also known as: First Nations, Northern American Indian

Written by Elizabeth Prine Pauls

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: May 7, 2025 • Article History

Also called:: American Indian, Amerindian, Amerind, Indian, aboriginal American, or First Nation person

Key People:: Hermon A. MacNeil; Layli Long Soldier; Walter Ufer

Related Topics:: Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains; Indigenous peoples of the American Southeast; Northwest Coast Indian; Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest; Northeast Indian

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Native American, member of any of the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere, although the term often connotes only those groups whose original territories were in present-day Canada and the United States.

Pre-Columbian Americans used technology and material culture that included fire and the fire drill; the domesticated dog; stone implements of many kinds; the spear-thrower (atlatl), harpoon, and bow and arrow; and cordage, netting, basketry, and, in some places, pottery. Many Indigenous American groups were hunting and gathering cultures, while others were agricultural peoples. Indigenous American domesticated a variety of plants and animals, including corn (maize), beans, squash, potatoes and other tubers, turkeys, llamas, and alpacas, as well as a variety of semidomesticated species of nut- and seed-bearing plants. These and other resources were used to support communities ranging from small hamlets to cities such as Cahokia, with an estimated population of 10,000 to 20,000 individuals, and Teotihuacán, with some 125,000 to 200,000 residents.

At the dawn of the 16th century ce, as the European conquest of the Americas began, Indigenous peoples resided throughout the Western Hemisphere. They were soon decimated by the effects of epidemic disease, military conquest, and enslavement, and, as with other colonized peoples, they were subject to discriminatory political and legal policies well into the 20th, and even the 21st, century. Nonetheless, they have been among the most active and successful Native peoples in effecting political change and regaining their autonomy in areas such as education, land ownership, religious freedom, the law, and the revitalization of traditional culture.

Historically, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been usually recognized as constituting two broad cultural groupings, American Indians (a term now considered outdated) and Arctic peoples. American Indians are often further grouped by area of residence: Northern America (present-day United States and Canada), Middle America (present-day Mexico and Central America; sometimes called Mesoamerica), and South America. This article is a survey of the culture areas, prehistories, histories, and recent developments of the Indigenous peoples and cultures of the United States and Canada. Some of the terminology used in reference to Indigenous Americans is explained in Sidebar: Tribal Nomenclature: American Indian, Native American, and First Nation; Sidebar: The Difference Between a Tribe and a Band; and Sidebar: Native American Self-Names. An overview of all the Indigenous peoples of the Americas is presented in American Indian; discussions of various aspects of Indigenous American cultures may also be found in the articles pre-Columbian civilizations; Middle American Indian; South American Indian; Arctic: The people; American Indian languages; Native American religions; and Native American arts.

Native American culture areas

Comparative studies are an essential component of all scholarly analyses, whether the topic under study is human society, fine art, paleontology, or chemistry; the similarities and differences found in the entities under consideration help to organize and direct research programs and exegeses. The comparative study of cultures falls largely in the domain of anthropology, which often uses a typology known as the culture area approach to organize comparisons across cultures.

Tecumseh. Battle of the Thames, Ontario, Canada, and the death of Tecumseh. Col. Richard M. Johnson with the Kentucky volunteers on left battle with Tecumseh and his Native troops. Native American Shawnee chief. North American indian. (See Notes)

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The culture area approach was delineated at the turn of the 20th century and continued to frame discussions of peoples and cultures into the 21st century. A culture area is a geographic region where certain cultural traits have generally co-occurred; for instance, in North America between the 16th and 19th centuries, the Northwest Coast culture area was characterized by traits such as salmon fishing, woodworking, large villages or towns, and hierarchical social organization.

The specific number of culture areas delineated for Native America has been somewhat variable because regions are sometimes subdivided or conjoined. The 10 culture areas discussed below are among the most commonly used—the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Great Basin, California, the Northwest Coast, and the Plateau. Notably, some scholars prefer to combine the Northeast and Southeast into one Eastern Woodlands culture area or the Plateau and Great Basin into a single Intermontane culture area. Each section below considers the location, climate, environment, languages, peoples, and common cultural characteristics of the area before it was heavily colonized. Prehistoric and post-Columbian Native American cultures are discussed in subsequent sections of this article. A discussion of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas as a whole is found in Indigenous American.