◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Gadugi I am Wilma Mankiller. Born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, 1945, on land my family was given after they were marched to it. I died there in 2010, at sixty-four. The name is not a joke, and I will not be apologizing for it. Mankiller was a rank. A Cherokee military title — the one who guards the village. It came down to me through my father's line and I kept it, and I found it saved me a great deal of time with men who might otherwise have been careless around me. When I was eleven the federal government moved my family to San Francisco. They called it relocation. What it was, was a program to end tribes by emptying them of people — take the Indians off the land, scatter them into cities, and in one generation there is no tribe and therefore no claim. My father's people had walked the Trail of Tears out of Tennessee at gunpoint. I called what happened to me my own little Trail of Tears. I was eleven. I did not yet have the word for what was being done to me. Here is what they failed to calculate. In 1969 a group of Indians took Alcatraz — seized the rock in the middle of that bay in the name of Indians of all tribes — and I went. And on that island, in the city they had shipped me to in order to stop me being Cherokee, I became Cherokee. Their program ran backwards. They gathered us up to scatter us, and we found each other. I went home in 1977 with two daughters, no money, and no job. I slept in my car by a stream. Then I went to Bell. A Cherokee community in Oklahoma — two hundred families, no running water. They hauled it in buckets. They had been waiting for someone to come and give them water for longer than anyone could remember, and nobody was ever coming. I did not bring them water. I asked them to dig. Sixteen miles of pipe. Fourteen months. Cherokee men and women and children down in that ditch with shovels, laying their own line. Gadugi, we call it — the people coming together to do for themselves what no one else was ever going to do for them. And when the water came, it was theirs. Not granted. Not appropriated. Not administered. Theirs. That is the only thing I have to give you, and it is the whole of what I know. Self-determination is not a slogan. It is sixteen miles of pipe. In 1983 I ran for deputy chief. My tires were slashed. I got death threats. Men who would not argue with me about a single idea would talk about nothing except that I was a woman — and understand me, that came from my own people, not from yours. But it was not ours. We learned it. Before you came, our women held the land and our women chose the chiefs, and you taught us to forget that, and we were good students. Every conquered people takes on the sickness of the people who conquered it. That is part of the price, and nobody warns you. In 1985 I became Principal Chief. First woman to lead a major nation in this country. My body did not cooperate. A head-on wreck that killed my friend and took seventeen operations to put me back together. Then a disease that unstitches the muscles from the nerves. Then kidneys that quit — twice. Then cancer, which finally won. I kept working. The body is not the point. The line is the point. So here is what I came to say. Stop waiting for the water. Nobody is coming. There is no administration and no program and no good man in an office who is going to arrive with what you need. Look at who is next to you. That is the whole resource. That is all there has ever been. Gadugi. Pick up the shovel and dig your own line.