Wilma Mankiller

Wilma Pearl Mankiller (born November 18, 1945 in Tahlequah, Oklahoma) was the first female Chief of the Cherokee Nation. She served as the Principal Chief for ten years from 1985 to 1995.

Early life

Wilma Mankiller was the sixth child of eleven children. Her parents were Charley Mankiller (born November 15, 1914) and Clara Irene Sitton (born September 18, 1921). Sitton is of Dutch and Irish descent and had no Cherokee blood but acculturated to Cherokee life.

The family surname, Mankiller is a traditional Cherokee military rank and is Asgaya-dihi in Cherokee, which is alternatively spelled Outacity or Outacite.

The Mankiller family lived on Charley’s allotment lands of Mankiller Flats near Rocky Mountain, Oklahoma. In 1942 the US Army declared 45 Cherokee families’ allotment lands, near those of Mankiller’s family, in order to expand Camp Gruber. The Mankillers willingly left under the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Indian Relocation Program. They moved to San Francisco, California in 1956 and later Daly City.

In 1963, at the age of 17, Mankiller married Hector Hugo Olaya de Bardi, an Ecuadorian college student. They moved to Oakland and had two daughters, Felicia Olaya, born in 1964, and Gina Olaya, born in 1966.

Mankiller returned to school, first at Skyline College, and then San Francisco State University. She had been very involved in San Francisco’s Indian Center throughout her time in California. In the late 1960s, Mankiller joined the activist movement and participated in the occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969. For five years, she volunteered for the Pit River Tribe.

After divorcing Hugo Olaya, Mankiller moved back to Oklahoma with her two young daughters in 1977, in hopes of helping her own people and began an entry-level job for the Cherokee Nation.

Political career

By 1983, she was elected deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation alongside Ross Swimmer, who was serving his third consecutive term as principal chief. In 1985, Chief Swimmer resigned to take the position as head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This allowed Mankiller to become the first female principal chief. She was freely elected in 1987, and re-elected again in 1991 in a landslide victory, collecting 82% of the vote. In 1995, she resigned, largely due to health problems.

Mankiller faced many obstacles during her tenure in office. At the time she became chief, the Cherokee Nation was male-dominated. Such a structure contrasted with the traditional Cherokee culture and value system, which instead emphasized a balance between the two genders. Over the course of her three terms, Mankiller would make great strides to bring back that balance and reinvigorate the Cherokee Nation through community-development projects where men and women work collectively for the common good, called gadugi in Cherokee.

Examples of progress include: the founding of the Cherokee Nation Community Development Department, the revival of Sequoyah High Schoolin Tahlequah, and a population increase of Cherokee Nation citizens from 55,000 to 156,000. She was also instrumental in providing financial and technical assistance to members of the tribe so that they could get off welfare and open small businesses – generating Cherokee Nation economic self-sufficiency.

"Prior to my election," says Mankiller, "young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief."

Personal life

After many years working together on Cherokee community development projects, Mankiller married her longtime friend, Charlie Lee Soap, a full-blood Cherokee traditionalist and fluent Cherokee speaker, in 1986. They live on Mankiller's ancestral land at Mankiller Flats.

Achievements

She won several awards including Ms. Magazine's Woman of the Year in 1987, Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Oklahoma Women's Hall of Fame, Woman of the Year, John W. Gardner Leadership Award, Independent Sector, and the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Her first book, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, an autobiography, became a national bestseller. Gloria Steinem said in a review that, "As one woman's journey, Mankiller opens the heart. As the history of a people, it informs the mind. Together, it teaches us that, as long as people like Wilma Mankiller carry the flame within them, centuries of ignorance and genocide can't extinguish the human spirit." In 2004, Mankiller co-authored Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women.

Controversy

Mankiller's terms as chief still had their controversy. Mankiller established the law that limited tribal membership to descendants of the 'by blood' sections of the Cherokee Dawes Rolls. The 'by blood' sections of Dawes Rolls included intermarried whites, non-indians who bought their position onto the rolls for land allotments, and other adopted tribes such as the Delaware, Shawnee, Creek, and Natchez. The law excluded only the 'freedmen' section listed on the rolls, generating the later Cherokee freedmen controversy. This law was ruled unconstitutional in 2006 by the Cherokee Nation's Judicial Appeals Tribunal (now called the Cherokee Supreme Court).

Mankiller's administration initiated many conflicts with the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians (UKB), the other federally-recognized Cherokee tribe headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Her administration questioned the jurisdiction of the UKB, culminating in the violent closure of the UKB's smoke shops.

Mankiller gave extravagant bonuses to her top administrators upon leaving office directly out of the Nation General fund, and without approval by the Tribal Council. Wilma faced embezzlement allegations of tribal funds at the end of her final term in office; however, these allegations never made their way to court.

Bibliography

• Hurtado, Albert L., editor. Mankiller, Wilma Pearl, introduction. Reflections on American Indian History: Honoring the Past, Building a Future. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. ISBN 0806138963.
• Mankiller, Wilma, Vine Deloria, Jr., and Gloria Steinem. Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2004. ISBN 1-55591-516-7
• Mankiller, Wilma and Michael Wallis. Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. ISBN 0-312-20662-3
• Smith, Barbara, Gloria Steinem, Gwendolyn Mink, Marysa Navarro, and Wilma Mankiller, editors. A Reader's Companion to the History of Women in the U.S. Boston: Mariner Books, 1999. ISBN 0-395-67173-6
• Kauger, Yvonne, Richard Du Bey, Wilma Pearl Mankiller, Judy A. Zelio. Promoting Effective State-Tribal Relations: A Dialogue. National Conference of State Legislatures: 1990. ISBN 1555169759.
• Mankiller, Wilma P. The chief cooks: traditional Cherokee recipes. Muskogee, OK: Hoffman Printing Company, 1988. ASIN B000728364.

References

• Edmunds, R. David. The New Warriors: Native American Leaders Since 1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
• Mankiller, Wilma. Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.
• Houghton Mifflin Review of A Readers Companion to the History of Women in the U.S
• Nelson, Andrew. People: "Wilma Mankiller" Salon.com, Nov. 20, 2001.