Wilma Pearl Mankiller was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the sixth of eleven children of a Cherokee father and a mother of Dutch and Irish descent. She grew up in a small house with no electricity or plumbing, and her parents sold peanuts and strawberries they grew in their garden to make a living. In 1956, at the age of 11, the family was forced to move to San Francisco as part of a Bureau of Indian Affairs’ relocation policy. She had difficulty in school, often teased by her classmates about her surname, clothing, and speaking style. She quit school and lived with her grandmother in Riverbank, California, for a year. After returning to San Francisco, she continued her studies and became involved in the San Francisco Indian Center.
At 18, after graduating high school, she began to work as a secretary in a finance company. Then, she met and married Hector Hugo Olaya de Bardi, with whom she had two daughters. In 1967, at 22, she began to take classes at Skyline Junior College while becoming involved with the American Indian Movement (AIM). In 1969, during the occupation of Alcatraz Island by a group of American Indians in protest of the treatment that American Indians received from the government, Mankiller supported the occupiers by gathering supplies of food, water, and blankets. Inspired by their act, she became more active in the movement and founded and served as president of East Oakland’s Native American Youth Center, believing that restoring the pride of Native heritage of the youth would prevent them from growing up on the streets.
In 1972, at 27, she began to study social welfare at San Francisco State University. Despite her husband’s desires, she bought a car and took her daughters to various Native-American events. During one of the events, she learned about the Pit River Tribe’s campaign to reclaim lands taken from them during the Gold Rush. Mankiller joined the cause and spent the next few years raising funds for its legal defense.
In 1974, she divorced her husband and moved with her daughters to Oakland. There, she worked as a social worker at the Urban Indian Resource Center while researching neglect and child abuse. She concluded that most indigenous children were placed with non-native families and began to work on legislation to prevent children from being taken from their culture. Her efforts were manifested with the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Three years later, Mankiller returned to her home state of Oklahoma, where she continued her activism and founded the Community Development Department for the Cherokee Nation. She completed her Bachelor of Science degree in social sciences at Flaming Rainbow University in Stilwell, Oklahoma, and continued to graduate degree in community development at the University of Arkansas.
In 1979, at the age of 34, she was seriously injured in a car accident, breaking her ribs and crushing a leg and face. While in recovery after numerous surgeries, she was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis – a neuromuscular disease that leads to skeletal muscle weakness. But none of these has prevented her from continuing her community work. A few months later, she began her first community development program in Bell, Oklahoma, recruiting 200 local families to lay 16 miles of pipe for a shared water system in only 14 months. Mankiller’s program was so successful that it became the blueprint for similar programs for other tribes.
In 1981, she was promoted to the first director of the Community Development Department of the Cherokee Nation by the tribal chief Ross Swimmer. After two years, he asked her to be his running mate in the elections for Principal Chief. During the campaign, she faced severe sexism and even received death threats. But this did not stop her, and she became the first woman elected as deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation. Three years later, on December 5th, 1985, when she succeeded Swimmer after his resignation, she became the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation and the first woman elected as chief of any major Native tribe. She was officially elected for two terms, serving in this position for ten years. As principal chief, she improved the tribe’s healthcare, education, and housing conditions. Under her leadership, educational achievement rose, and infant mortality declined.
In 1995, at the age of 50, Mankiller decided not to run for a third term due to ill health. After leaving office, she taught at Dartmouth College’s Native American Studies program for a semester before embarking on a national lecture tour, speaking and promoting Native American and women’s rights. She remained an avid activist for the next decade, even after being diagnosed and treated for cancer. She died at the age of 65.
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