Wilma Mankiller has the features that identify her people. Her high cheekbones frame large, soft eyes that look into a man as much as at him. Clasped in front of her, her thick fingers appear as though they would be at ease shucking corn or clutching a pen to authorize an act of office.
She smiles often. And when she laughs, it is from the soul and hearty, especially when recalling the times when she`s tried to register at hotels and has been asked ”Is that your real name?”
Her voice is deep, her speech forthright, and her eyes rarely stray from the person she`s talking to. Her coal black hair drops straight to wide shoulders on which rest the responsibility for 67,000 lives.
It`s hard to believe that the new Chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma once was afraid of elevators.
”We`d see people walk into this thing, and the doors would close and God knows where it took them,” Mankiller said. ”It scared my brother and me, so we didn`t use elevators.”
That was in 1957, and the beginning of an odyssey that took Mankiller away from her people before bringing her back to lead them. It began not far from here, but quickly took an abrupt turn.
When other children her age were discovering hula hoops and ”Leave It To Beaver,” Mankiller found herself uprooted from Oklahoma, discovering life in a rough district of San Francisco. The city was a world away from the tiny community of Stilwell, where she had ridden horseback to a spring to fetch water for a house with no plumbing and no electricity.
And no sirens.
”We had never heard a siren,” she recalled. ”We were sure a wolf was loose out there somewhere because the sirens kept going all night long.”
The land on which she had been born in 1945 dried up in 1956, and the family`s strawberry crop wasn`t enough to produce a living.
Charlie Mankiller sought help for his family from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He was told that his family could be relocated to San Francisco through a federal program designed to ”mainstream” American Indians.
The mainstream stopped at a housing project for the Mankillers, one of two non-black families in the area, adjusting to traffic and noise from buildings bunched together, and missing the plains, where the seemingly endless vista is interrupted only by the smoky silhouette of the next distant hill, with roads that follow river paths, and clear skies across which the blurred outline of a darting hawk is a frequent and exciting image.
Such scenes branded Wilma Mankiller`s memory.
”It was a very difficult adjustment,” she said of her childhood move.
”It was like taking a group of people and moving them 30 years ahead, with no preparation at all.”
It wasn`t the first time her people had been relocated, and the adjustments this time weren`t severe. In 1938, one of every four of the 16,000 Cherokees forced from their southeastern homes died along the famous and haunting ”Trail of Tears.” Those who survived had memories of plantations, of businesses, of schools, of a civilized and sophisticated life, taken from them because they had the features you see when you look at Wilma Mankiller.
She`s back on her family`s land now; but, 30 years later, the word
”relocated” has a jagged definition in her vocabulary.
”We seemed to get through what was a really horrible time by hanging on to an awful lot of pride,” Mankiller said. ”With a name like mine, it`s very obvious that you`re American Indian, and so we always had a lot of pride associated with that.”
Mankiller. The uniqueness of the name is lost in the irony that it belongs to the Cherokee Nation`s first female chief. In some smaller tribes, women have served as tribal chairmen, but Mankiller is the first woman to have sole leadership of the governing body for the Cherokees, the tribe second only to the Navajo in size.
In the 18th Century, ”mankiller” was a title of military honor
–”something like a general,” Chief Mankiller explained. It was given to warriors, and at some point one of those warriors decided to make his title his name.
She says that she is less aggressive than the name would imply, but like her ancestor who bore the title, she is no less a warrior.
From her headquarters in this small town, the new chief is waging her own war against the social ills–mainly some of this country`s most extreme poverty–which have made a once-proud tribe a nation of passive, if not defeated people.
The headquarters of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is much like any suburban office complex. The single story brown-brick structure, built in 1979, is more modern than most buildings in Tahlequah.
Its operation, however, is a throwback to government for the people.
Mankiller believes in an open-door policy. So at any business hour her office lobby may be crowded with tribal members who are disgruntled with the system or who may simply want to give the chief some advice.
And she listens, squeezing impromptu complaints about tribal burial benefits around meetings with heads of tribal departments or planning meetings with outside officials concerning a proposed hydroelectric plant.
The 14-county nation`s government operates on a $30 million annual budget. It owns a 160-acre industrial tract in Stilwell, a cattle and poultry ranch in Kenwood, and a woodcutting operation in Candy Mink Springs. The nation has fought a court battle to maintain rights to the Arkansas Riverbed, on which it hopes to build a $100 million power plant, which would offer tribal income in the 21st Century.
Yet there are Cherokees in these hills who lead a reclusive lifestyle, surviving on less than $2,000 a year. If they hold tribal pride, it is overshadowed by publicized problems such as alcoholism.
”Other people look at our people and see a whole lot of social problems,” Mankiller said. ”I look at our people and see a whole lot of tenacity and strength and beauty.”
She began to see those qualities in 1969, when, for the first time in her life, Wilma Mankiller had it made.
When she lived in San Francisco, she married a wealthy Ecuadoran who had shown her a new world and new places, including South America and Europe. She had daughters, ages five and two, and was happy for their good life, which was so different from hers at the same age.
Then she heard that some American Indian college students had occupied Alcatraz Island in protest of Indian treatment.
”Those college students who participated in Alcatraz articulated a lot of feeling I had that I`d never been able to express,” she said. ”I was a mother, so I couldn`t join them, but I did fund-raising and got involved in the activist movement.”
She started attending college at night, which led to a job as Native American Programs Coordinator with Oakland Public Schools, which in turn led to more activism, and to a divorce from her husband of 10 years.
Which led back, in 1977, to Oklahoma.
”I wanted my children to experience rural life,” she said, ”and I thought some of the skills I`d learned out there (in San Francisco), I could practice here.”
Her skills and practice mixed with a degree in social work she`d gotten from San Francisco State, and by 1979, Mankiller was tribal planner and program development specialist for the Cherokee Nation, and was in graduate studies at the University of Arkansas.
Then came two years that would test for the personal tenacity by which she had defined her people.
Asked to identify a turning point in her life, Mankiller will recall a day in 1979, when her car collided with a car carrying her best friend, who was killed in the crash.
”Everybody kept looking at the car, and looking at me and saying `I don`t know how on Earth you could have survived this. There must be some reason.` ”
There would be more to survive. As she recovered from injuries sustained in the accident, Mankiller learned that she had a form of muscular dystrophy. Chemotherapy treatments were long and painful, but today the disease is in remission. This spring she will appear on a national telethon to tell of her survival.
”Everything has been up from that point on,” she said. ”In a way, it seems it was a test of perseverance or something that I went through. It was a maturing kind of process. It was a definite preparation.”
In 1981, Mankiller founded the Cherokee Nation Community Development Department, which she directed until 1983, when then-chief Ross Swimmer asked her to run as his deputy principal chief as he sought re-election.
”A lot of people said it would be political suicide for Ross to have a woman run for that office,” Mankiller said. At first she declined his invitation, but later changed her mind. She called a meeting to announce her candidacy. Four people showed up.
Still, with Swimmer`s endorsement, she won that election. Then, last December, when President Reagan appointed Swimmer to be director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the tribe`s first female deputy chief became its first female principal chief.
”I`m conscious of the fact that I`m the first female chief,” she said,
”and people are watching me, and I want to make sure I do a good job. So I feel like I have to do a little extra.
”Cherokee history has been one of a matrilineal system,” Mankiller said, challenging the stereotypical Hollywood version of Indian life. Indeed, historians agree that it was the anglicization of tribal life that taught her people to put their women into subservient positions.
So Wilma Mankiller`s apparent step forward is actually a step back toward a time when Cherokee women chose who would be the tribe`s next leader.
Not all her constituents, however, want the women to hold high positions. Perry Wheeler, who opposed Swimmer in 1983, dislikes having a woman in charge, and will oppose Mankiller if she decides to run for election in 1987.
”Women`s liberation just hasn`t caught up with the Cherokees.” said Wheeler. ”They just don`t think it`s a woman`s job, and a lot of them resent it.”
That she is a woman may not be the biggest factor that sets Wilma Mankiller apart from her predecessors.
From the time that Oklahoma became a state, in 1907, until the Indian Claims Commission Act, in 1946, Cherokee government lay dormant. Even after the U.S. Government allowed the tribal government to reorganize, the chief was appointed by the president. In 1949, that appointment went to W. W. Keeler, who also happened to be the chairman of the board of Phillips Petroleum.
In 1971, the Cherokees held their first election since statehood. Keeler was elected and served until 1975, when Swimmer, who was a lawyer and a banker, was elected.
”There was a tendency for the tribe to be led by what I call the
`Cherokee elite`–people who were from prominent Cherokee families,”
Mankiller said. ”I`m a radical departure from that. My background is so different from the prior leadership of the tribe, that there has got to be a departure.”
And so it was recently that the chief traveled to a small community to participate in a fund-raising event in which members of her tribe were gathering to build a house for one of their elders who couldn`t afford it otherwise.
That`s the sort of grassroots involvement Mankiller hopes to see flourish during her administration. It is the kind of activity, she says, that will survive outside influence, such as impending cuts in financial support, in President Reagan`s efforts for a balanced budget.
Mankiller, a Democrat, said she`d like five minutes with the President, in which she would try to get him to ”see the tremendous strength and beauty and creativity that I see in Indian people in this country, and the tremendous potential for people to solve their own problems, given half a chance.”
Behind Wilma Mankiller`s desk, carved in wood, is the Seal of the Cherokee Nation. Part of the words are written in the Cherokee alphabet, invented by Sequoyah, one of the tribe`s prominent members, in 1821.
While they`ve grown passive waiting for revitalization of their tribe, many Cherokees have passed their language from one generation to the next.
And they teach their children the Cherokee religion, a mysterious spirituality that believes that each person has a guide to lead him toward perfection.
The new chief isn`t fluent in the language, but she practices the religion.
”It`s an understanding of the world that`s devoid of selfishness or a feeling that you are somehow more important than other people, or that one particular group of people is more important than another. It`s really an understanding of yourself in the world.
”At one point we were a very strong, powerful people who ran our own schools and newspapers, who had an independent economy. But from statehood until today, we`ve been characterized by poverty and a lot of problems like that.
”I want to be remembered as the person who helped us restore faith in ourselves.”
