Passage IV

Leading the Cherokee

According to Wilma P. Mankiller, whose job was like running a large company. In 1993, she had a $78 million budget and 1,200 employees, and she answered to 140,000 people. What will she do next? She was the elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and the first woman in recorded history to lead a major North American Indian tribe.

In 1945, in Oklahoma, Mankiller (the name stems from a Cherokee military title) was born. She spent her teen years and her early adulthood in San Francisco. In 1969, just outside the city, American Indian demonstrators occupied Alcatraz Island to protest the government's treatment of American Indians. The protesters didn't like the way the government was treating American Indians. Listening to the activists, Mankiller realized that they were giving voice to feelings that she herself had. Mankiller began raising funds for the Alcatraz protestors and taking college courses in sociology. Several years later, she returned to Oklahoma with her two small daughters, determined to change her people's lives.

(50)She led projects to build houses and to bring running water to isolated towns. She seeked start-up funding for the Cherokee Gardens being a commercial gardening operation. Her success with economic development led to her election, in 1983, as deputy chief. Four years later, Mankiller was elected principal chief. Still emphasizing self-help as a route in order to get more self-esteem, her and her colleagues created a Department of Commerce to coordinate future business development with the needs of existing enterprises. Mankiller also established programs that encourage students to read and write Cherokee and to pass that knowledge to others.

The 1987 election was marred by controversy over whether a woman could hack it, and Mankiller's margin of victory was slim. (59) However, in the 1991 election, in a tribute to her leadership skills and hard work, Mankiller won by a landslide.