A girl relocated to San Francisco came home to lead the Cherokee Nation
At 11, Wilma Mankiller was moved with her family from an Oklahoma farm to a squalid San Francisco hotel under a federal relocation scheme. Two decades later she returned home, and she went on to become the first woman elected Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Her face now appears on a US quarter.
Mankiller was born on November 18, 1945, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, one of eleven children of Charley Mankiller, a full-blood Cherokee, and Clara Irene Sitton. The family lived on her grandfather's land allotment in Adair County until a drought in 1955 made farming harder. Under the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, federal agents promised better jobs and housing in cities; in reality the Mankillers found no apartment waiting and spent weeks in a rundown Tenderloin hotel. At school, classmates mocked her surname, her clothes and her speech.
She married an Ecuadorian student, raised two daughters and found her calling in 1969, when Native activists occupied Alcatraz. She mostly raised funds and gathered food, water and blankets for those on the island, and during the 19-month occupation she learned how to organise and do paralegal research. Around the same time she discovered she shared her father's polycystic kidney disease. She went on to work with the Pit River Tribe on land claims and spent five years as a social worker focused on children.
Back in Oklahoma from 1976, she became a skilled grant writer for the Cherokee Nation and, by the early 1980s, directed its new Community Development Department, where rural residents identified their own needs and built solutions with their own labour. A water project in Bell was later dramatised in the film The Cherokee Word for Water. Principal Chief Ross Swimmer chose her as his running mate in 1983, making her the first elected female Deputy Chief, and she moved up when he joined the Bureau of Indian Affairs, serving until 1995. Her government added health clinics, a mobile eye clinic, ambulances, education and job training, and funded them with factories, shops and bingo while taking control of tribal finances.
Illness shadowed her: myasthenia gravis, lymphoma, breast cancer and two kidney transplants. She wrote a bestselling autobiography and lectured on sovereignty and women's rights, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and died of pancreatic cancer on April 6, 2010. In 2021 the US Mint announced she would feature on its American Women quarters.
Source: Wilma Mankiller
