who was wilma mankiller?

Answer 1

Wilma Mankiller
The first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, she took tragedy and illness and made strength. And don't ask where she got her name.

Nov. 20, 2001 | San Francisco transformed many people living there during the 1960s. Its shabby, lunch-pail-toting neighborhoods became crucibles for a society recasting its values. The fire eventually caught a shy housewife and mother in her 20s named Mrs. Hugo Olaya and alchemized her into Wilma Pearl Mankiller, a symbol of both feminism and Native American self-determination.

In 1985 Mankiller, now 57, became the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, the 220,000-member Native American tribe based in Tahlequah, Okla., to which she belongs. She did it not only by overcoming the usual barriers set against Native Americans, but also by vaulting the chauvinistic hurdles imposed by her fellow Cherokees, who had never been led by a woman.


Once chief, Mankiller took the traditional "women's issues" of education and health care and made them tribal priorities. She raised $20 million to build a much-needed infrastructure for schools and other projects, including an $8 million job-training center. The largest Cherokee health clinic was started under her tenure in Stilwell, Okla., and is now named in her honor. Mankiller also sought to reunite the Eastern Cherokee, a group based in North Carolina, with the larger Western division.

She ruled with grace and humor -- she often teased patronizing Anglos by telling them her surname was due to her reputation; in fact, "Mankiller" is a Cherokee military term for a village protector -- and with organizational smarts learned in the blue-collar neighborhoods of clapboard and "ethnic politics" that circled San Francisco Bay.


Her journey -- from complacency to activism to political power followed a familiar boomer flight path, but hers was a working woman's ascendancy. It was born in the rural grit of Adair County, Okla., and the tough industrial neighborhood of San Francisco's Hunters Point. Elite, tree-shaded suburbs like Pasadena or Grosse Pointe that shaped so many '60s radicals couldn't have been more remote to Mankiller.

Mankiller grew up on her father Charley's ancestral Oklahoma lands. "Dirt poor" was how she described her early life. The Mankillers frequently ate suppers of squirrel and other game. The house had no electricity. Her parents used coal oil for illumination.

In 1956 Charley Mankiller, eager to provide a better life for his growing family, moved them from Oklahoma to California as part of a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) program, initiated by the same bureaucrats who had "relocated" Japanese-Americans during World War II. The program, a misguided experiment in social engineering, transplanted rural Native Americans to jobs in industrial cities, thus serving to weaken reservation ties and diffuse the little political clout the tribes held. It was another insult in a history of them stretching back two centuries.

In 1838 the Cherokee Nation was ripped from its ancestral homelands in the Carolinas, Tennessee and Georgia by U.S. Army troops acting under orders from the federal government. The forced march to the Oklahoma reservations, the famous "Trail of Tears," killed thousands of men, women and children. Buffeted by white assaults -- both physical and legal -- the Cherokees would spend more than 100 years as wards of the state. It wasn't until 1970 that Washington allowed the tribe to elect its leaders directly.

Wilma was 11 when the Mankillers arrived in San Francisco. Charley found work as a rope maker and the family settled down. Wilma had a difficult transition. She and her siblings were the proverbial hicks in the big city. A kindly Mexican family showed them how to work a telephone and taught Wilma to roller skate. Charley Mankiller had instilled in his children a pride in their heritage, and San Francisco's Indian Center, located in the Mission District, fostered it. The center became Wilma's after-school refuge. The city's diversity exposed her to other things. In high school, African-American girlfriends influenced Mankiller's taste in popular culture. While white girls swooned over Fabian and Elvis, Mankiller absorbed Etta James and B.B. King. Life in a poor black neighborhood, Mankiller told a Sweet Briar College audience in 1993, taught her other valuable lessons.

"What I learned from my experience in living in a community of almost all African-American people," she said, "is that poor people have a much, much greater capacity for solving their own problems than most people give them credit for."

Mankiller exhibited no appetite for intellectual ambition as a teenager. In her 1993 autobiography, "Mankiller: A Chief and Her People," co-written with Michael Wallis, she recalled hating the classroom. When she graduated from high school in June 1963, she expected that to be the end of formal schooling.

"There were never plans for me to go to college," she said. "That thought never even entered my head."

Instead, a tedious pink-collar job followed graduation, as did a fast courtship and marriage to a handsome Ecuadorean college student, Hugo Olaya, with whom Mankiller had two children. Olaya's family was middle-class; his prospects were good. At 17 the pretty girl, whose dark, flashing eyes gave her a resemblance to actress Natalie Wood, settled down to live the life of a California hausfrau -- replete with psychedelic pantsuits, baby strollers and European vacations.

Answer 2

Wasn't she an Indian? Let me check for you: yeah, prinicipal chief of the Cherokee Nation, born in 1945. I think I heard her speak at U.C. Berkeley or Cody's books....

Answer 3

What were the names of her siblings