Krystal Tsosie grew up playing in the wide expanse of the Navajo Nation, scrambling up sandstone rocks and hiking in canyons in Northern Arizona. But after her father started working as a power plant operator at the Phoenix Indian Medical Center, the family moved to the city. “That upbringing in a lower socioeconomic household in West Phoenix really made me think about what it meant to be a good advocate for my people and my community,” says Tsosie, who like other Navajo people refers to herself as Diné. Today, she’s a geneticist-bioethicist at Arizona State University in Tempe. The challenges of urban life for Tsosie’s family and others, plus the distance from the Navajo Nation, helped spark the deep sense of community responsibility that has become the foundation of her work.
Tsosie was interested in science from an early age, volunteering at the Phoenix Indian Medical Center in high school with the hopes of eventually becoming a doctor. She remembers seeing posters at the Indian Health Service clinic in Phoenix warning against the dangers of rodents and dust. The posters were put up in response to cases of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, or HPS, in the Four Corners area. Though the disease had not been identified by Western science until that 1993 outbreak, it had long been known within the Navajo tradition. Learning how Navajo oral traditions helped researchers understand HPS made Tsosie want to work in a laboratory studying diseases, instead of becoming a practicing physician.
Tsosie settled on cancer biology and research after college, in part because of the health and environmental impacts of decades of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation. But after leaving Arizona for the first time after college, Tsosie was confronted with the profit-driven realities and what she calls the “entrenched, systemic racism” of the biomedical space. She saw a lack of Indigenous representation and disparities that prevented Indigenous communities from accessing the best health care. Tsosie began asking herself whether her projects would be affordable and accessible to her community back home. “I didn’t like the answer,” she says.