In Good Company: A Reflection on Dr. Gregory Cajete’s Visit

On March 25, 2026, the Indigenous Resilience Center welcomed Dr. Gregory Cajete (Santa Clara Pueblo), Professor at the University of New Mexico, as the featured speaker for the Native Voices in STEM Spring 2026 seminar series. His talk, “Creating a Mindful Science: Through Indigenous Eyes,” drew a full room and opened a conversation that many attendees had been waiting a long time to have.

Dr. Cajete brought more than five decades of experience as a curriculum designer, researcher, and Indigenous educator. Drawing from a new manuscript he has just completed, he invited attendees to rethink science not as a rigid set of rules with only one right way of doing things. Instead, he offered a different vision: science as a living, relational practice rooted in mindful attention to people, land, and community. Mindfulness, he reminded the room, is not only about meditation. At its heart, it is sustained, focused attention, and Indigenous science has always been built on exactly that: careful, generational observation of plants, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos.

Central to his talk was an honest accounting of why Native American participation in STEM fields has remained below 1% of total PhDs awarded nationally, a number that has barely shifted in decades. Dr. Cajete was direct about why: recruitment efforts and support programs, while valuable, cannot close that gap on their own. What must change is the curriculum itself. As he put it, most STEM curricula are designed for a narrow range of learners and leave little room for Indigenous ways of knowing, identity, or relationality. The frustrations Indigenous STEM students carry today are nearly identical to what he experienced as a biology student more than 50 years ago, and that continuity, he said, is the real problem.

Part of the work he shared was a 344-page curriculum framework he has been developing, built to integrate Indigenous knowledge, community context, and culturally responsive learning into higher education science. It drew entirely from Indigenous scholarship and was designed as a parallel track, not a replacement for western science. The goal was to enrich the field and create space for students who have long been asked to leave their full selves at the door. He was clear that curriculum alone was not the whole solution, but that having something structured and grounded was an important place to start.

Dr. Gregory Cajete, NVIS seminar address, March 25, 2026

A visit rooted in relationship

The seminar was one part of a full three-day visit that our team put together with care. Dr. Cajete met with Native SOAR undergraduate students and with the Indigenous Teacher Education Program faculty at the College of Education. He stopped by our pod at ENR2 to meet the IRes team over snacks and good conversation. And on the evening of his arrival, he joined IRes faculty, staff, and student staff for dinner at the Guadalajara Original Grill, where the conversation flowed long into the evening. He did not have to give that much of himself. He did it anyway.

For many in attendance, his presence carried weight beyond the lecture. He named the struggle plainly and without hesitation, validating what so many carry quietly inside these institutions. As one of our IRes student staff members shared after the seminar, it was refreshing to finally hear someone say out loud what Indigenous students already know, and to feel that their experiences were being seen.

We are grateful to Dr. Cajete for his generosity, his scholarship, and his vision. And we are grateful to every member of the IRes team and to the students who showed up, asked hard questions, and reminded us why this work matters.