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Focus on diversity
OPPORTUNITIES IN TECHNOLOGY

Native Americans take to technology

Corporate affinity groups and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society offer support and networking. Each year there are more Indian role models to demonstrate the possibilities of a technical career

By Lisa Furlong
Contributing Editor

Company sites in the vicinity of large reservations often count significant numbers in their Native American affinity groups. But other technical companies also consider Native affinity groups an important part of the corporate culture, and Native employees at a distance appreciate being able to network with other Indians.

Affinity groups operate on several levels. For the Native employees, they provide the comfort of peer-group interaction and emotional support, career guidance and a way of addressing top management. They serve management as both retention and recruiting tools.

Reaching beyond their own companies and people, many tech pros take part in intertribal networking with participation in the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES, www.aises.org). In fact, some Indians working in large corporations say they meet Natives from other branches of the same company mainly at AISES conferences.

The job fairs associated with AISES meetings are valuable recruiting vehicles for diversity-minded employers, as well as ways for technical folks to check out many possible venues.

Outreach primes the pipeline
Many Native affinity groups are concerned with outreach programs to the Native community. Technical professionals may put on scientific demonstrations, or act as role models and mentors to school kids.

Priming the pipe-line is a long, slow process, targeting students who may not enter the workforce for a decade or more. But the effort is a worthwhile step toward the future, and it's being made by some of the biggest and best employers in corporate America.

Michelle Morningstar

Programs at IBM
IBM (Armonk, NY) has active Native American programs at many of its locations. Michele Morningstar, of the Oneida nation, is the company-wide Native American program manager for IBM's Global Workforce Diversity organization. She works at IBM's Endicott, NY facility.

Morningstar stresses the need to reach not only Indians but all students earlier - in elementary school if possible.

This spring, for example, Morningstar took part in a science workshop for St. Regis Mohawk students living in the Akwesane Territory that straddles the border of New York State and Canada. She was accompanied by other Native Americans and female engineers from Endicott's Women in Technology (WIT) chapter. Similar workshops for Native children will be held at reservation schools near Tucson, AZ, Raleigh, NC and Rochester, MN this year.

When interviewing new Indian grads for technical jobs, IBM brings in current Native employees to talk about what it's like to work in a corporate atmosphere. "We speak the truth about it," says Morningstar. "Our percentages are low, but the candidates see there are other Indians they can reach out to, and who are ready to reach out to them."

In fact, company data for 2002 shows more than 400 Indian managers and tech professionals at IBM - 62 percent of the total Native Americans at the company - Morningstar notes with pride.

John Connors

Namer at Microsoft
At Microsoft (Redmond, WA), the Native American Microsoft Employee Resources (Namer) group is growing, buoyed by the enthusiastic sponsorship of CFO John Connors. "His involvement is huge," says Microsoft lab manager and Namer president RobinLee Sayers, a member of the Leech Lake Ojibwe tribe. "When he sends a memo people pay attention."

Namer is working to enhance Microsoft's image as both Indian-friendly and Indian-useful. "We want Native Americans to realize the potential of Microsoft products," Sayers says. "But it has to start with the elders and the children. I have an office full of software, but what good would it do my uncle? He isn't familiar with computers.

"We're facing much bigger challenges than dropping off our software."

Clubs at Motorola
At Motorola (Schaumburg, IL), affinity groups are called clubs. All the clubs submit scorecards to show how their activities reflect and support corporate aims. Spokesperson Amy Halm notes that although the overall workforce has been cut by about a third in the last three years, "We've kept our diversity initiatives in place because we see them tying back to the bottom line in terms of talent retention, motivation and innovation."

Native employees at Motorola's Phoenix, AZ facility formalized a club not long ago, partnering long distance with others in the Austin, TX facility. The Phoenix group does elementary school outreach, and puts on "lunch and learn" opportunities which it shares with all employees. A wildly popular recent program brought in a Navajo code talker to describe his experiences in WWII.

Barbara Grimes

The pipeline at Los Alamos
"We are definitely still trying to build and fill a pipeline," says Barbara Grimes, a San Felipe Pueblo and the American Indian education and outreach coordinator for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, NM).

In the late 1980s, a Native American employee task force at Los Ala-mos started to study the low representation of Native Americans at the lab. The study made its recommendations, but the number of Indians at Los Alamos has remained virtually unchanged, says Grimes. She attributes this to the retirement of first-wave Indian workers, overall workforce reductions, and a limited pool of available workers.

Grimes has seen relationships between the lab and neighboring Pueblo tribes strengthen in the last ten years. There are now formal cooperative agreements with four nearby tribes, creating a structure for joint efforts on the environment, education and employment.

A recent high point is the environmental monitoring certificate program at Northern New Mexico Community College. Los Alamos techies developed the program and take a major role in presenting it. The lab also puts on workshops for students at pueblo schools, and arranges workshops for its own staff on cultural awareness and tribal history.

HP's digital villages
Hewlett Packard (Palo Alto, CA) is building Native relationships through AISES participation. The company also goes directly to the tribes with its "digital villages" program.

Digital villages link tribal leaders with electronic resources. As part of this initiative, HP has taught Natives to recognize and locate optimum microwave tower sites. The idea is to bring solar-powered Internet access to remote reservation land, and link the tribes via the Internet with each other and with community, educational and business resources.

Further efforts
Not all companies have significant Native American populations to draw on.

Many, like Alcatel (Plano, TX) and Northeast Utilities (Hartford, CT), use their tight recruitment dollars to reach out to Native Americans and other groups via the Internet. Many post their jobs on the AISES website. Northeast Utilities does boast one Native working in IT, notes HR consultant Lynn Loveland.

While Shell (Houston, TX) has no formal Indian employee group, it is a regular AISES sponsor. Since 1999 it has contributed upwards of $75,000 to the organization, funding scholarships, science fairs and other activities.

Each year there are more Indian role models to demonstrate the possibilities of a technical career. Here are the stories of some successful Indian technologists on the corporate career ladder.

Blackfoot Harry Reinert is a CIM engineer with Agere Systems in Allentown, PA.

Blackfoot Harry Reinert: group dynamics at Agere Systems
"There are basic needs, technology needs and education needs," says Harry Reinert, a computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) engineer and chair of Asuna, the Indian affinity group at Agere Systems (Allentown PA). Agere makes communications ICs for wireless LANs, cell phones, networks and more.

Asuna organized a "read to me" program for this summer, and is supplying an AISES partner school with materials for the school year. In addition, the group is working with Pennsylvania State University-State College to encourage a new AISES chapter there.

"You've got to go back to the community to get the kids interested in engineering," Reinert says. "You have to go to the earliest level to build the pipeline to college and bring technology into Indian communities."

Reinert, of Blackfoot descent, grew up in Philadelphia, PA. He understood his heritage, but admits he didn't pay careful attention to his grandmother's teachings. It wasn't until he hit company diversity programs, he says, that he began to "feel like an Indian."

In 1984 Reinert completed an AA in electronic technology at Pennco Tech (Bristol, PA). He went to work for AT&T in Orlando, FL as a process analyst when the company opened a new microchip plant there in 1985.

His interest in hardware and networking led Reinert to pursue a 1994 BSCS at Florida Metropolitan University. His timing was good. When AT&T moved its Bell Labs R&D operation to Orlando in 1995, Reinert was promoted to a route-building job, translating engineering requirements on the shop floor and managing the process control system.

With the conversion of the Orlando facility to Lucent, Reinert moved into systems analysis. While working at Lucent he chaired a small Native group raising money to buy clothing for Indian children.

In 2000 he took a "big leap," landing a job with Agere Systems as a CIM engineer - a liaison between engineering and shop-floor systems.

In this job he gets to work with everyone from process and planning engineers to factory schedulers, accountants and shop-floor people. "I hold these people in high esteem," he says. "I like to solve their problems." Being an Indian, Reinert believes, makes him particularly sensitive to group dynamics.

Navajo Rachel Yellowhair is an IS technologist in a Raytheon IT group.

Navajo Rachel Yellowhair: infrastructure at Raytheon
When Rachel Yellowhair finished her junior year in high school, she left her home in Kayenta, AZ on the Navajo reservation and traveled to Woods Hole, MA to participate in a pilot Upward Bound program at the Oceanographic Institute. She did well, and her supervisor invited her back the next summer as a lab assistant.

In 2001 she received a BS in math from the University of Arizona. Currently, she's just one course short of an additional BS in CS, and is looking into a masters program. She found a job with Raytheon (Tucson, AZ) as an IS technologist in the IT infrastructure department.

Data management is an important part of her job. "We project how much space users will need and purchase space as needed," she says. "We've bought more reliable data servers and are in the midst of migrating the final group of user data."

She also manages infrastructure for offsite locations in Oklahoma and New Mexico. The New Mexico site is on Navajo land and most of its employees are Navajo. "I was excited to get that site," she says. "I had instant rapport, which helps because I'm managing a cabling project there right now."

Yellowhair is the outreach lead for Raytheon's Native American Indian Association in Tucson. The forty-five-member group launched its outreach efforts this year. They included establishing ties with a predominantly Indian school district, and starting a reading program. Many members of the group are active not only in Tucson but in the communities where they grew up - often on the reservation, says Yellowhair.

Choctaw Dirk Maxwell: at Dell, solving unique security challenges.

Choctaw Dirk Maxwell: security at Dell
Dirk Maxwell got interested in computers when the first PCs arrived, but "I didn't plan the career I have now," he says with a laugh. Today he's senior manager of global information security services at Dell (Austin, TX).

"Security is one of the few areas that has grown during a downtime for the industry," says Maxwell. "There are unique challenges because Dell does so much business on the Internet and because of increasing threats of hacking, viruses and events like 9/11. With the explosion of wireless networking, security has become even more important."

Maxwell grew up in touch with his Choctaw heritage, though not on Indian land. He's a 1987 BSCS graduate of Northwestern Oklahoma State University, and earned a 1989 MBA in MIS and production ops management at the University of Oklahoma.

He began his career with Texas Instruments (Dallas, TX) in the IS audit group. He was the first techie hired for the team, and eventually took over the information systems audit function, growing it into a ten-person team.

Maxwell moved to Compaq (Houston, TX) in 1994 as a senior business analyst. In 1996 he joined Dell as IS audit manager, a post which included responsibility for IS audit at both Dell and Dell Japan. After eighteen months Maxwell was promoted to IS manager, then to his present job managing global info security services.

Tlingit Dr Kyle Grant: a new generation of microprocessors at Intel.

Tlingit Dr Kyle Grant enjoys the process at Intel
Tlingit Dr Kyle Grant was born in the very small town of Kake, AK. Growing up, he didn't like the guy his sister was dating. "I got into advanced chemistry just to show him up," he says.

He went on to a 1993 AA degree from Everett Community College (Everett, WA), a 1997 BS in chemistry from Central Washington University (Ellensburg, WA) and a 2001 PhD from the University of Utah, also in chemistry. While going to college he worked outdoors, sampling water for the Washington State Fish & Game Department.

As a student, Grant joined AISES and dreamed of someday becoming president of the university. Instead, he ran into Intel Corp (Portland, OR) at the 2000 AISES conference. Today he's a senior process engineer at Intel.

"Making semiconductors was interesting to me and the industry was booming then," says Grant. "I enjoyed developing a new generation of microprocessors and making them into high-volume products." He also enjoyed the task of transferring that technology to facilities in Albuquerque, NM and Ireland.

This November he'll be back in Albuquerque for Intel, recruiting Natives from the Lower 48 at the AISES conference there.

Lummi Dakotah Lane heads up a system support group at AT&T Wireless.

Lummi Dakotah Lane: networking at AT&T Wireless
Dakotah Lane, a member of the Lummi Nation who grew up in Bellingham, WA, started in technology because he thought he'd like to program video games. An early internship in the electromagnetic compatibility department of IBM (Rochester, MN), where he tested products for FCC compliance, turned his interests to EE.

His intern counselor, a CE student at the University of Washington, continued to support Lane through the EE program there. Lane is expecting to complete his BSEE in June 2004.

His college major, plus the work he'd done at IBM, made him an attractive candidate to AT&T Wireless (Bothell, WA). Rick Newell, who heads up data ops there, is a Native American of the Muncee tribe on his mother's side. He's active in AISES and the Intertribal Council of AT&T Employees, and an enthusiastic recruiter of Native students as interns.

In 2001, Rick Newell of AT&T Wireless, second from right, with Native interns.

Newell hired Lane as an intern at AT&T Wireless during his sophomore year. Lane did so well that the company brought him on full time in the fall of 2000. He has continued to work there throughout his college career.

"The cool thing was that I had a well-paid job while I was still in school," says Lane. He was also able to help his classmates with their Unix work, drawing on skills sharpened on the job.

Long before graduation, Lane had become a valued member of the data ops team. Right now he's heading up a fixed-end system support group.

He likes the networking side of wireless, especially since AT&T has so many public-safety customers. A career slanted toward public service is his eventual goal, he says.

"I want to help my tribe," he explains. "In the meantime, I'm getting the tools I'll need to make a contribution."

Navajo Robert Quintana coordinates data tech at an American Indian grad center.

Navajo Robert Quintana: one-man MIS at the grad center
Growing up in Fort Defiance, AZ on the Navajo reservation, Robert Quintana had no mentors pushing him to achieve. He's the first member of his family to finish high school, and follow the long road from high school graduation to a college degree. He received his bachelors of business admin in MIS from the University of New Mexico (UNM) in 2000.

After he finished high school, Quintana took courses at Diné College (Tsaile, AZ) and worked at outdoor jobs that "didn't appeal." In 1988 he landed an indoor job on the reservation, as a statistical data analyst in the MIS department of the Navajo Division of Health. He liked the work, and gained valuable skills just as the Web was developing and Microsoft and Intel were becoming big players in IT.

After years of evening classes at UNM-Gallup, Quintana left his job to attend school full time. Along with liberal arts courses he took some programming - enough to get work in the school's admissions office. He completed an AA in liberal arts in 1993.

Next he took a job in the local detox center, doing database development and managing a network that supported about fifteen computers. After he moved to Albuquerque in 1993, he found work as a consultant for Intel in nearby Rio Rancho, NM.

In 1996 he landed a job as database coordinator and developer with the Native American Studies department at UNM. Free college classes were a perk he greatly enjoyed, and led to his BBA.

In 2001 he moved to his current job as data technology coordinator and one-man MIS department at the American Indian Graduate Center (Albuquerque, NM). The systems he works on do scholarship tracking for Native students.

The work is gratifying. "I enjoy taking care of my students," he says. "It's especially challenging to be relied on as an IT professional to move an organization or business forward. It's different from the theory they teach you in college."

Athabascan Chuck Newby worked on the Alaska pipeline before he joined HP in Vancouver, WA.

Athabascan Chuck Newby is an HP software engineer
Chuck Newby also took a long break between high school and college. Outstanding among his jobs along the way was work on the Alaska pipeline as a welder's helper.

Newby is from the Athabascan tribe and grew up near Fairbanks, AK. He got interested in computers in junior high, and started at Abilene Christian University (Abilene, TX) in 1985. But he soon returned to Alaska and spent the next six years working in retail jobs.

He moved to Portland, OR to be closer to his wife's family, and found work with Epson (Portland, OR), the printer firm. He began to study CS at Portland State University, with help from Epson's tuition reimbursement program.

AISES helped him with a scholarship, and connected him with Inroads, which arranges internships for talented minority students. In the summer of 2000 Inroads found him an internship at Hewlett-Packard (Vancouver, WA).

His initial work at HP involved Web development and database management for Web interface. When the Inroads internship ended, Newby stayed on as an HP intern, working on ever larger projects and continuing his course work.

He completed his BSCS in 2001, and HP brought him in full time as a software engineer. He is now in HP's R&D labs, creating installation software for HP DeskJet printers.

Obibwe RobinLee Sayers is a transports and connectivity lab manager at Microsoft.

Ojibwe RobinLee Sayers: fiber optics at Microsoft
When she turned eighteen, RobinLee Sayers left the Leech Lake Indian reservation in Northern Minnesota. "At the time I wanted to get as far away as possible," she says. "I thought there was nothing there, and I'd heard good things about Washington State."

She moved to the Seattle area, starting in construction. Then she found a job trimming cable for an AT&T subcontractor, and developed an interest in infrastructure.

Her tribe subsidized her five-week training program as a fiber-optic technician, and she went on to a job with Johnson Controls, on one of Microsoft's integrated facilities management teams. A year later, in November 2000, she moved to Microsoft, working on the Windows house architectural management team supporting the company's Windows division.

Sayers loved the company and its handsome campus from the moment she arrived. "It was Valentine's Day and it was literally love at first sight," she remembers with a smile.

Today Sayers is a transports and connectivity lab manager with four direct reports. She and her team are responsible for infrastructure and space allocation, configuring machines to servers so tests can be launched.

"I want to gather all the technical and management experience I can," she says. "Then I'd like to go on working here at Microsoft, but in an outreach role to Native Americans."

Sioux/Assiniboine Faith Yanez: "Motorola has really helped me grow."

Sioux/Assiniboine Faith Yanez: supply management at Motorola
Faith Yanez, a Fort Peck Sioux/Assiniboine, has a teenage son who wants to be an aeronautical engineer. Yanez is delighted with his aspirations. When she was growing up on her reservation in northeastern Montana, she never even knew such a career could be possible.

Like RobinLee Sayers, Yanez turned to construction to support herself after high school. Eventually she was able to enroll at the University of Montana, thanks to its fee-waiver policy for Natives and additional support from the American Indian College Fund and her tribe. As a single mother of three, she found that help a lifeline.

In college she was recruited by Lucent Technologies (Warren, NJ) to work two summer internships in Columbus, OH as a database specialist. The company and its affinity group, Lucent Native Americans (LUNA), helped her move there temporarily with her children. "Lucent made me feel comfortable in a corporate environment," she says. In 2000 she received her BS in business IT with an emphasis on entrepreneurship.

Motorola hired her, putting her to work in Mesa, Tempe, and now Chandler, AZ, where she's a sourcing specialist with Motorola supply management. Her job involves supporting site services, the facilities organization, procurement and data management.

Yanez has enjoyed the rotation and appreciates the independence she has gained. "Motorola has really helped me grow," she says.

An active AISES member, Yanez is also the leader of the Native American diversity team for Motorola's semiconductor products sector. The group is spearheading outreach to three Arizona schools.

Shawnee Cherokee Aaron Loucks is a testing engineer at Convergys in Itasca, IL.

Shawnee Cherokee Aaron Loucks: into technology at Convergys
Shawnee Cherokee Aaron Loucks is a testing analyst at Convergys (Itasca, IL). He revels in his busy, challenging work, where problem solving and team building are requirements.

When he joined the company in 1997 to work in production support, he had no real technical training. His previous jobs were at nontechnical companies.

"I wanted a new environment," he says. And he got it, thanks to "a lot of on-the-job-training and a very helpful manager," plus classes offered by the company and others taken on his own. His first technical work was in development and testing, and in 2000 he moved into his current position.

Loucks didn't really tap into his Native American heritage until early adulthood. Now he's very much interested, and hopes to become active with other Native employees at Convergys.

D/C

Lisa Furlong is a freelance writer and editor in Center Harbor, NH.