Chapter 1Mankiller Flats

Foreword

I have spent my working life on the transfer of power, and on the machinery underneath it. How a campaign finances itself. How a vote is assembled, one contested precinct at a time. How an office passes from one hand to the next under rules written by people long dead. On December 5, 1985, a succession clause in a constitution activated, and a Deputy Principal Chief became a Principal Chief. The mechanism was one I recognized on sight. The office it delivered was one my shelf had never counted.

That shelf is the American presidency and the operatives who work its margins, and the office of Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation does not sit on it. Not because the Cherokee Nation is small, it is not, but because the frame I was trained in has no slot for a nation inside a nation, a government with its own elections, its own budget, and its own treaties with the United States. I came to Wilma Mankiller expecting to be a tourist in someone else's political system. I discovered, fairly quickly, that I was a specialist who had spent twenty years reading half a map.

What drew me was procedural, which is to say it was the only thing that ever draws me. Mankiller became Chief by succession, the accident-of-office my field knows in its sleep, and then did the thing succession never guarantees: in 1987 she went out and won the office in her own right, in a runoff, in a political culture that had never once given the top job to a woman and that included citizens who believed it never should. I wanted to know how that vote was actually built. Not the meaning of it. The construction of it.

What I expected was a symbol, the first woman, the medal, the quarter with her face on it. What I found, in the public record and her own published account and the press and governance archive that any patient reader can reconstruct, was an administrator. A woman who read budgets. Who negotiated self-governance compacts with the federal government line by line. Who built a functioning government where there had been an administrative shell run out of Washington. The symbol is real. It was never the point. The compact was the point, and the budget, and the waterline in the ground at Bell.

This must be said plainly, because the record around a figure like Mankiller fills up with sentiment faster than almost any subject I have worked on. She did not inspire the Cherokee Nation back into existence. She governed it into capacity. Those are different verbs, and the distance between them is the entire subject of this book.

I write biography that takes procedure seriously because procedure is where power is either constrained or let loose, and because the story a nation tells about a leader is almost never the story of how that leader actually moved money and votes and law. Mankiller understood the difference more clearly than her admirers did. She objected, consistently, when the work was reduced to a story about her. So this is not that story. This is a book about the work.

I did not expect to find, on the far side of my own frame, the cleanest case I have ever studied of self-government simply working. I found it in the hills of Adair County, Oklahoma, in a nation my shelf had failed to count. That failure was mine, and correcting it is why I wrote this book.

— Theodore Pemberton, Boston

Chapter 1 · Mankiller Flats

The land came first. Before the politics, before the elections, before the water project and the health clinics and the federal negotiations and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, before Wilma Mankiller became the most consequential Native American leader of the twentieth century, there was the land, 160 acres of allotment property in Adair County, Oklahoma, in the rolling hill country east of Tahlequah, where the oaks grew thick and the creeks ran cold and the soil was thin and red and studded with limestone, and where her family had lived since the federal government divided up Cherokee communal land and parceled it out to individual citizens under the Curtis Act of 1898. The allotment was called Mankiller Flats. The name was not a boast. It was not a threat. It was not, as reporters would assume for the rest of her life, a name chosen for dramatic effect. Mankiller was a Cherokee military title, Asgaya-dihi in the Cherokee language, an old rank designating a person who protected the village, and it was in the family for generations, passed down like the land itself, an inheritance that carried within it the history of a people who had been naming their defenders since before the Europeans arrived.

Mankiller Flats sat in the Cherokee Nation, which was not a reservation in the way most Americans understood that word. It was a nation, a sovereign political entity with its own constitution, its own courts, its own legislature, and its own capital at Tahlequah, a small town of five thousand people that had served as the seat of Cherokee government since 1839, when the Cherokee people, having been forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States, reestablished their government in Indian Territory. The removal, the Trail of Tears, as it became known, killed an estimated four thousand Cherokee during the march westward in 1838 and 1839, roughly one-quarter of the Cherokee population. Those who survived rebuilt. They built Tahlequah. They built the Cherokee Female Seminary, one of the first institutions of higher education for women west of the Mississippi. They built a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Advocate, printed in both English and the Cherokee syllabary that Sequoyah had invented in 1821. They built a constitutional government modeled on, and in some respects more sophisticated than, the government of the United States. They did all of this in territory the federal government had promised would be theirs forever.

Forever, in the vocabulary of the federal government's dealings with Native nations, was a word with an expiration date. The promises made in the 1830s were broken by the 1890s. The Curtis Act of 1898 dissolved the Cherokee national government, abolished Cherokee courts, and divided communal Cherokee land into individual allotments, a policy designed to destroy the collective basis of Cherokee sovereignty by converting it into private property that could be taxed, sold, mortgaged, and lost. The allotment policy succeeded precisely as intended. Cherokee citizens who had held land communally, as a nation, now held it individually, as vulnerable property owners. Much of it was lost within a generation, to fraud, to tax sales, to the quiet mechanisms by which land transfers from Indigenous hands to non-Indigenous hands throughout American history. What remained were scattered allotments, isolated parcels, family homesteads disconnected from the communal governance that had given them meaning.

Mankiller Flats was one of those parcels. By the time Wilma Pearl Mankiller was born, at the W.W. Hastings Indian Hospital in Tahlequah on November 18, 1945, the allotment where she would be raised was a place of beauty and poverty in roughly equal measure. The beauty was real, the Ozark foothills of eastern Oklahoma are among the most striking landscapes in the interior United States, green and rolling and cut by clear streams, and Mankiller Flats, set among those hills, had the quality of a place that was inhabited long enough to feel like home. The poverty was equally real. The house had no indoor plumbing. It had no electricity. Water came from a spring. Heat came from a wood-burning stove. The nearest paved road was miles away. The nearest town of any size was Stilwell, twelve miles to the east, a farming community that was itself not prosperous by any national standard.

Charley Mankiller, Wilma's father, was a full-blood Cherokee who worked the land, cut timber, and took whatever wage labor he could find. He was, by his daughter's later description, a proud man with a quiet disposition and a deep connection to Cherokee identity, a man who spoke Cherokee, who understood Cherokee traditions, who valued the land as something more than real estate. Irene Mankiller, her mother, was of Dutch-Irish descent, not Cherokee by blood, though she had married into the nation and raised her children within it. This was not unusual. The Cherokee Nation, unlike some other tribal nations, defined citizenship through lineage and political membership, not through blood quantum alone, and mixed marriages were common. The cultural identity of the family was Cherokee. The language of the household was English, but the frame of reference, the stories, the values, the understanding of who they were in relation to the land and the nation, was Cherokee.

They were poor. This must be said plainly, because the romanticization of rural poverty, the pastoral fantasy that conflates material deprivation with spiritual richness, has been used for centuries to excuse the conditions under which Indigenous people in America live. The Mankiller family was not living a pastoral ideal. They were living in a house without running water in a country that had running water. They were heating with wood in a country that had central heating. They were walking to a spring for water in a country that had municipal water systems.

The poverty was visible enough to attract charity, and the charity arrived in a form that Mankiller never forgot. White Christian women from the surrounding towns made the Mankiller family "one of their charities." They brought used clothing to the house. They offered rides, murmuring "Bless your little hearts" as the children climbed into their cars. "Even at a very early age," Mankiller recalled, "I understood that these women thought they were better than us and that they would accept us if only we were more like them." The bless-your-little-heart ladies were not cruel. They were something more insidious: they were kind in a way that required the Mankillers to be pitiful, and the pity was the price of the kindness. Decades later, when a white woman told Mankiller she wanted to "give pride back to the Indians," the Chief recognized the same transaction. "She had such a staggering sense of entitlement," Mankiller observed. The poverty was real, but the way outsiders saw it, as a deficiency of character rather than a product of policy, was a distortion that Mankiller would spend her career correcting.

The poverty was not a lifestyle choice. It was the result of a century of federal policies designed, sequentially and cumulatively, to dispossess Cherokee people of their land, their government, their economy, and their capacity for collective self-determination.

The allotment policy had taken the land. The dissolution of the Cherokee government had taken the political structure. The underfunding of the Bureau of Indian Affairs had taken the services, the schools, the health clinics, the infrastructure, that other Americans received from their local and state governments. And the general American indifference to Native affairs, an indifference so profound that it functioned as a policy in its own right, had ensured that none of this would be examined, debated, or corrected in the ordinary course of democratic politics. The Mankiller family's poverty was not an accident. It was an outcome.

Wilma was the sixth of eleven children. The names, in order: Louis Donald, Frieda Marie, Robert Charles, Frances Kay, John David, Wilma Pearl, James Ray, Richard Colson, Linda Jean, Vanessa Lou, and William Edward. Eleven children in a house without plumbing. The logistics alone are staggering, the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry done by hand, the water carried from the spring, the wood chopped and stacked and burned, the children clothed and fed and cared for on an income that was, by any national measure, inadequate. Irene Mankiller managed it. The management was invisible, as women's domestic labor in large families has always been invisible, and it was essential, as it has always been essential, and it left almost no record, because the record-keeping institutions of American life, newspapers, government agencies, archives, have never been much interested in the operational heroism of poor women raising large families in houses without running water.

What Wilma remembered, when she wrote about her childhood decades later, was not the poverty itself but the quality of the life that existed within it. She remembered the garden, large, carefully tended, the family's primary food source. She remembered the woods, the oaks and hickories that surrounded Mankiller Flats, the streams where the children played, the feeling of a landscape that was both wild and familiar. And she remembered, with a specificity that decades in San Francisco could not erode, the spring.

The spring sat a quarter mile from the house, protected on the east and west sides by steep hills dotted with oak, hickory, locust, and walnut trees. Its banks were covered with watercress and fragrant mint. Mankiller would later call it her favorite place to pray. The spring was shared with bobcats, mountain lions, and wild pigs, and on certain mornings the children would arrive to find animal tracks in the soft mud around the water's edge, evidence of a negotiation between species that had been ongoing long before the allotment and would continue long after. "God surely created the spring with an abundance of love," she wrote. The spring was not a utility. It was a relationship. Cherokee traditional medicine included "going to the water," dipping into water seven times during the fall to promote healing, and the Mankiller children grew up understanding water not as a commodity that came through pipes but as a living thing with healing properties and spiritual significance.

She remembered the extended family, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, the dense network of kinship that is the social infrastructure of Cherokee rural life, and that had survived the allotment policy and the dissolution of the government and every other assault on Cherokee collective identity because kinship is harder to legislate away than land. She remembered the stories. Her great-aunt Maggie Gourd, whom the family called Grandma Gourd, told a dream story about a large animal ramming her front door. The next morning, the front door was badly damaged. "In her stories," Mankiller recalled, "there were no absolute lines between dreams and reality." There were stories of Cherokee Little People, the Yunwi Tsunsdi, who lived in rocky places and could sometimes be heard speaking Cherokee or singing near freshwater springs. There were stories of owls as bearers of bad news, of Pretty Boy Floyd burying treasure in the hills, stories that carried within them the history, the values, the humor, and the worldview of a people. Cherokee oral tradition was part of the fabric of her childhood, as much as the garden and the woods and the spring.

She would later write a poem about it, about the childhood feeling she could never quite explain. "I experienced my first powerful feelings of affection or love, not for a person but for life itself," she recalled. "I recall sitting in the sun on a rock or log and feeling full of love. Everything seemed perfect in my world." She was six. "Now, more than five decades later, that tremendous affection and love for life still occasionally comes calling."

And she remembered her father's relationship with the land. Charley Mankiller was a man who belonged to Mankiller Flats in the way that Cherokee people understood belonging, not as ownership, which was a European concept imposed by the allotment policy, but as relationship, as reciprocity, as the understanding that the land and the people who lived on it were bound to each other by obligations that preceded property law and would outlast it. He hunted on the land. He farmed on the land. He gathered on the land. He was buried, eventually, on the land. He "rejected offers to sell the land even in the very lean times our family faced," his daughter would write, and the rejection was not stubbornness. It was faith. The connection was not sentimental. It was structural. It was the foundation on which everything else, family, identity, community, governance, was built.

There was a word for this, a Cherokee word that Mankiller would carry through her entire political career: gadugi. "Gadugi, or working collectively for the common good, is an abiding attribute of Cherokee culture," she wrote. The concept was not abstract philosophy at Mankiller Flats. It was brother Louis Donald going with their father to Colorado to cut broomcorn so they could buy winter clothes for the younger children. It was the neighbors arriving to help when sister Frances severely cut her knee preparing logs for railroad ties and had to be hospitalized at Hastings Indian Hospital. It was the garden, which fed them, and the spring, which sustained them, and the community around both, which held everything together. Gadugi was the operating system of Cherokee life, and Mankiller Flats ran on it.

The land itself carried a specific history that Mankiller understood from childhood. Her grandfather John, known as Yona — the Cherokee word for bear — was the original allottee, the family member who received the 160 acres of Mankiller Flats under the Curtis Act of 1898. When the federal government converted communal Cherokee land to individual allotments, families received their parcels as private property, with a patent in fee — an ownership document that also, as the federal government understood, converted Cherokee land into real estate that could be taxed, sold, mortgaged, and lost. Thousands of Cherokee families lost their allotments within a generation through exactly these mechanisms. John Mankiller's allotment passed to his son Charley and his daughter Aunt Sally Leach, and it held. Charley Mankiller "rejected offers to sell the land even in the very lean times our family faced," Wilma wrote. He rejected them because the land was not an asset to be liquidated. It was the family's connection to the Cherokee Nation, the anchor that prevented the drift into the placeless poverty that had swallowed other Cherokee families who had sold. When the federal government later tried to move the family off it through the relocation program, the land waited. When Wilma came home in 1977, the land was still there. She walked to the spring. She bathed in it. She was home.

This is the thing that must be understood before anything else in Wilma Mankiller's story can be understood: the land was not a backdrop. It was not a setting. It was the first fact, the fact from which all other facts derived. Cherokee identity was rooted in land. Cherokee governance was organized around land. Cherokee community was built on the relationships that proximity to shared land made possible. When the federal government took the land, through removal in the 1830s, through allotment in the 1890s, through relocation in the 1950s, it was not taking real estate. It was taking the foundation of a civilization. And when Wilma Mankiller spent her life trying to rebuild Cherokee self-governance, she was not engaged in an abstract political project. She was trying to restore the relationship between a people and their land that the United States government had spent a century and a half trying to destroy.

Tahlequah, the capital, was a study in contradictions that Wilma Mankiller would spend her career trying to resolve.

It was a Cherokee town. The Cherokee Nation's offices were there. Cherokee citizens lived there. The Cherokee language could be heard on the streets. The Cherokee syllabary appeared on signs. Cherokee identity permeated the culture of the place in ways that were visible and in ways that were not, in the way people related to each other, in the way hospitality was offered, in the way decisions were made, slowly, through conversation and consensus, rather than through the adversarial procedures of American politics.

But it was also, by the mid-twentieth century, a town in which Cherokee self-governance had been effectively suspended. The Curtis Act of 1898 began the dismantling of the Cherokee national government, and by statehood in 1907 the work was finished. For the next seventy years, the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation was not elected by Cherokee citizens but appointed by the President of the United States, a colonial arrangement so extraordinary that it would be difficult to believe if it were not documented. The most powerful political office of the largest tribal nation in the United States was, for seven decades, a patronage appointment made by a president who had no accountability to Cherokee citizens and no particular interest in Cherokee affairs. The appointed chiefs served at the pleasure of the federal government. They administered what the federal government allowed them to administer. They had no independent authority, no independent revenue, and no mandate from their own people.

This arrangement was not an oversight. It was a policy. The dissolution of Cherokee self-governance was part of the larger federal project of terminating tribal sovereignty, of converting Native nations from political entities with inherent rights into populations of individuals with no collective political identity. The goal, stated explicitly in federal policy documents, was assimilation: the absorption of Native people into the general American population, the elimination of Native nations as distinct political units, the end of the federal government's treaty obligations to those nations. The appointed chiefs were instruments of that policy. They existed to manage the termination, not to resist it.

In Tahlequah, the result was a Cherokee capital that could not govern itself. The buildings were there. The history was there. The people were there. The authority was not. It was in Washington, in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in the hands of federal bureaucrats who made decisions about Cherokee health, Cherokee education, Cherokee housing, Cherokee employment, and Cherokee land without consulting the Cherokee people and without being accountable to them. The Cherokee Nation, in the decades before Wilma Mankiller's birth, had been reduced from a self-governing nation to an administrative unit of the federal government, a county, in effect, without the county's ability to levy taxes or elect its own officials.

Wilma Mankiller was born into this arrangement. She was born, that is, into a nation that was not allowed to be a nation, a political entity that had a constitution but no functioning government, a people who had a homeland but no sovereignty over it, a community that had leaders but no mechanism for choosing them. The contradiction was the defining condition of Cherokee life in the mid-twentieth century, and it was the condition that Mankiller would devote her career to resolving. But in 1945, she was simply a baby born on an allotment in the hills, the sixth of eleven children, in a house without running water, in a nation that the United States had spent a century trying to make disappear.

The childhood was short. Not in years, Wilma lived on Mankiller Flats until she was eleven, but in the sense that childhood on an allotment in rural Oklahoma in the 1950s did not permit the extended dependence that American middle-class culture was beginning to treat as normal. Children worked. They carried water. They chopped wood. They tended the garden. They helped with the younger children. They did not have a prolonged period of play and education separated from the demands of the household, because the household could not function without their labor.

Wilma attended the Rocky Mountain School, a small rural school that served the Cherokee families in the area. The school was underfunded, as schools serving Native students in Oklahoma were systematically underfunded, and it was staffed by teachers who were, in many cases, poorly prepared for the cultural context in which they were teaching. The curriculum was standard American, English language, American history as told from the perspective of the settlers, mathematics, reading, and it included almost nothing about Cherokee history, Cherokee language, or Cherokee culture. The children were being educated, in other words, to be Americans rather than Cherokees, and the education was being delivered in a form that implicitly denigrated the knowledge they brought from home.

This was not an accident either. Federal Indian education policy, from the boarding schools of the late nineteenth century through the day schools of the mid-twentieth century, was designed as an instrument of assimilation. The goal was to detach Native children from their families, their languages, their cultures, and their nations, and to attach them instead to American culture, American English, and American economic life. "Kill the Indian, save the man", the phrase attributed to Captain Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was the explicit philosophy of federal Indian education for decades, and while the language had been softened by the 1950s, the policy had not fundamentally changed. Native children were still being educated out of their identities.

Wilma experienced this as a quiet pressure, not the violent, traumatic pressure of the boarding schools, where children were beaten for speaking their languages, but the subtler pressure of irrelevance, of being a Cherokee child in a school that had nothing to say about what it meant to be Cherokee. The experience planted a seed that would grow into one of her most important policy priorities as Chief: the creation of Cherokee-controlled education programs, including Cherokee language immersion schools, that would educate Cherokee children within their own cultural context rather than outside it.

But that was decades away. In 1956, the immediate future held something much more disruptive than a culturally indifferent school. The immediate future held San Francisco.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs had a program. The program had a name, the Indian Relocation Act, sometimes called Public Law 959, enacted in 1956, though the relocation policy had been operating informally since 1952. The program had a stated purpose: to help Native Americans find employment and improve their economic circumstances by relocating them from rural reservations and allotments to urban areas. The program had an actual purpose, which was different from the stated purpose: to reduce the Native American population on reservations, to decrease the federal government's obligation to provide services to reservation communities, and to accelerate the assimilation of Native people into the general American population by physically removing them from the communities that sustained their collective identity.

The program worked like this: a Bureau of Indian Affairs relocation officer would visit a reservation or an allotment community and identify families that were poor, which, given the systematic underfunding of Native communities, meant nearly all families. The officer would offer the family a deal: move to a designated city, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, San Francisco, and a handful of others, and the government would provide one-way transportation, temporary housing, job training, and help finding employment. The deal sounded reasonable. It sounded, to families living without plumbing and without reliable income, like an opportunity. What it did not sound like, because the relocation officers did not explain it in these terms, was a federal policy designed to separate Native families from the land, the communities, and the political structures that made them Native, to solve the "Indian problem" by dispersing the Indians.

Charley Mankiller took the deal. He took it because the family was poor and the government was offering a way out of poverty. He took it because the relocation officer made it sound like an opportunity. He took it because he was a father of eleven children and he could not feed them all on what Mankiller Flats produced. He took it, and he regretted it, and Wilma never forgot that he regretted it, and the regret was one of the things that influenced her understanding of the federal government's relationship with Native people, not as a benefactor, not as a protector, but as an entity that offered help in the precise form most likely to destroy the thing it was ostensibly helping.

The family packed what they could carry. They left Mankiller Flats. They boarded a train. The train went west.

Wilma Mankiller was eleven years old. She was leaving the only place she had ever known, the land her family had lived on since the allotment, the hills and the creeks and the oaks and the spring, the relatives and the neighbors and the school and the Cherokee Nation itself. She was leaving because the government told her father that leaving was the path to a better life. She would not return for twenty-one years. When she returned, she would return to rebuild what the leaving had damaged, not just for her family, but for the nation.

The train went west, and the hills fell away behind it, and the red dirt of Oklahoma gave way to the brown plains of the Texas Panhandle and the desert of New Mexico and the mountains of Arizona and the Central Valley of California and, finally, the city. San Francisco, gray and cold and vertical, smelling of salt water and diesel exhaust, a place that had nothing in common with Mankiller Flats except that it was, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where the Mankiller family now belonged.

They did not belong there. That was the first lesson San Francisco taught. It was not the last.