Emily Jarvis

Really helpful tips! Great post for these uncertain times.

Congrats to all the finalist! So many diverse roles and achievements.

These are great attributes Emily – thanks for sharing! Mentorship programs are only as strong as the people that become mentors. If your organization has a formal mentorship program, find out how the vet people that become mentors. Often times it is simply those that volunteer – and are not necessarily the best mentors (see Emily’s article above).

Please do not overlook the importance of informal mentorship. The attributes are the same, just without the formal program. I work for a small state agency (about 70 employees) with no formal program. But in my team of six, four of my 5 colleagues, including my boss, are all younger than my oldest kid. The 5th person is still a good 15 years younger than me. I take my informal role of mentoring them and helping them develop very seriously. We have great team dynamics. They appreciate my experience and advice and I love the energy and innovation they bring to the table. You don’t need a formal program to be an effective mentor.

Great article Emily,
We are practicing those traits in our mentor program and I am forwarding your article to the others mentors.

I was quite offended as an American Indian/Alaska Native with your promotion of Theodore Roosevelt as a role model for leadership.

Even white historians agree that Roosevelt held the following biases against Native people:

• The US was generous to the Indians, paying them many times what their land was worth.
• Indians broke just as many treaties as white men did.
• That just and honorable nations like the US can break treaties whenever they choose.
• That international law and morality don’t apply to indigenous people.
• It was US policy to kill and conquer Indians and take their land.

Here are just some of the nasty things Roosevelt had to say about my ancestors:

• All the men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of wild beasts with which they held joint ownership.
• It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities.
• The most righteous of all wars is a war with savages.
• In their paint and their cheap, dirty finery, these savages did not look very important.
• The ravages committed by these skulking parties of murderous braves were monotonous in their horror.
• Indians are reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel, they rob and murder.
• We need not waste our time in dealing with any sentimentalist who believes that, on account of any abstract principle, it would have been right to leave this continent to the domain, the hunting ground of squalid savages. It had to be taken by the white race.
• The General Allotment Act is a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.
• The truth is the Indians never had any real title to the soil.

Thank you for reminding American Indian/Alaska Native readers as to why they are the most disengaged racial group in the federal government.