Bmo 1993 Solutions

[Hilma Klingaman]

Thank you very, very much for choosing to spend a little time with me tonight. I appreciate that. I'd like to introduce my husband, Charlie, who traveled with me from Oklahoma, who's here somewhere. There he is, right there. Some people don't know I'm married because his name is Charlie Soap and my name is Wilma Mankiller, and when we got married we debated whether he should take my name or I should take his name, and we decided we'd both keep our own names, so he kept his maiden name and I kept mine.

Being in this part of the country is really kind of nostalgic, because part of the Old Cherokee Nation took in part of Virginia, and it's really interesting and kind of an emotional experience always to come back to this part of the country. It was interesting, as I met people during the course of the day today, several people asked me how they should address me, and at home I can think of very, very few people who call me "Chief"; most people just call me Wilma, and that's how I ask people to address me here.

But I had a different experience one time when I went to an Eastern college to do a panel on Indian economic development, a named Eastern college. This young man came out to the airport to pick me up at the airport to take me out to do the panel, and he asked me, he said, "Well, since principal Chief is a male term, how should I address you?" And we were driving in the car by then out to the university, and I just looked out the window of the car. Then he said, "Well, should we address you as Chiefteness?" So I looked out the window for a little longer. Then he thought he would get real funny and cute, and he asked me if he should address me as "Chiefette," so I looked out the window for a real long time. Then I decided that I should answer him, and so I told him to call me "Ms.-Chief," misChief. So we went out to the university to do our panel and the same young man who picked me up at the airport was one of the people who got to ask the panel his questions, and so his question to me was about the origin of my name. My name is Mankiller, and in the old Cherokee Nation, when we lived here in the Southeast, we lived in semi-autonomous villages, and there was someone who watched over the village, who had the title of mankiller. And I'm not sure what you could equate that to, but it was sort of like a soldier or someone who was responsible for the security of the village, and so anyway this one fellow liked the title mankiller so well that he kept it as his name, and that's who we trace our ancestry back to. But that's not what I told him. When he asked me about the origin of my last name, I told him it was a nickname, and I'd earned it. So I'm sure there's some yuppie somewhere still wondering what I did to earn my last name.

Tonight I wanted to talk to you about rebuilding the Cherokee Nation community by community and person by person, or specifically rebuilding the Cherokee Nation, but I've also been asked by a number of people to talk about myself and my own sort of growth into a leadership position, essentially from first being a rural Cherokee person, one of eleven children and then being relocated to an urban ghetto and spending time in an urban ghetto, and how I evolved as a woman into a leadership position, so I'll try to weave some of that into my story of rebuilding the Cherokee Nation and the process we've been undergoing for the last two decades.

I think first it's important before I start talking about what we're doing today in the 1990's and what we did throughout the eighties or even the seventies in rebuilding our tribe; I think it's really, really important to put our current work and our current issues in a historical context. I can't tell you how many everyday Americans that I've talked with who've visited a tribal community in Oklahoma or in other places, and they've looked around and they saw all the social indicators of decline: high infant mortality, high unemployment, many, many other very serious problems among our people, and they always ask, "What happened to these people? Why do native people have all these problems?", and I think that in order to understand the contemporary issues we're dealing with today and how we plan to dig our way out and how indeed we are digging our way out, you have to understand a little bit about history. Because there are a whole lot of historical factors that have played a part in our being where we are today, and I think that to even to begin to understand our contemporary issues and contemporary problems, you have to understand a little bit about that history.

Normally I talk about the nation-to-nation relationship between tribes and the U.S. government, but Orin Lyons is going to cover that subject tomorrow and can do that much more ably than I can, but let me just say about our tribes so you have an understanding of that. The Cherokee Nation has had a government for a long, long, long time. We had a government in this country long before there was a United States government. We had treaties with England even before we had treaties with the colonies, and then later with the United States. We have a long history of governance. We had a constitution. The constitution doesn't look like the United Sates Constitution; our constitution was a wampum belt, and the color and the arrangements of the beads represented symbols of governance and principles by which we lived our lives, and so we have a long, long history of governance, and so that for people who find it odd that we today have a government-to-government relationship with the U.S. government should reflect on the fact that we've had that relationship for a long time.

Some people will tell you today, when you hear people as you hear Orin tomorrow talking about treaty rights and treaty issues, some people will tell you that those treaties aren't valid anymore and they should be ignored simply because they're old, and obviously if you listen to Leslie Silko and Scott Momaday today you can understand why that argument makes little sense. There are lots of world documents that are very old and just because they're old and because of their age doesn't mean that they're any less valid. The United States Constitution is very old. There are many other similar documents that are very, very old.

What I'd like to tell you just briefly, and for the historians here, I'd like to touch just briefly on the history of our tribe and what happened under this continual attempt by the United States Government to "solve the Indian problem," and because our story is very similar to the story of many other tribes in this country, not in exact detail, but in net effect. Our tribe, we were kind of farmers and agricultural people, and we lived throughout the Southeast in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, all throughout the Southeast, and we had early European contact, first with DeSoto in the late 1540s and continued to have European contact and eventually were surrounded by our new Southern neighbors. So that by the first part of the last century, we were fairly accustomed to our Southern neighbors that were surrounding us.

There began to be discussion of removal. This is one of a continuing series of policies that the federal government had instituted; there were the Indian wars, there were a number of other policies, and we were by now in the beginning of the relocation/reservation policy; the war era hadn't ended, but we were beginning the reservation/relocation policies of the federal government at that particular time or the United States government at that particular time.

There were several reasons why there began to be discussion of removing the Cherokees. President Jefferson conceptualized removal; Jackson gets all the blame for the removal of the Cherokees and the other southeastern tribes, but Jefferson actually conceptualized the removal. Some of the impetus for the removal was economic. Cherokee land was good land for growing cotton, was good land for growing tobacco, and also some gold had been discovered within the Cherokee Nation, and then there were also a number of corporations and individuals who wanted our land, so all those were factors in the pressure for removal. But one of the other factors in the pressure for removal was the fact that Georgia, the state of Georgia, had grown up around the Cherokee Nation, and they did not want a sovereign within the boundaries of the state of Georgia, an argument that we hear even today as states and tribes continue to battle over issues of jurisdiction and states' rights. So we got caught up in a states' rights issue as well as all the other issues that caused people to want to remove the Cherokees.

During this period of time, when removal was being discussed in our tribe, our Chief was a fellow named John Ross, and John Ross believed in the American judicial system, and he felt that the American judicial system was built on beautiful principles, and that was something that should work for the Cherokees. And so both individual people and the tribe took some of our cases for the preservation of the integrity of the Cherokee Nation through the American judicial system and all the way to the United States Supreme Court and won. By then General Jackson, who fancied himself to be a great Indian fighter was President Jackson, and he basically told the United States Supreme Court, when they ruled in favor of the Cherokees, "You've ruled in favor of the Cherokees, now let's see you enforce it," and continued on toward implementing a removal policy.

During this period of time when removal was being discussed, our own people, the Cherokees, became very bitterly divided politically. Part of our people wanted to remain here in the Southeast and throughout the rest of the Southeast and fight to the death for the right to remain in our homeland, and part of our people wanted to go on to Indian Territory, believing that the removal was inevitable, and that we should go on to Indian Territory, what is now Oklahoma, and resettle and rebuild our families and our communities there in Indian Territory. And so there were bitter internal divisions among our people during that period of time, that period of discussion. We had non-Indian friends throughout the South who helped us, who took up our cause and tried to protect the Cherokees and work with us. Some of our friends spent time in jail, who refused to obey the laws of the state of Georgia, which asked them to get special licenses from the state of Georgia to reside within the Cherokee Nation.

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