We Are CITC: Meet Gedza
Video by Thomas McIntyre
Gedza nyo Thah Jimerson applied for a summer internship at Cook Inlet Tribal Council not expecting to get it, since she’s almost in her 40s and most interns are much younger. She flew to Anchorage on May 31 and started the next day.
Gedza graduated magna cum laude from Syracuse University with a degree in psychology and is now earning a Master of Legal Studies in Indigenous Peoples Law from the University of Oklahoma. As an intern, she split her time between Youth Education and cultural events, helping run weekly beading gatherings for staff and joining the Family Wellness team for a day of set net fishing. By the end of the summer, she said, she’d learned what it really means to meet people where they’re at.
That lesson became personal. Just days into her internship, Gedza went through a very difficult time and wasn’t sure she’d stay. The support she found from her coworkers changed her mind. “CITC met me where I was at,” she said, “and I got to pay that forward.”
Today Gedza is a Reading Advocate with Read with Me, a literacy program within CITC’s Youth Education department. She works at Willow Crest Elementary, getting to know teachers and students and helping young Alaska Native readers build their skills, with a goal of raising literacy rates for Alaska Native students by 15 percent. “It’s such a gift to be able to connect and give to them, for them to do better in their own lives,” she said.
For anyone thinking about working at CITC, Gedza puts it simply: this is a place where people buy into a dream and want to make an impact on others, especially in the Alaska Native community.
Gedza is CITC. Watch her story above.