Page 17 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH THE COMMON APPLICATION

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

My name is Ahnawake—“Steph Harper” in English—and I am a proud Cherokee woman. I have encountered challenges, setbacks, and failures. And, someday, I will be an astronaut.

I was born far from my ancestral homelands.

During the Trail of Tears, my family was forced to leave their Cherokee village in Georgia for Indian Territory.

Some time later, Indian Territory was stolen by the state of Oklahoma.

And some time after that, my mother grew up poor and neglected in the city of Little Rock.

She ran away from home at the age of seventeen, to Dallas, where she had me and my sister and lived with our terrible, abusive biological father.

There are many challenges that come with a father who perpetrates domestic violence.

Our household was chaotic, and when I started preschool I had to learn to advocate for myself in order to get there.

I had to pay attention to my baby sister at home, when the adults forgot about her.

I had to keep her from crying, so that our father would not hit us.

I learned to read a little bit, and to make up stories in books that were too hard.

I spent many evenings pretending to read for my little sister (I was only five), on the floor of our bedroom closet.

I especially liked making up stories about other worlds, which would later develop into a passion for outer space.

You might wonder, why did you not leave?

That would be an ungenerous question. First of all, I was a child and children have no agency—I see this as one of the great injustices facing our nation today.

Second of all, my mother was a different person then.

She was terrified of my biological father, so one should not blame her for the absolute hell that she dragged us through.

Third of all, there is a long history of Native American children being taken away from their families and raised by white people as a method of slow cultural genocide.

That means that my sister and I couldn’t tell anyone about the absolute hell through which our mother was dragging us, lest we be taken away, like thousands of Native American children before us.

The worst thing about my traumatic childhood was my lack of agency.

If I wanted to go to the children’s science museum, but my biological father wanted to yell and throw my mother’s good plates at the wall, we would not go to the children’s science museum.

The best thing about my traumatic childhood is that when I was almost six years old and my mother decided she was finally ready to run, she took me and my sister to our new home in the heart of the Cherokee Nation.

One thing I learned from this experience was to appreciate the beauty of life in a tribal community.

Upon arrival, my sister and I were enrolled at a school with Cherokee language classes.

We have been learning to speak the endangered Cherokee language ever since, and to be language warriors for our people.

When other students around the country were signing up for the famous, overpriced, overhyped Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, I was helping my mother to establish and administer the first-ever tribally run space camp that both honored our rich, dying culture and exposed at-risk Native youth to a plethora of career possibilities in STEM.

I soon realized what a difference I could make in my own community.

I was raised with the traditional Cherokee principle of gadugi, community self-reliance, and I understand what it is to need and be needed by my people.

This is why, when I was accepted with a full merit scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy, I made the difficult personal decision to remain in Oklahoma until college—to be in community, and to keep our traditions alive.

For the last three summers, I have served as a cultural ambassador at the Cherokee Heritage Museum’s living history exhibit.

When my mother first saw me in my traditional clothing on the way to work, with the kind of buckskin skirt and finger-woven sash no one in our family had worn for generations, she laid down on our stained, threadbare, free-off-the-street rug and cried.

I am applying to [INSERT SCHOOL NAME] because I have lived what feels like one thousand years for someone my age, and based on the unique values of [INSERT SCHOOL NAME], I feel strongly that I would be a good fit for your institution.

[INSERT SCHOOL NAME] brings together students from all over who are devoted to the betterment of the world.

One day, I intend to use my degree from [INSERT SCHOOL NAME] (along with many years of training) to become an astronaut—specifically, the first Cherokee astronaut in history.

I would like to represent my people, on my journey to college and to space.

It’s easy to feel like we as Indigenous people have been stripped of our once-great agency, like we are all (metaphorically) living in my father’s house.

Still, I have made it this far. I have still further to go.

I will do whatever it takes to get to space.