Link to Audio Podcast: https://www.bravevoices.fieldscenter.princeton.edu/native-indigenous-voices

Interview with Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25

Hosted by Gabby Chavarria ‘26

Gabby Chavarria '26 (00:05)

So the first question is just you introducing yourself. So it's going to be name, class year, and concentration. If you want to share your tribal affiliation, nation or clan or your tribal community, you can do that too. And if you want to share this in your own Native or Indigenous language, then please do so.

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (00:12)

[Introduction in Native and/or Indigenous language]. Good morning. My name is Rodrigo Córdova Rosado. I am a final year, class of 25, grad student. Fifth year grad student. I'm a citizen of the Osage Nation. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be with you all here today. I'm a final year PhD student in Astrophysical Sciences, which is why we're in this department, I guess.

Gabby Chavarria '26 (00:37)

Very cool.

So this next section is going to be community and environment. What was your initial impression of Princeton, and how does Princeton’s environment compare to the environment that you were raised or grew up in?

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (00:47)

I mean, I think part of the reason why I decided to come to Princeton, so I, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, lived my whole life there until I was about to turn 18. I went to Harvard for undergrad. So kind of a similar and different vibe from how Princeton is. And I remember when I first got admitted here for grad school and started walking on campus when they did our visit. One of the first things that shocked me was the fact that I remember arriving at night and you could hear crickets. So that was pretty different from, and you could actually see the night sky. You could see the stars, which is a little different from Boston. So in that way, I think I really felt a little bit like a return to familiarity. It felt like I was going back to somewhere where I could have that space to kind of like, not be in the hustle and bustle of a city, which I really found exciting.

And in other ways, it’s also Princeton. A big institution with a lot of people doing a lot of crazy, beautiful things. And I think one of the privileges of my life thus far has been coming into these spaces and thinking there's a lot of really wonderful things happening here. How will I kind of contribute to the pot?

Gabby Chavarria '26 (01:50)

So this question's a little different for you, I guess. But your experience here, like your first year here at Princeton, how did you adjust to the transition, especially considering you’re a grad student?

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (02:00)

Well the transition for us was a little strange because we were the first, we were, I started fall of 2020. So we definitely had a bit of a transition to get used to. It was a lot of taking zoom classes feet from your bed and then just rolling through and staying stuck on there all day long doing research. So it was, it was a, it was a transition, let's say. And I think if I can cast my mind back to the experience of, undergraduate and then and then kind of like how that fit in here, I think what really happened to us was as Covid started to dissipate and we all started kind of interacting more and more on campus is where we started finding, I started finding a little bit of community, particularly on the Native side, also on the Puerto Rican side and I think that has continued to be some of the most like, transcendental pieces of my experience here has been finding that community.

Gabby Chavarria '26 (02:49)

So what is your relationship like with your family and/or your tribal and Indigenous community since leaving home and has Princeton changed that?

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (02:57)

Well, for me, I think my, my experience in large part, as the Native community here all knows, is that growing up in Puerto Rico, you, you definitely didn't have a connection to Native North America, right? That connection was made was through my grandmother, was through

her side of the family. I didn't have the relationships until I got to college. And then I was really at the university level, first then and especially now, I think at Princeton that I've been able and had the economic and material kind of like resources in part being grad student to then be like, okay, no, I'm gonna, we've always had this relationship with our communities. Be that in Puerto Rico,

or in Oklahoma, where the Osage Nation reservation is today. But we haven't had, I haven't had the opportunity to kind of like set out on my own and say, I'm going to go participate and be part of community life on the reservation. And I think the opportunity and freedom that being a grad student gives you meant that, no, I actually want to make sure that that's a big part of,

it is already a big part of who I am. I want to make sure that's a big part of what I do going forward.

And so I've had the opportunity since coming to Princeton to spend a lot more time in community back in Oklahoma and not only get to know more members of the community, but also work closely with our language immersion school and thinking about how we do astronomy and physics and science classes in our language and how we're breathing in new life into these dusty old textbooks about stars and galaxies. And, and really, I think one of the most beautiful things that I've had the privilege to see is more and more young students from Puerto Rico and from Native communities being amazed by the universe that we live in, because it is, in my mind, very amazing.

Gabby Chavarria '26 (04:35)

That's very cool.

Do you feel like you found a community or a home away from home at Princeton? And if so, when was the first time that you felt this way?

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (04:42)

I think the first time I felt like a home away from home, I guess, was probably...yeah, midway through my second year of grad school. So it would have been, yeah, fall, towards the end of the fall of 21, when it was the first time I actually met Kelly Toledo and Jessica Lambert and try to hang out with, with Native Americans at Princeton and, and Keely and Jessica are A. amazing and B. I think such a huge driving force of how the Native community at Princeton came together. And it was kind of, I think, in large part through their example and me getting to know the community, right, them having open arms and saying, yes, let's all be in community together, that then the grad students came together later that academic year and finally got going on, hit a critical mass of three people, enough to actually start, Native Graduate Students at Princeton. And from there, I think it's been a really wonderful ride.

Gabby Chavarria '26 (05:32)

That is really cool. We actually just interviewed Keely.

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (05:35)

Yeah, I know. Yeah. She was telling us.

Gabby Chavarria '26 (05:38)

So are there any moments where being Native or Indigenous made you feel marginalized from the greater Princeton community? And if so, could you describe this moment?

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (05:46)

I mean, I think a story I've referenced sometimes is, especially in the context of something like an astronomy department, one of the conversations that comes up here and there is the topic of telescopes on Mauna Kea. On the tallest mountain on the island of Hawai’i. And it's always been this interesting conversation where I think a lot of folks want to try to say the right thing.

And I think since the initial explosion or protests and debates over whether or not there should be telescopes up there at all a few years ago, when the Hawai’i community, finally, I think I was finally heard appropriately. Even then, I think there's still a lot of misinterpretation by scientists. I think one comment I heard once from another astrophysicist was, don't they understand that we also care about nature, as an somehow justification for some way of saying, of…I don't know, it's, it was an interesting time to continue being a person who prioritizes community needs and community respects above almost everything else. And to have a field reflect the broader, I think, ideas of an institution and a set of institutions across the country and across the world that say, no, the people who didn't invent steam locomotives must be backwards, and I fundamentally disagree with all of it, as you might expect.

So my work has been on the ways that Indigenous science has happened throughout millennia, in ways that are always surprising and not surprising. And writ large, I think the institution still has to grapple with what it means to be an institution that was founded in an era where Native folks were being pushed off their homelands. Right. I think there's a lot of work that we still need to do. And every so often, I still feel out of place when we have a conversation of like, oh, like, right, where are the people that when I hear on campus something to the effect of this is our home and this is, right, we have been entrusted with this land forever for, for so long. And we have to make sure that Princeton continues its mission for the next 100, 200 years. And then it's just like, well, do we appreciate that there's a much longer history that came on this land well before Princeton was ever a word spoken on these shores?

Gabby Chavarria '26 (00:12)

How do you feel about, like, being in this department? Do you feel isolated or are there other Natives that you can like, discuss the issues with?

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (08:10)

When I've had the chance to discuss the issues, it's really been with other Native folks not in this department. I will say last year we had the first ever meeting of the Society of Indigenous Physicists in Seattle, and that was one of a whole something like 20 something of us got together for the very first time. And that was fantastic. That was the first time when like, the kind of conversation of what I've been kind of describing a little bit of feeling like you can actually talk about the difficulties of being a scientist and the way that science has been a cudgel for a lot of states to push out and call other groups backwards, particularly Indigenous groups backwards.

To know a lot of folks that we're now kind of in these institutions. And, right, we're all able to be in solidarity with one another and be in community with one another, which I’d never been able to do before. And I think that's been really, that was one of the better experiences I've had.

Being on my own here, I think, it's interesting because I think there are like-minded folks in the department that I care a lot for, and we have great conversations. But that is almost entirely,

almost entirely at the like, graduate student and maybe some postdocs, right? At the faculty level, it's few and far between that, like, meaningfully engage with the topics of Native American/Indigenous studies writ large if you want to academicize it, if you want to put it in a scholarly context. But I think, I think there's still a lot of thinking to be had on what does, for example, responsible telescope siting mean, right? What does it mean to do a science that as much as astronomy likes to think of itself as being not particularly extractive, it is at the end of the day, looking at photons that are bouncing off the Earth if we didn't collect them from deep in space. In order to see those photons, in order to see that light, you're going to need to build something somewhere. And how that process happens, I think, is often kind of waived off.

Gabby Chavarria '26 (10:09)

We're going to move on to the identity portion. Has being at Princeton changed the way you perceive yourself as Native or Indigenous?

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (10:15)

I think Princeton, what opportunity that Princeton has afforded me is the first time that I felt

fully settled in being in a Native community that wasn't just my own. Right. So it was the first time that I felt like, you've got to really, right, and had the time, frankly, to build a web of community and relationships that are some of the most important relationships in my life. And I think I credit this place for being where we did all it, where we got the opportunity to think

carefully about what kind of community we want to build and how to do it, and what are the priorities, and how would we turn that into academic exercises, bringing in speakers, bringing in Native nation leaders? I think all that has been some of the most wonderful work that I've done, and I credit many parts of the university, especially folks like the Provost Office for Access, Diversity, and Inclusion. We had a lot of support over the years from the Graduate School’s Access, Diversity, and Inclusion Office. Had a fair number of collaborations with the Carl A. Fields Center. I think it's been through those that we've had the opportunity to do all that,

and I credit the university with that. And at the same time, I will continue reminding it that

just because the Native folks are doing this work doesn't mean that the university is doing this work.

Gabby Chavarria '26 (11:32)

That's a very good distinction to make.

So our next section is about campus life. Do you believe that Native or Indigenous identity and culture is represented at Princeton and [if] so in what ways?

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (11:42)

I think the most clear way that we talk and see Native culture, if you're not certainly aware of what I think is obviously the driving force, which is the student groups and the few members of the faculty who are very clear and outspoken about, Native issues and Native history, is things like land acknowledgments. It's things like the one plaque on campus recognizing the three Delaware Nations by Prospect House on campus. And in both cases I find it a little bit lacking. I find it limited. I find it to not wrestle with anything serious. I think land acknowledgements to this day, I think they started in the like academic lexicon as a means of accepting and recognizing the position in which we are all sitting in. I think parts of acknowledging all the histories that come to making the place that we are in today, and particularly one that I think, yeah, often gets overlooked in the discourse.

However, as folks like our own Professor Elizabeth Ellis in the History department here have written, land acknowledgments without any commitment to forward action are just pretty words that don't have a lot of meaning behind them. Same with the plaque. I think the plaque by Prospect House is one example of the university saying, you know, we do want to build a commitment towards the future to the people on whose land we now occupy and on whose ancestral lands, on who's, in who's spaces their stories are told. Right. I think that's the thing, and certainly anthropologists like to describe, which is not completely untrue, that Indigenous communities in North America have this epistemic foundation where stories are really tied to place. And you can imagine, just to put it in the context of something like a Western religious canon, for example, the Bible, that the Bible can travel with you, right? You can write it down, take it with you and keep propagating the story. What happens if the story is tied immensely to the place where it's being told, and you no longer have access to that place? That's the framing that I like to describe of like why is the fact that folks are removed from their ancestral land so important because the stories aren't the same anymore. Fundamental pieces of culture now inextricably changed, and communities still to this day continue to argue and push for having the opportunity to come back and be able to tell the stories on the land where their stories originated from.

And I think Princeton has to like any institution like especially places like governments and state governments, etc., they need to reckon with the fact that there's a responsibility that was oftentimes encoded in law that was encoded in treaties that has been completely disregarded by every signatory party except the Native communities who keep arguing for those treaties to be recognized. Not to mention that many of those treaties were, were swindles and never really said what they were really saying. So I guess I would just say Princeton is starting to look more Indigenous. It is bringing and working closely with folks in different offices to improve recruitment, to bring in more folks at the graduate level, to bring more faculty, to bring more undergraduates, to make sure that the students that come here feel included and feel like they have a home where they can be their authentic selves in every way, shape and form, as well as be excellent students and scholars and anything else they want to be.

But we're still, we're still working on it.

Gabby Chavarria '26 (15:05)

Yeah. Thank you for that perspective.

So our last section is about administration, which we've been talking about a little bit already.

But if there was one change that Princeton leadership could make to improve experiences for Native and Indigenous students on campus, what would that be?

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (15:19)

To first order, I would say bring more folks. The fact is that, something that, that Native folks bring up a lot, particularly Native academics, bring up a lot is the fact that Native American/Indigenous communities are often slumped into the “other” category of any kind of survey. Right. It's always almost a rounding error. Native Americans make up something like one point something percent of the US population. And, about that is what makes up the campus Native American population. But it is still the case I think that in the same way that you find that institutions like Princeton are constantly trying to sample from across the country and across the world to find talent wherever it is, I think one of the great tragedies, many tragedies in history, but one of them, in the last many years, is the fact that there's so much talent and so much curiosity among Native communities that I think Princeton and institutions like it aren't, they're not making the most of, I think, what its mission, what Princeton's mission the administration and we all like to believe it is, which is if we're going to be in service of humanity and the world writ large, then I think we need to do more to reach out to communities to know that these institutions are for them too.

So I think that's really amorphous as a next step. So what is a solid thing that the administration can do? I think we're already seeing the dividends being paid, that more Native faculty attract more Native students at the undergraduate and especially the graduate level. So, there's been a lot of efforts and a lot of organizing between students and alumni and other faculty to push a lot of these hires forward. And I think continuing to do that, I think, is an important set of next steps. And writ large, I think there needs to be an opportunity for not just the Native community on campus, but the campus writ large and students writ large to start appreciating the reality that there's a much longer history to the ground on which we're walking than the one that we usually tell. And the way that you do that, I think, in a solid way, is by continuously bringing out more and more folks, especially from the Delaware Nations, especially from Princeton, building a strong relationship with the communities on whose unceded land we're sitting on. And going forward, build that relationship in such a way that you continue to attract more students from Native backgrounds and Native communities. You keep seeing, right, an opportunity to grow whatever Princeton's commitments currently are to Native nations, I think making them firmer is the obvious next step.

Gabby Chavarria '26 (17:53)

So we have some extra questions. How did you feel when you got accepted into Princeton? And how does this feel compared to how you feel now?

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (18:01)

As any graduate student will tell you, by the end, you really want to leave. In the midst of writing a thesis and getting everything done, you are just, just banging off the walls, trying to wrap everything up. In part because you want to start asserting your independence. You want to start really doing what you want to be doing for your career. In my case, it's, right, continuing on as a, as a researcher. When I got in, I think I was really excited. I think Princeton, right. Our Astronomy department is one of the, one of the ones that takes itself seriously for good reason. I think we, we craft are really good scientists and we have built an environment here. And I think these were really my thoughts when I got in here. We built an environment that is really supportive of students and researchers, and I think especially on the graduate student side, we really love to support one another and to be thinking about how we make sure that everyone

feels supported, taken care of, feels like the research is going well when it isn't going well, which it always is, right? There's always periods of time in one's professional, like science researcher life that research is going poorly or not poorly like everything else in life. And I have always been very happy to know that the impressions that I had when I, when I first got here, when I first visited, it's only gotten better. So I think that's been really lovely.

I think towards the end, yeah, you are at the same time kind of feeling like, have I done everything that we wanted to do to make Native community feel represented and feel like they have a voice on campus? And I think we've made a lot of ground. I think we've built on what folks like Keely and Jessica did in the past, right. The community that is here today has built on what they did in the past, as they built on what the first kind of like generation of Native folks on campus really did in the tail end of the 20th century. And I don't know, I think I'm excited to see what else we can get up to.

Gabby Chavarria '26 (19:59)

And our final question, what is your hope for future Native and Indigenous students on Princeton's campus?

Rodrigo Córdova Rosado *25 (20:04)

Well, we had a really great conversation with Dr. Tachine here on campus the other,

other week, and she asked us to do a similar exercise. Imagine, imagine a future of Indigenous education on campus. And what does that best possible future look like? And I imagined one thing, a lot more laughter than I hear on campus these days. I think we're all too stressed out. That's, there's a lot of things going on. But I think I really thought to myself, what would it look like to have a system of education that really embraces all of the beautiful things that Indigenous communities across the world do? What does it look like and to imagine that, like, right, you're going to have some student who, right, is coming to us from, I don't know, Brazil, Estonia, Spain being like, oh man, I have to do my Diné homework tonight. I can never get all the accents right.

Right? So what does it look like to be, to have a system of education that is folding in and respecting and uplifting communities, Indigenous communities specifically, in the same way that we have departments dedicated to German literature, to romance language literature, to English literature, to everything else and not continue to do, I think what has been the operating mode

of academia, and I think there's, there's departments here that are actively fighting these questions themselves. They’re thinking really hard about what it means to do research on and with Native communities today so it doesn't reproduce the same behaviors that were so emblematic of academia for so long that have made Native communities so distrustful of academics. Right. The fact that they would parachute in, talk to a few folks and suddenly they had a new theory on how Native community really worked. I think a lot of academics, more and more are realizing that that was probably pretty superficial.

And what I hope for the future, for community, for places like Princeton, is that we keep reckoning with the past. Insofar as doing so, I think, I believe, will make a better and more encompassing experience for education and for an appreciation of all the beautiful things that humans from all parts of the world do. I worry, and I think this is the thing that I really would call

Princeton and places like it to think about is that, we keep saying there's so many folks have been written out of history, and we need to make sure that they're written back in. While I'm, yes, very concerned about that, but also very concerned about what is the future we're writing? Are we taking a lesson from the fact that ways of knowing the world, ways of doing science, ways of thinking about how to interpret our environment and our relationship to the environment and how we're moving into a world that is rapidly getting hotter and hotter. I think going back and thinking through seriously, what does an approach to education and to scholarship look like that is focusing on those relationships and building in the relationships of all communities, of all stripes into a place like Princeton? It feels like a really airy goal that at the same time, I think needs to become the mission more and more.