The Chief

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.