Wilma Mankiller

Mankiller was born at the Indian hospital in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and grew up on her grandfather's allotment in Adair County without electricity or running water, the family living on hunted game and what they grew. She was eleven in 1956 when drought and a denied bank loan pushed the family into the federal government's Indian Relocation Program, which promised jobs and housing in San Francisco and mostly delivered neither. She was mocked at school for her surname and her accent and ran away once, to her grandmother's farm, before coming back. She graduated high school in 1963, married an Ecuadorian college student that November, had two daughters by 26, and found her way into the Bay Area's Native American rights movement almost by accident.

She helped run supplies during the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz, then worked land-claims cases for the Pit River Tribe and helped draft what became the Indian Child Welfare Act before moving back to Oklahoma in 1976. The Cherokee Nation hired her the next year, and she built her reputation the slow way, running a self-help water project in Bell that required residents to dig sixteen miles of pipeline themselves rather than wait on federal contractors. Chief Ross Swimmer picked her as his running mate in 1983 over death threats and burned billboards, and when he left for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1985, Mankiller became the first woman to lead the Cherokee Nation. She served ten years, during which enrollment rose from 68,000 to 170,000 and annual revenue reached 25 million dollars from businesses she built nearly from nothing.

Her body kept failing while she built the institutions. A 1979 car accident, caused by another driver, killed her close friend Sherry Morris and left Mankiller needing 17 reconstructive surgeries. Recovering from that, she developed myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease, and diagnosed it herself after recognizing the symptoms during a telethon. Her kidneys, damaged by the same polycystic disease that had killed her father, failed in 1990, and her brother Don gave her one of his — a niece gave her a second transplant in 1998, the same year Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She stepped down as chief in 1995 rather than run again, after a lymphoma diagnosis meant she could no longer take the drugs that kept a transplanted kidney alive.

Mankiller was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in March 2010 and died a month later, on April 6, at her home in Adair County, the same county she had grown up in without power or plumbing. About 1,200 people attended the memorial at the Cherokee National Cultural Grounds, and both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama sent statements. She is buried at Echota Cemetery in Stilwell. The U.S. Mint announced her likeness for its American Women quarter program in 2021, and Mattel produced a Wilma Mankiller Barbie doll in 2023. The Bell water project she once had to argue Cherokee families into building for themselves is still the story the Nation tells new employees first.

Wilma Mankiller's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Indian Child Welfare Act law
  Contributed research and drafting before returning to Oklahoma 1978
• Bell Waterline Project building
  Rural water system built with resident-donated labor, her model for self-help development 1981
• Cherokee Nation self-governance compact law
  Secured direct federal block-grant authority for the tribe 1990
• Mankiller: A Chief and Her People book
  Bestselling autobiography written with Michael Wallis 1993
• Every Day Is a Good Day book
  Reflections gathered from Native women leaders 2004

• November 18, 1945 aged 0 Born at the Indian hospital in Tahlequah, Oklahoma
• 1956 aged ~11 Family relocates to San Francisco under the federal relocation program
• 1969 aged ~24 Helps supply the occupation of Alcatraz
• November 9, 1979 aged 33 A car accident kills her close friend Sherry Morris and badly injures her
• 1983 aged ~38 Elected deputy chief on Ross Swimmer's ticket
• December 5, 1985 aged 40 Becomes the first woman Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation
• 1990 aged ~45 Receives a kidney transplant from her brother Don
• 1998 aged ~53 Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
• April 6, 2010 aged 64 Dies at home in Adair County, Oklahoma

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