Happy Indigenous Peoples Day. To the best of my knowledge I’m the 1st Indigenous person to chair a physics department in the US. (I’d love to know if there were others before me. I hope there were/are). Yaqui/Chicana. #IndigenousPeoplesDay Indigenous peoples exist in Astro/physics spaces. We have always studied and understood the natural world around us. We have always understood and studied the cosmos. Academic erasure doesn’t erase our histories, our own knowledge. It’s in our dna, passed down thru generations

1/ I have a degree in Astrophysics and two degrees in physics. I am Indigenous and Chicana. As an indigenous scientist absolutely in love with space and our ways of studying it, it has been very difficult watching what is happening to #MaunaKea and #TMTShutdown #ProtectMaunaKea 2/ Indigenous scientists walk in many worlds and understand the challenges of bringing our culture with us into colonial structured spaces. Our people have always been scientists. Our people have always studied the stars. This is not science vs culture. #ProtectMaunaKea