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I'm Navajo, American Indian, I was born and raised in Shiprock, New Mexico. There I was basically trained to, brought up in my family to raise our family livestock,
sheep, horses, and cows and working on the farm and those kinds of things. Coming from a traditional Navajo background, Navajo family, and I didn't know about science
and research as a possibility. The field of Cell Biology was not even, I had never heard of it at all growing up and this was back in 1976-77, that time frame.
So when I got out of high school, I really thought about college, my family had not gone to college, and I tried to go to college. I went to the University and found out
I couldn't be successful there, they told me don't come back because my grades were so poor. I didn't know what to do, I was very disappointed
and I really wanted, I knew I could do college because my friends that had gone to college were doing well and I couldn't figure out what was wrong; why I had this problem.
That year when I was looking to go back my second year, I was very unhappy that nobody would take me. It just so happened that in my own town,
we have a community college, Diné College, at that time it was called Navajo Community College, they took me when I went to see them.
I went there and thinking that, well I'll just kind of hang out here for a year and then reapply to the other schools, but that's not what happened, it was actually a really transformative time
for me because at Diné College, or Navajo Community College, they had just gotten an NIH MBRS research grant.
That stands for Minority Biomedical Research Support program. The lady running that program had just come from Highlands University,
her name was Dr. Lora Shields. At that time, she interviewed a number of different people for a research student with her for that program,
and I was lucky that she took me into the program and started to mentor me in something called research. I didn't really know what that was about. I was looking at the money
that came every month with this MBRS program, and thinking that was the good thing about it. But actually what was really good about it
was I saw research in action for the first time because she had a project with a very difficult name,
it's the Epidemiology Laboratory Spread of the Group A of the beta-hemolytic streptococci on the Navajo Reservation and of course none of that meant anything to me.
It was just words, but I really wanted to understand what that project was, what the name meant and so reading her books, looking at her grant proposal, looking at,
went to the library and all of that. I began to understand something about this project that we're really looking at a special kind of bacteria
that has a special antigen and so forth that could be identified by laboratory tests. It was a major cause of disease in my community,
causing strep throat and more serious diseases that result from that like rheumatic heart disease. So I became very interested in understanding what research was because of that.