Embrace Community, Lived Experiences for Better Mentoring

December 8, 2025

By Katya Hrichak

The words “mentoring relationship” often conjure the image of two individuals, one mentor and one mentee, but good mentorship structures can be multifaceted. During the fall 2025 Mentoring within the Academy Keynote, Sweeney Windchief (Assiniboine) spoke about the Indigenous Mentoring Program (IMP) he co-created and what mentors can learn from its modules.

Windchief, professor of adult and higher education at Montana State University and co-PI of the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership, gave the talk, “Re-Interpreting Our Roles: Mentorship and Cultural Integrity in the Academy,” during the Nov. 18 event, which was attended in-person and online by students and faculty from 26 institutions including Cornell.

“A lot of faculty were concerned that they would have to be all-everything to their students, and we need to create a community so that they’re not the all-everything,” he said. “It’s really, really helpful when you can lean on the community for some of this.”

To develop the IMP and its nine modules, Windchief spoke with Indigenous graduate students in STEM, their mentors, and individuals providing Indigenous student support services in Montana and other locations across the country. The resulting program, intended for mentors of Indigenous graduate students, includes a large focus on creating community.

Windchief spoke about Indigenous mentoring models as a foundation of the program, addressing the difference between a mentor and an advisor, what makes a good advisor, and different models of mentorship. Rather than expecting one person to be “cultural sustenance, technical expertise,” and “the driver,” Windchief emphasized the importance of learning from members of one’s many communities to have internal and external mentors, peer mentors, and individuals who mentor “up” from an earlier place in their career.

Another integral facet to effective mentoring, he shared, is supporting students as their whole selves. For some of the students who helped inform the IMP, it was important that their faculty knew where they came from, resulting in visits together to the student’s home community. For others, it meant understanding other priorities in their lives outside of their degree programs.

“When we’re constructing community to support our students, sometimes they come with nephews, nieces, dogs, kids that we need to bring along in their success,” Windchief said.

Hand-in-hand with seeing students as more than just mentees or students, he also emphasized the importance of taking students up on invitations to interact outside of the traditional academic structure, when offered, to strengthen those relationships.

“Relationships are important, but they’re even more important when you have to have that Monday morning conversation about clear expectations,” Windchief said.

The MAC Public Keynote on Mentoring within the Academy provides the Cornell community an opportunity to learn about mentoring practices, academic culture, climate, and belonging within graduate education and the professoriate from nationally recognized scholar-practitioners.

This keynote was sponsored by the Graduate School Office of Inclusion and Student Engagement and MAC Doctoral Peer Mentoring Club with support from the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly Finance Committee.