She Preferred “Wilma” to “Chieftaness”

By ANNIE ATURA

April 21, 2010

Wilma Mankiller was not unaware of the satir­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties of her sur­name. In a 1993 speech at Sweet Briar Col­lege, she quipped, “I told [my dri­ver] it was a nick­name, and I’d earned it. So I’m sure there’s some yup­pie some­where still won­der­ing what I did to earn my last name.” It takes a cer­tain kind of per­son to iron­i­cally repeat the stereo­types about one’s own race and gen­der, and then take no spe­cial pains to be polit­i­cally cor­rect one­self, about the “yup­pie” bour­geoisie. Mankiller was intrepid.

The first female chief­tain of the Chero­kee nation, Wilma Mankiller died on April 6, still stout­heart­edly engag­ing with – and ami­ably mock­ing – the assump­tions made about her gen­der, cul­ture, and social val­ues. She served as Chief from 1985 to 1995, when seri­ous health prob­lems forced her into retire­ment. Per­haps because of her self-imposed out­sider sta­tus, Mankiller made no bones about her sense of humor. And per­haps because she refused to take her own his­tory too seri­ously, she suc­ceeded in con­vinc­ing the over­whelm­ing major­ity of Chero­kee con­stituents that a com­pli­cated past would not adversely affect her lead­er­ship capabilities.

Mankiller’s recent death reminds us of the com­pli­cated stance that vic­tims are forced to assume in light of their col­lec­tive set­backs. Mankiller assumed con­trol of her tribe while it was in the midst of seri­ous inter­nal issues, and she dealt with those issues by both rec­og­niz­ing their his­tor­i­cal basis and insist­ing that they be actively addressed. Her sense of humor echoed that dou­ble sen­si­bil­ity: she played on racial and sex­ual under­tones while refus­ing to admit the legit­i­macy of prejudice.

The ori­gin of “Mankiller” is not as far from its intu­itive mean­ing as one might think: the name denotes her ancestor’s tribal posi­tion as a sol­dier of sorts, the man respon­si­ble for the phys­i­cal pro­tec­tion of the tribe on a daily basis. Ms. Mankiller explained, “When we lived here in the South­east, we lived in semi-autonomous vil­lages, and there was some­one who watched over the vil­lage, who had the title of ‘mankiller.’” It is appro­pri­ate, then, that she her­self should assume a pro­tec­tive role for her tribe.

Despite her promis­ing last name, how­ever, Mankiller’s suit­abil­ity for a tribal lead­er­ship posi­tion was not par­tic­u­larly appar­ent dur­ing the first 35 years of her life. Her mother, Clara Irene Sit­ton, was a Dutch and Irish woman who had cho­sen to inte­grate her­self into the Chero­kee com­mu­nity, and Mankiller was the sixth of her eleven chil­dren. When Mankiller was eleven, the fam­ily moved from its plot of allot­ment lands in Okla­homa to a house in San Fran­cisco under the Indian Relo­ca­tion Pro­gram. Mankiller com­pleted her high school edu­ca­tion there and mar­ried at sev­en­teen. She had two daugh­ters with her hus­band, Hugo Olaya, a stu­dent from Ecuador. They moved to Oak­land, and Mankiller decided to attend junior col­lege at what was then San Fran­cisco State Col­lege. She became involved with the San Fran­cisco Indian Cen­ter. As an active mem­ber of that orga­ni­za­tion, she par­tic­i­pated in the occu­pa­tion of Alca­traz in 1969, in which Native Amer­i­cans took over the for­mer prison, claim­ing that its sta­tus as sur­plus fed­eral prop­erty ren­dered it prop­erly Native Amer­i­cans’ under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. The occu­pa­tion lasted for a full 19 months before it was forcibly quelled by the fed­eral government.

Mankiller divorced Olaya in 1977 and moved back to Okla­homa with her two daugh­ters in hopes of recon­nect­ing with her tribe. She remar­ried to a staunch Chero­kee tra­di­tion­al­ist, Char­lie Lee Soap, in 1986. The two moved back to Mankiller’s ances­tral lands. She was elected as Deputy Chief for Ross Swim­mer. When he chose to step down to become head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1985, she assumed the posi­tion of Chief. She was elected in her own right in 1987, and was reelected in 1991, when she received 83% of the pop­u­lar vote. Though Mankiller received death threats and tire slash­ings dur­ing her cam­paign, there is no evi­dence that Mankiller’s per­sonal life actively affected her judg­ment; her two-time land­slide elec­tion seems to indi­cate that the Chero­kee cit­i­zens also believed that to be the case.

At the heart of Mankiller’s polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy lay the con­vic­tion that a com­mu­nity should take respon­si­bil­ity for itself. After mov­ing back to Okla­homa and tak­ing on a low-level job in the Chero­kee gov­ern­ment, she began a project to bring fresh water to the com­mu­nity. The Bell Water and Hous­ing Project put every par­tic­i­pat­ing fam­ily in charge of fund­ing and installing one mile of water pipeline. Its suc­cess con­tributed to the choice to elect her as Deputy and, in time, Chief. The project was in keep­ing with her gen­eral phi­los­o­phy: that Native Amer­i­cans should, as she often said, “solve their own eco­nomic prob­lems.” Mankiller made good on those words. In 1990, she signed a bill that placed the Chero­kee Nation in charge of national funds pre­vi­ously admin­is­tered on their behalf by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She also improved the infra­struc­ture of the com­mu­nity by improv­ing the judi­cial, crim­i­nal, tax­a­tion, and edu­ca­tion sys­tems. In a state­ment hon­or­ing her mem­ory, Obama praised Mankiller’s improve­ment of the “Nation-to-Nation rela­tion­ship between the Chero­kee Nation and the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment.” Mankiller cham­pi­oned the full agency of Native Amer­i­cans, and of all women, by demon­strat­ing their abil­ity to care for themselves.

Despite her per­sonal expe­ri­ence with racism and preda­tory gov­ern­men­tal pol­icy, Mankiller eschewed unsym­pa­thetic attacks on the oppres­sor. Instead, she focused her ener­gies on active edu­ca­tion. In her editor’s note in The Reader’s Com­pan­ion to U.S. Women’s His­tory she writes, “Even the most com­mit­ted fem­i­nist schol­ars knew lit­tle about con­tem­po­rary Native Amer­i­can women or our his­tory. But then who can blame them when Native Amer­i­can peo­ple, women in par­tic­u­lar, are not even a blip on the national screen? Because there is so lit­tle accu­rate infor­ma­tion about Native Amer­i­can women in either edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions or the pop­u­lar cul­ture, stereo­types are pervasive.”

Mankiller was aware of her unique role in his­tory. “Prior to my elec­tion, young Chero­kee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief,” she proudly asserted. But she was also aware of the ways in which she con­sti­tuted a per­fectly unre­mark­able con­tin­u­a­tion of the Chero­kee tra­di­tion. “In some tribes women have held and still hold pow­er­ful lead­er­ship posi­tions,” she wrote in The Reader’s Com­pan­ion. Mankiller described how the Chero­kee had sent tutors to Mount Holyoke to pre­pare them for edu­cat­ing girls at home after an Indian relo­ca­tion in 1839, estab­lish­ing edu­ca­tion for Native Amer­i­can women even as it was denied to white ones.

Mankiller did not shy away from her past or iden­tity any more than she cited it as the foun­da­tion of her per­spi­cac­ity. She did not rep­re­sent her­self in a mas­cu­line or gender-neutral light; rather she embraced her gen­der her­itage only when appro­pri­ate, as when she described the process of writ­ing a book with other women to “weav­ing a com­mu­nal basket.”

She was unafraid of appear­ing weak. She prized none of the trap­pings of chief­dom that related to rit­u­al­ized hier­ar­chy. “At home I can think of very, very few peo­ple who call me ‘Chief;’ most peo­ple just call me Wilma, and that’s how I ask peo­ple to address me,” she said. She attrib­uted a great deal of her own fear­less­ness to her extra­or­di­nary health hur­dles. In 1979, she was in a near-fatal car acci­dent, and she suf­fered myas­the­nia gravis, kid­ney prob­lems (which led to a trans­plant), breast can­cer, and lymphoma.

The Chero­kee only achieved the right to elect their own chief in 1971 – prior to that time the Chief was a US gov­ern­ment appointee cho­sen for his amenabil­ity to fed­eral inter­ests. It is telling that one of the tribe’s first self-appointed lead­ers was a woman, who had described the pow­er­ful Indian Cen­ter in San Fran­cisco as a place for “sort of refugees,” and who had taught her­self to work as a para­le­gal even though nobody she knew went to col­lege. It was only “[a]bsolute faith and con­fi­dence in our own peo­ple and our own abil­ity to solve our own prob­lems” that accounted for her inter­est in gov­ern­ment, and that same innate drive for improve­ment– rather than for vic­tim­iza­tion– led to her polit­i­cal success.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale Col­lege. She is a staff writer for Broad Recog­ni­tion.