Wilma Mankiller died today at age 64 from pancreatic cancer

Today in the Tulsa World. By Tim Stanley

Wilma Mankiller, a onetime Oklahoma farm girl who grew up to become an American Indian activist and the first woman principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, died Tuesday. She was 64.

Mankiller was recently diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. Services are pending.

Mankiller served as principal chief from 1985 to 1995.

Elected deputy chief in 1983, she became chief two years later when then-Chief Ross Swimmer left to become head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Mankiller was elected chief outright in 1987 and reelected in 1991.

Born in 1945 the sixth of what would be 11 children, Mankiller grew up poor on her family’s farm near Rocky Mountain in Adair County. She credited her father, Charley Mankiller, with enriching her in another way from an early age: Passing on his love for books and reading.

In 1956, the family moved to San Francisco and it was in California that Mankiller began to gain a true sense of her Indian identity.

In the 1960s, she became a political activist and in 1969, when a group of Indians occupied Alcatraz Island to protest U.S. government treatment, Mankiller was with them.

She returned to Oklahoma in the 1970s where she continued to work on behalf of Indians, eventually founding the Cherokee Community Development Department in 1981.

As the department’s director, she helmed several renewal projects, growing in fame within the tribe and beyond.

In 1983, she ran for and was elected deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation, becoming chief with Swimmer’s departure.

Credited with helping change perceptions of women within the male-dominated Cherokee Nation of the day, she was officially elected to the chief post in 1987 and re-elected in 1991 overwhelmingly.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Mankiller the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

She talked about her life and her accomplishments in her autobiography, “Mankiller: A Chief and Her People.”

For more, read tomorrow’s Tulsa World.

Jodi Rave