Indigenous Perspectives – How The Stars Tell Our Stories
Staff Highlight: Misha Pipe, NAAOP Coordinator
I met Native American Astronomy Program (NAAOP) Coordinator Misha Pipe in the Education Office, a small, cozy house-turned-office-space located near the entrance to the observatory. I was excited to talk about the history of the NAAOP program at Lowell – and about her passion in sharing indigenous perspectives. Needless to say, I was honored to get the chance to interview her.
To start off the conversation, I asked Misha to introduce herself.
“My full name is Misha Lynn Has The Pipe, but it’s shortened to Misha Pipe,” she began. “My last name is Has The Pipe because I am Navajo, Assiniboine, and Gros Ventres. I was raised within the Navajo community in Chinle, Arizona.”
She then explained that in Navajo culture, one introduces themselves by listing where their mother is from, as well as the clans of their close relatives: “My biological mother is from a place called Valley Store. I am from the Red Cheeks clan, born for Assiniboine and Gros Ventres of the Nakota tribe. My maternal grandfathers are Bitter Water, and my paternal grandfathers are the Swedish people. That’s how I identify myself as a Navajo woman.”
Misha came to Lowell after earning a bachelor’s degree in Parks and Recreation from Northern Arizona University, pursuing an interest in the tourism industry.
“When I came out here for school, I originally was going for biomedical science,” she said, “but then I just loved tourism and the outdoors, so I ended up going for Parks and Rec. I loved it.”
She began volunteering at the observatory in 2015, and was hired as a public program educator in 2016.
“I loved guiding tours, talking about the history here, and just being able to bring people to their first experience with a telescope–like seeing Saturn’s rings for the first time.”
By May of that year, she transitioned into the Navajo-Hopi Program — what NAAOP was called at the time.
“I felt horrible because they had just hired me in public programs and I left,” she said of the transition, “but the Native program is where I felt like I could really make a difference.”
Misha began working as an outreach educator, traveling out to reservations and working with teachers to develop accessible, hands-on science curriculums for their students.
“We’ll bring a graham cracker tectonic plate demo, and then we’ll eat it,” she said with a big, warm smile. Seeing her face, it’s easy to imagine the excitement and joy that fills the classroom during her science demonstrations. “A lot of times, these kids don’t have snacks like that, or their nearest store is about two, three hours away. And so we would always take extra water, extra oranges, just things that could benefit the teacher, as well as classroom supplies, and then leave everything with them.”
From there, the program continued to grow beyond the Navajo and Hopi tribes, expanding to include White Mountain Apache, San Carlos Apache, Havasupai, and more. NAAOP began incorporating book clubs into their partnerships with schools, where they would lead popcorn reading and other group reading sessions to help with students’ literacy and comprehension.
As the book club program expanded, Misha and her team began gifting sets of books to the schools they partnered with, aiming to find STEM-related titles that could be tied into their science curriculum. “English is not the first language of a lot of the students, so they struggle,” she explains. “A lot of them are retained in their grade because they can’t pass the school’s requirements for reading in English. So, when we looked for books to bring them, we would try to find ones with stories that they could relate to.
One of the first books Misha read with a class was, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, an illustrated book based on a true story about a young man in central Malawi who builds a windmill out of bicycle and other scrap yard parts to produce electricity for his family’s home. “We still use windmills on the reservations to this day, and the book helps us introduce some of the scientific concepts behind them,” Misha explained, “like how they use water to generate electricity, how that electricity gets to people’s homes, and so on.”
NAAOP began holding annual book drives in 2023, seeking donations of STEM-related children’s books and school supplies for indigenous students from the public. Each year, Misha paints intricate Navajo designs on the donation boxes, each of the box’s sides showcasing different color patterns and symbols. This year’s NAAOP Book Drive began on October 13, and continues through the end of the year. Donations can be dropped off in person in donation boxes located in the Steele Visitor Center at Lowell Observatory, at Dark Sky Brewing Company. in downtown Flagstaff, or at the Flagstaff Visitor Center. Donations can also be made virtually via an Amazon wishlist.
“We’re really just looking for any book that can tie into science, whether it’s engineering, mathematics, astronomy, or technology, and into culture. If it’s written by an indigenous author, that’s a big highlight, especially for the kids to see. If they don’t get into science, but they see themselves in the book, they might think, ‘hey, I can be an author,’ and that means we made a difference.”
Outside of work, Misha enjoys working with her hands to create things: painting, beading, and weaving. “I didn’t come from a family who did these things because they were wiped out for so long,” she said. “And here we are, this generation, the generation before me, the generation after, we’re bringing this all back and artwork and native artistry is so huge right now. When I leave this office and I go home, I’m exhausted. Sometimes I’m mentally drained, or maybe we were on our feet all day doing field trips, or we went out to the reservation.”
“But when I get home, I pull out my boxes and I’m like, all right, what am I doing tonight?” she explained, “I started weaving in college, but I learned from my grandma just by watching her. I knew why she made those knots, I knew why she separated the yarn the way she did. So when I started, I was like, ‘I know this trick.’ It felt really good.”
For Misha and her family, making things like moccasins, blankets, rugs, and jewelry by hand isn’t just a hobby — it’s a way of connecting to their culture and continuing the legacy forged by their ancestors.
“I feel like it’s just in our blood to use our hands,” she said. “It doesn’t come to us in a hard way. As native people, we’re taught that your hands are your life. They basically define you. When you give things you’ve made as gifts, you breathe it in four times. On the last breath, you hold it in and you imagine yourself in it, and you imagine yourself growing. It might not grow with you, but you grew with it in that time. And so, you don’t trash these things. You can pass them on, you can save them, but you don’t let them get dusty in a box. We keep it going, we give ours away. Weaving, you give your rugs away, painting, you give your paintings away, you give your beadings away.”
When asked about her favorite part of her job, Misha replied, “I really love the star parties. They give us a chance to go out to the reservations and do this huge party where we provide hot cocoa and snacks. We ask that they provide a cultural speaker and they talk about things in their region that are culturally significant during that time. Usually it’s during winter time, so they can talk about constellations since we’re looking at stars anyway, because we take all of our telescopes there. It won’t just be mom and dad and one child, families will come as a whole tribe, a whole clan.”
Making science accessible to all the generations represented at the star parties can sometimes pose a challenge.
“I’ll have a little room where I’m passing out planispheres and the kids are making Sun models out of popsicle sticks and yellow yarn,” explained Misha. “There are always really little kids who are bored and don’t want to look through the telescope, or sit through the cultural talk, they just want a lot of hot chocolate. There are also elders who can’t look through the telescope for cultural reasons, and don’t want to listen to the talk because they already know all of it, so they just sit with the kids and wait patiently for their family to be done. I get to see the littles all the way to our older generations [within the arts and craft classroom during the star parties, I get to interact with all of them]. It’s peaceful, and it’s science.”