Teaching the Next Generation of Indigenous Environmental Scientists
By Ted Alcorn ’01
As her mother remembers it, Ranalda Tsosie ’96 did not tell anyone she had applied to Albuquerque Academy until she was accepted.
Somehow, word of the school had reached the eighth grader at Red Mesa Junior High, up the road from the Four Corners on the Navajo reservation. The eldest child in a multigenerational household, living at times without electricity, Ranalda had grown up hauling water from a local windmill for livestock and the family’s needs. Her days were long — up at 5 a.m. to bus down dirt roads to school and returning after practice as late as 8 p.m. But when the girl set her mind on something, she went out and got it.
“I wanted to go to a high school that was challenging, that would challenge my potential,” Ranalda recalled.
The teenager relocated to Albuquerque, where her aunt was a nurse at Presbyterian delivering babies on the graveyard shift. Financial aid covered her tuition, but each day her aunt would leave 75¢, and Ranalda would ride the public bus up paved Wyoming Boulevard to the campus gates.
At the new school, a freshman trip to Bear Canyon cemented Ranalda’s first friendships, some that have lasted to this day. “I was sort of intimidated, but also excited at the same time,” she said. She joined the softball team and thought about volleyball, “but it was the year that they introduced the bun huggers, and I was like, ‘hell no.’” So she ran cross country instead, where she found camaraderie and the chance to test herself against the faster runners, and against herself.
She was surprised to win a place on student council — and still suspects the vote was rigged in her favor. And her orbit kept widening, through a domestic exchange to North Carolina and then in Germany for her senior year on a U.S. State Department scholarship.
By the time her peers were looking to get out of New Mexico for college, she was looking to come home. She served her tribe as Miss Northern Navajo, fell in love, had three kids, and raised them alongside four nephews and nieces. And then, more than 20 years after graduating from the Academy, she went back to school. Associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees, and then a doctorate, with a thesis focused on water contaminants in the community where she grew up.
Which is how Dr. Tsosie is now directing the Environmental Science program at New Mexico Tech. Among other subjects, her lab is working on point-of-use filters that people could use at unregulated sources, like the wells Ranalda drew water from as a child.
Her goals are in part pragmatic: to improve the quality of life of Indigenous people living with the legacies of mining and industrial pollutants. But through her research she is also demonstrating how to integrate the Diné worldview and methods with Western science, which she says is vital to working with and in Indigenous communities. The title of her latest National Science Foundation-funded paper, “T’ah kóó hóniidló,” attests that “we are still here.”
As a proud member of the Navajo Nation, she is mindful of what her ancestors fought for and died for so she could be here, and transmit it on. “The resiliency of Indigenous people comes through, all the way to my grandson’s generation,” she said. “It’s continuing.”
To shine a light on the transformative power of tuition assistance, Alumni Council member Ted Alcorn ’01 is telling the stories of alumni who were grateful recipients during their Academy years.
