Wow that circuit board is so evocative, with such a clear and apparent link to Native American heritage. How cool would a Solarpunk story be about this?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3103720

Excerpts:

Not only was the first female engineer at Lockheed and NASA(1) a citizen of The Cherokee Nation, a Native American Tribe, but she -Mary Golda Ross- was a pioneer and founding member of the renowned and highly secretive Skunk Works project at Lockheed Corporation...

Like Jerry Chris Elliott High Eagle, one of the first Native Americans who worked at NASA. He’s best known as the lead retrofire officer during Apollo 13, where his actions saved the lives of the 3 astronauts & earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom...

Then there’s Dr. Fred Begay/Young of the Los Alamos National Laboratory & part of a NASA-funded space physics research team on the origin of high energy gamma rays and solar neutrons in the 1960’s & 70’s...

And speaking of Navajo innovation, if you have ever wondered why computer circuits resemble Navajo weaving patterns then you will not be surprised to learn that this is not a coincidence but is in fact by intentional Navajo design. As one scholar put it upon discovering the connection “ I had no idea that indigenous people in the U.S. had played such an important role in the early history of computing devices.