# The Chief *A Biography of Wilma Mankiller* — Legendary Biographies No. 063 - **Subject:** Wilma Pearl Mankiller - **Written by:** Theodore Pemberton - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / American Politics - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 198 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 198 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-073-7) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-466-7) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/063-the-chief.html ## About this book December 5, 1985, Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Wilma Pearl Mankiller is sworn in as the first woman Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. She is forty. She inherits a nation of 100,000 enrolled members emerging from a federal-termination decade, a 1970s economic decline, and a patriarchal council that has not seriously consulted a woman before. Over the next ten years she triples enrolment, builds the Bell, Oklahoma, community water system, and negotiates the 1990 Self-Determination Compact that returned to the Cherokee Nation the authority to administer its own federal funds. Theodore Pemberton's biography opens earlier — in the Rocky Mountain, Oklahoma, sharecropping community where Mankiller was born in 1945 to a Cherokee father and a Dutch-Irish mother — and follows the arc through the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs Relocation Program that moved the family to San Francisco in 1957, the 1969 Alcatraz occupation that the book treats as her political education, the Cherokee Nation community-development director years, the 1979 head-on car accident with her best friend Sherry Morris that nearly killed her, the 1985 ascension, the 1991 election to a full term with 82 percent of the vote, the 1995 retirement after lupus and breast cancer, the 1998 Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the death at Stilwell, Oklahoma in 2010 at sixty-four. What emerges is a portrait of the Cherokee Nation's first woman Principal Chief and one of the most consequential American Indian self-determination organisers of the twentieth century. ## Contents 1. Mankiller Flats 2. The Relocation 3. Hunter's Point 4. The Island 5. The Education 6. The Return 7. Bell 8. The Campaign 9. Principal Chief 10. Nation Building 11. Self-Determination 12. Eighty-Three Percent 13. The Body 14. Charlie Soap 15. The Gender Question 16. A Nation Within a Nation 17. The Medal 18. Every Day Is a Good Day ## Questions **Who is The Chief about?** Wilma Pearl Mankiller. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Chief — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,859 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 198 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Theodore Pemberton is a Boston-based biographer whose books on American presidents and political operatives have been shortlisted three times for the Lukas Prize. He writes biography that takes campaign finance and procedural history seriously, focusing on the mechanics of political power. His early publications, including The Playbook and The Chief, established his reputation for meticulous archival research. His subsequent works, such as The Founder, Blexit, and The Bunker Hours, continued to examine the inner workings of political machines. With The 1972 Florida Primary, The Bletchley Park Hut, and The Mar-a-Lago Storeroom, he turned his attention to specific, high-stakes environments that shaped national policy and intelligence operations. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he spends his time teaching writing workshops and rowing on the Charles River.