Module 5 - Wilma Mankiller

I found it very interesting that Wilma Mankiller served as the first ever female chief of the Cherokee Nation, and during here reign, was recognized for her many accomplishments, including, receiving from then President Bill Clinton the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

During the interview when asked about sovereignty, Wilma Mankiller expresses her beliefs in that this is inherent, and reminds the audience that Native tribal governments were in existence long before the United States government.  She also points out something important in the answer to her question.  Sovereignty is about more than just supreme power, it’s about having control over your own vision for the future, and your destiny.  This for me really speaks to the significance of recognition of Native Americans, sovereignty, as a means for identifying with something to which you belong, real meaning and purpose through association. She goes on to make the link between sovereignty and self-awareness, self-identity, and health.  These are things that she helped to foster during her leadership.

Mankiller also shows strong support for culminating the many social, economic, and cultural aspects of Cherokee Nation consisting of over 240,000 members, to find common ground.  And within that challenge, her role as a leader was to unify members not as social or economic classes, but at Cherokee Nation members, a unified identity that all could relate to regardless of their status, a stratification of sorts, as Mankiller refers to it.  This stratification is perhaps one of the biggest contributing factors in the continual revitalization process that Cherokee tribe, as well as other tribes have gone through historically.  Mankiller speaks of the significance of being able to “hold on to a sense of who we are”, and re-establish family and community in the midst of upheaval, and this has been common place for Native Americans throughout all history, especially post-contact, and the relocation of Cherokee tribes from the Southeast to Oklahoma, leaving behind connections to sacred ancestral land, their homes, their identity as a people.  Upon arrival in Oklahoma “Indian Land,” they began immediately rebuilding their lives, with a vision toward the future. 

In this interview, Mankiller continues to reference the importance of trusting your own thinking, and the impact this has on the resiliency of tribal community. “I think if you trust your own thinking and you truly believe that from within the cultural context of your tribal community that you can rebuild your nation than you can” (Mankiller) I viewed this as being significant in light of my earlier reference to sovereignty, and the ability of Cherokee Nation to control their own vision and future, something to identify with, as a means to trust your thinking, and decisions.

I found Wilma Mankiller’s response when asked about solutions for Native American tribes coming from within to be very relative to the significance of sovereignty.  Mankiller describes the evolution of Native American reliance on government through a period of great oppression, and the interest in federal government and certain programs to define who and what Indians should be.  This is changing though, and we see with the Pan-Indianness movement that Native Americans are less accepting of being told whom they should be, and how they should live.  Mankiller explains, “we can articulate our own needs and we actually have the skill to be able to make, to solve those problems, and make our dreams a reality.”  And this starts with building basic foundations that are rooted in a sense of self-worth, trusting your thinking, and a strong sense of self-efficacy and belief in oneself.  This was essential in Wilma Mankiller's efforts as a leader to encourage in rural communities to step up and build their own infrastructure.  She states “all we did was trust people; it’s that simple” (Mankiller).  This concept of broad ownership, and moving away from top down solutions was the approach that she (Mankiller) successfully used to foster solutions and keep Cherokee Nation moving forward under her leadership.

References:

Mankiller, Wilma. "Governance, Leadership, and the Cherokee Nation." Leading Native Nations interview series. Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. September 29, 2008. Interview.