Hers is a life that has come full circle.
Wilma Mankiller has taken many turns since her childhood in the hills of eastern Oklahoma. Some of them have been predictable, such as housewife and mother; others, such as political activist, were surprising at first, even to her.
And some she did not choose, such as in 1956, when her father, a full-blooded Cherokee, enrolled in a federal program intended to urbanize rural Indians. Until then, she had never been west of Muskogee, Okla. When she, her seven brothers and sisters and her parents boarded a train and headed for San Francisco, she didn’t feel excited or even curious.
“I felt sad,” says the 48-year-old Mankiller. She refers to that trip, even today, as “my own little Trail of Tears,” a reference to the notorious Trail of Tears of 1838, when the Cherokees were forced to move from their homeland in what is now Georgia and the two Carolinas hundreds of miles west.
In the late ’70s, she returned to Oklahoma-divorced, mother of two girls, but feeling centered.
“I knew I was home,” she says. The protests of the ’60s had given her a mission and a voice. Settling in Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee nation, Mankiller became a political agitator for water lines, health clinics, better schools.
Then, in 1985, the circle was complete: Mankiller became the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, the second largest Native American Nation in the United States (only the Navajo Nation is larger). She is the first elected female leader of a major Indian tribe.
Earlier this month, Mankiller announced she will not seek re-election to a third-term next year. “People don’t own these positions. I’ve always said that a good leader will use ideas and programs and then pass the baton onto someone else.”
Mankiller’s plans beyond 1995 are not definite, but she says she is not going to run for another elective office.
It is tempting to see a soft-spoken, collected woman as a living symbol, an idea that her autobiography, “Mankiller: A Chief and Her People” (St. Martin’s Press, $22.95), does little to dispel. Written by Mankiller and Michael Wallis, a Tulsa journalist, the book weaves parts of Mankiller’s life with chapters that parallel the history of the Cherokees.
“In the past, I had been approached by a couple of publishers about doing my autobiography,” Mankiller said during a stop in Chicago. “They wanted me to do a very maudlin book: a poor girl grows up with no indoor plumbing, goes to the big city, comes home and becomes chief kind of book. And I didn’t want to do a book like that.
“I wanted to do a book that would put my life as a contemporary Native American woman in a historical context, so that people would not only understand more about me but also they would understand more about the Cherokee nation and Native issues in general. But when I tried to tell these publishers that, they would just go blank on me.”
So Mankiller shelved the idea of writing a book. Certainly she had enough to do. Since becoming chief of a tribe with more than 150,000 enrolled members, Mankiller has been busy on several fronts.
“My role is to advocate for all the tribal members in all areas, from treaty rights to health care,” she says. “Also, I manage the structure called the Cherokee nation. We have an annual budget of $68 million and 1,200 employees that work for businesses and agencies. Just to give you a thumbnail sketch: We run our own health care clinics; we have a fully accredited high school; we are building an $11 million job corps center; we run head-start centers; we give higher education scholarships; we build water systems and other basic infrastructure.
“So, in a way, my job is like being a CEO, a social worker and a president of a little tiny country-all at the same time.”
Along the way, Mankiller has been honored with numerous awards-Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame, in 1986; Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year, 1987; Ladies Home Journal’s 100 Most Important Women in America, 1988, and honorary degrees from Dartmouth College and Yale University.
At Yale an editor from St. Martin’s Press heard Mankiller make a few comments at the Law School. “I talked about history and effect,” Mankiller says. And from there, the idea of a historical autobiography was born.
“Gloria Steinem helped me figure out how to organize it,” says Mankiller, “with one chapter of history and one chapter of my personal story. We still had people say, `Well, that’s not going to work because readers will just skip the history.’ But that is absolutely not true.”
In the back of the book the autobiography has a chronology. According to Mankiller, the idea is so that “you could see the ever-changing policies of the U.S. government towards Native people. People will say about Native Americans, `What went wrong?’ Here, just taking a look at the chronology might give you a clue as to what went wrong.
“It’s also the only autobiography I’ve ever seen with a bibliography,” says Mankiller with a laugh. “I did that so that if someone reading the book says, `My goodness, I didn’t know that Thomas Jefferson conceptualized Indian removal,’ there are references so that they can go back and check that.”
Ironically, Mankiller returned to her roots by first leaving them.
When Charley and Irene Mankiller moved their young family to San Francisco, through the federal relocation program, theymet other people who had been relocated from various parts of the country.
“I think that that move and then meeting relocated families politicized our family even without us knowing it,” Mankiller says. It also helped that her father insisted that the family discuss politics and history around the dinner table.
In 1969, Alcatraz Island was occupied by a group of Indian students from San Francisco State and the University of California at Berkeley who claimed the island “in the name of Indians of all tribes.” Mankiller says it was “a watershed period for me.”
By that time she was married to Hugo Olaya, a wealthy Ecuadorean businessman, and was the mother of two daughters, Gina and Felicia.
“But I felt that something was wrong with me because I was completely happy being a traditional housewife,” says Mankiller. “You have to understand that part of the time, with the political and social change, the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Movement was starting.”
But part of it was something else, something that touched Mankiller.
“The students who took over the island said things that I had felt but didn’t know how to articulate. It was the first time I heard people of my generation-Native people-stand up and talk about the U.S.’s obligation to uphold treaty rights, the need for more education, health care and jobs.”
This talk appealed to Mankiller. She related to the issues, and her whole family got involved in the Alcatraz Island protest.
“I think all of us really believed then, in 1969, that we could change the world,” she says. “There were such feelings of hope and optimism and we were willing to work toward that change.”
But the world didn’t change exactly the way it had been supposed in 1969. Still, Mankiller had found her calling; she got involved in Native American rights in California. By 1977, divorced, she moved back to Oklahoma with her daughters. There, she got involved with Cherokee issues. Several years later, she married Charlie Soap, 48, a full-blooded Cherokee and community activist whom she credits with helping her win election as chief.
Was gender a factor in her campaign? How hard was it for a woman to become chief of the Cherokee nation?
“It was hard,” says Mankiller. “It was very, very hard. In fact, as the 1983 campaign progressed, the only issue in the race was my being female. So it was a very painful campaign in many ways-to face your own people and have them tell you that the tribe might be the laughing stock of all tribes if a woman was elected.”
She got past that issue, Mankiller says, “by just outworking all my opponents. And Charlie helped me a great deal.”
Her re-election as chief in 1991, winning more than 80 percent of the vote, seems to have finally put that gender debate to rest.
“I think the issue now is who can best lead the tribe?” Mankiller says. “Most of our people are poor, and most are pragmatic. I think they care about competence more than anything else.”
As for the future, Mankiller views that as a continuing process.
“If you look at our story, which is just the story of one tribe, you get an idea of what Native Americans are struggling with and for today,” she says.
“The details of what happened to our tribe are different from what happened to other tribes. But the net effect is the same. What you see is this continual social, political, economic and spiritual disruption of people over and over and over.
“What’s happening to us now is we are finally shaking off a couple hundred of years of thinking that our history didn’t exist, that our language is archaic, that our religion is pagan. Once that process is complete, we will be able to trust our own thinking again and articulate our own vision of the future.”
