Leadership — A Story about William George Demmert, Jr.

Abstract

Abstract:This article describes 40 years of interactive friendship and work between William Demmert, Jr. and Rosemary Christensen, who met during the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars in March 1970 at Princeton University and then in the fall of that same year as they both arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts as graduate students in the first year of the American Indian program at Harvard University. It traces their work together through a review of selected documents that Demmert sent to Christensen that became the basis for the William Demmert Jr. Archives of the American Indian Learning Resource Center Library at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Leaders are in every walk of life, waiting for the opportunity to unlock the intangible characteristics that will set them apart, if but for a moment. But having had that moment, one will always know that one can be a leader when the need or the occasion warrants. Once a leader, always a leader, because we can only be true to what we are and have done. (Marshall, 2004, p. 193)