Wilma Mankiller

Wilma Mankiller was the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.  She gave an interview in 2008 concerning her career as a native community administrator, sharing her wisdom for the benefit of other native communities facing poverty and the need to prosper.

Mankiller’s prime message is one of personal empowerment.  Rather than expecting aid from external sources like the Bureau of Indian Affairs, her philosophy is that tribal reconstruction can only effectively occur when the community members first come to believe in themselves, in their own capability to rebuild their own nations.

After reviewing the tragic history of the Cherokee people and their severe setbacks and struggles to rebuild their nation, she cited a number of working examples from her personal experience to support the efficacy of her self-help philosophy.  In the 1970’s, the Cherokee nation’s Bell community was particularly impoverished and run down.  One quarter of the dilapidated homes had no indoor plumbing.  Mankiller helped start up a project with her to-be husband at the time, along with other community members, to help the community with their water problem.  They brought technical and material resources to aid in extending the water grid to all homes.

But rather than let the housing authority do the actual construction work for them (which was usually how it was done), Mankiller’s team recruited and employed workers from within Bell community.  She said it was in the people’s best interests to build the pipework themselves because it fostered a sense of control over their own lives.  A sense of helplessness had been dominating the community, which could only hold them back.  It took time for them to convince the community members over a series of meetings to believe they could actually not only change things for the better, but to do so by their own hands. 

Critics outside of the community verbalized skepticism at the time, citing the fact that many community members were on welfare.  How would Mankiller’s team motivate them to do the work?  Cutting through their presumption that all welfare recipients are lazy, Mankiller observed that they were instead largely on welfare because there were no work opportunities available and that this project would provide such an opportunity.  She has “always believed poor people would rise to the occasion if you partnered with them.”

Even Mankiller’s definition of tribal sovereignty reflects not only a nation’s control over its own land and resources, but the people’s control over their own vision and “determine [their] own destiny.”

Interdependence is another virtue emphasized in her interview.  Rather than being fully independent, “people helped one another” when she lived with her family as a child in an off-reservation BIA housing project in San Francisco.  She also added that local communities know best how to solve their own problems.  Outsiders may have ideas, but they cannot be successful since they do not know the community and its issues as intimately as locals do.  Solutions must come from the people themselves through cooperative efforts, with each member contributing their own skills to the situation.

This combined spirit of interdependence and local solutions is what she believes is required for effective change to happen. “Trust your own thinking,” she wisely advises community members.  If you think you can rebuild your own nation, then you can.

Work Cited

Mankiller, Wilma. “Wilma Mankiller: Governance, Leadership and the Cherokee Nation.” Leading Native Nations interview series, Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, U Arizona. 29 Sept. 2008. Web. 22 Sept. 2016. <https://nnidatabase.org/video/wilma-mankiller-governance-leadership-and-cherokee-nation>.