Mankiller (Red-Horse Native Productions, Valhalla Entertainment, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ve had such a busy week I haven’t had time to comment on a quite interesting PBS special I watched on Monday night at 10 p.m. – a time slot KPBS is using for some quirky and fascinating political documentaries after Antiques Roadshow. The film had the provocative title Mankiller, and it’s about Wilma Mankiller (1945-2010), a Cherokee whose life was shaped by the political and social ferment of the 1960’s and exemplified what’s meant by that ugly but fashionable Leftist term “intersectionality.” She was born in Tahlequah on the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma and lived in that state’s Adair County on her family’s allotted land until 1956. Then the U.S. government pulled one of the many sadistic and cruel tricks they’ve played on American Native people over the centuries: after decades of policies like “assimilation” and “termination” aimed at severing Native people from their cultural and social traditions and forcing them to accept the norms of white life and culture (one brutally honest official referred to it as “killing the Indian to save the man”), the Eisenhower administration called the man who’d supervised the World War II-era relocation of Japanese-American people into internment camps (ostensibly for military security but actually motivated by racism) for the duration of the war. His new assignment was to move as many Native Americans as possible outside their traditional communities and dump them into cities, and in the case of the Mankiller family they were shoved into the middle of Hunters’ Point, one of the slummier parts of San Francisco and a hothouse of prejudice against them by both whites and Blacks.

Wilma – whose unusual last name was a Cherokee slang term meaning “warrior” – got exposed to the political, social and cultural changes in San Francisco at the time. She met and married a man from Ecuador and had two daughters with him, but ultimately left him when he expected her to give up her political activism and stay home as a wife and mother. While in the Bay Area she met César Chávez and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers and saw the original Black Panthers running free breakfast programs for Black schoolchildren. She was also exposed to 1960’s feminism (Gloria Steinem became a close friend and was interviewed extensively for this documentary), and it was that awakening that led her to divorce her husband in 1976, move back to Oklahoma, and use the tactics and techniques of community organizing to make lives better for her people. Her first project was to ask the local Cherokees what they wanted most – she assumed they’d want a school for their young people but what they actually needed most was running water for their community. Wilma became adept at lobbing the Federal agencies and getting them to find what the tribe’s members said they needed instead of what the Feds assumed would be best for them, and after doing her original organizing as a volunteer she ultimately got a paid position within the Cherokees’ tribal administration. She also got married again, to a fellow Cherokee named Charlie Soap who co-directed a film about her campaign, The Cherokee Word for Water, that in 2015 was voted the best film about Native Americans in the previous 40 years by the American Indisn Film Institute.

She was hired by the Cherokees’ Principal Chief (an elected position voted on by the tribe), Ross Swimmer, who ran for re-election in 1983 with Wilma as his running mate. Not surprisingly, there was quite a lot of opposition from other tribal leaders to having a woman on the ticket of a Principal Chief – this documentary pointed out that, like a lot of other traditional people worldwide, historically their communities had been run by women, but white Americans had come in and “taught” them to adopt a patriarchal system instead – but her ticket won, and when Swimmer was appointed to a federal post at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1985, Wilma succeeded him as Principal Chief. She was then elected Principal Chief in her one right in 1987 and re-elected in 1991 with 80 percent of the vote. As Principal Chief, her top priority was to increase the income of the tribe so it would no longer be dependent on federal handouts, and towards the end of her term she made the controversial decision to use the option the federal government nad made available to Native tribes to build and operate a casino on their land, despite the opposition of Christian ministers and businesspeople on the reservation. She stepped down as Principal Chief in 1995 due to deteriorating health, but returned to activism as an outsider after her successor’s administration was embroiled in financial scandal. Ms. magazine featured her on their cover as one of America’s 20 leading women activists, and she got an audience at the White House from President Bill Clinton. In 2010 her various health issues caught up with her and she died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 61.

Wilma Mankiller’s story is an inspiring one and has some odd turns I hadn’t expected – like the story of how, in December 1973, Richard Nixon signed into law a bill giving land back to Native Americans for the first time in U.S. history. (I’ve long been fascinated by the Nixon presidency because in a real sense he was the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of U.S. presidents: Jekyll Nixon signed into law America’s landmark environmental legislation and proposed national health insurance and a guaranteed annual income, and also recognized China and sought to tone down the Cold War with Russia. Hyde Nixon, meanwhile, expanded the Viet Nam war into Cambodia, kept it going unconscionably long, and concocted an elaborate series of corrupt plans to ensure his own re-election which eventually became known as the Watergate scandal and drove him from office prematurely.) Wilma Mankiller is one of those American heroines who’ve fallen through the cracks – certainly I’d never heard of her before – who showed off just how much good can be accomplished despite the obstacles the U.S. throws up in the way of anyone who tries to do anything positive for ordinary people, especially ordinary people of color, and most especially the people who were here well before we were and from whom we stole this country at gunpoint!