The Time of the Butterfly: Wilma Mankiller

Sitting in a longhouse in New York in the 1980s, Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller — who had recently become the first female chief of a major tribal nation — told a group of female Iroquois elders she was visiting that she couldn’t believe she was chief.

The elders’ response to that? “It’s no surprise to us.”

“We have a prophecy that there is going to come a time where a woman emerges as leader,” Charlie Soap, Mankiller’s husband, remembered the elders saying to Mankiller. “We believe you are that leader that has emerged. You’re paving the way for other women to become leaders of their Tribes. This is what we call The Time of the Butterfly. This is your time.”

Reflecting on the memory, Soap does believe his late wife ushered in The Time of the Butterfly that he hopes endures today.

“It was a beautiful way to talk about her,” he said.

And not only a source of power for Indigenous women, though, her monumental work and leadership also carries on a legacy — even after her death in 2010 — of empowering all Indigenous people, women and young people as a champion of tribal sovereignty, women’s rights and equality.

Her historic appearance as one of the first women on the U.S. quarter this year only serves as a symbol of the power her life’s work continues to have, and a book of her recently discovered poetry tells her story in her own creative words.

Having lived in San Francisco for her teenage years and early adulthood, Mankiller moved back to Oklahoma in the late 1970s and created the Community Development Department for the Cherokee Nation.

“People did not quite know what to make of me,” Mankiller said. “I cheerfully worked longer hours than most anyone, and I would do whatever it took to get something done.”

That drive and passion for her people as director of the Community Development Project eventually led to then-Principal Chief Ross Swimmer asking her to run with him as his deputy chief in 1983.

In a speech at Sweet Briar College on April 2, 1993, Mankiller said she had expected challenges to her campaign because of her activist background or her work with rural communities, but her challengers had a different focus.

“The only thing people wanted to talk about in 1983 was my being a woman,” she said. “That was the most hurtful experience I've ever been through.”

But she powered on and eventually won the election.

The misogyny didn’t stop when she was elected, though.

As deputy chief, she would fill in for Swimmer at meetings or events when he couldn’t attend.

At one of these events — her first meeting since becoming deputy chief — she was to meet with other Oklahoma tribal leaders, but when she arrived, there was no chair for her.

“Literally, she did not have a seat at the table,” current Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said. “So she goes and grabs a chair and drags it to the table and sits down.”

She then carried on with the meeting, ignoring the issue.

“That to me showed her determination,” Hoskin said. “It also showed she had a great deal of courage at a time when surely a woman in politics in the Cherokee Nation needed it.”

Two years later, Swimmer stepped down as principal chief to take a federal position, so Mankiller then, in 1985, became the first woman to be principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

And two years after that, the people of the Cherokee Nation elected her in her own right as the chief of the Cherokee Nation.

“When (Wilma Mankiller) was a community organizer — trying to inspire people and communities that had been underserved over generations — that was her almost all by herself," Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said. "That was her, in some ways, against the world. That was her speaking truth to power.”

“That sent a message to our citizens and the country about the power of women in Cherokee culture,” Hoskin said. “It was, in a sense, back because it was so rooted in our history of being a matrilineal society.”

Mankiller spent a decade as the principal chief, and in that time, the Cherokee Nation more than doubled from 68,000 to 170,000 citizens; she led efforts to increase the nation’s sovereignty and hold the U.S. government accountable; and she improved education, health care and housing services.

Under her leadership, infant mortality declined and educational achievement rose in the Cherokee Nation.

In the almost 40 years since she was first elected chief, the Cherokee Nation is still building on the initiatives she led and the success she enacted.

And her work is reverberating across the U.S., as the U.S. Mint released a commemorative quarter earlier this year with Mankiller as the “head” in a series of quarters featuring prominent American women.

“People have forgotten the names of the men at that table,” Hoskin said of that meeting long ago. “But Wilma Mankiller is on the quarter.”

Even though Mankiller had — and still has — the spotlight as such a prominent figure, she always strived to shine that light on others.

Her family moved to San Francisco when she was 11 years old. While living in the Bay Area, the occupation of Alcatraz Island by Native American activists from 1969 to 1971 called Mankiller to the world of social activism.

“When Alcatraz occurred, I became aware of what needed to be done to let the rest of the world know that Indians had rights, too,” Mankiller said in her autobiography.

After the occupation of Alcatraz, she became a staunch advocate for Native American and women’s rights, “speaking truth to power” even before she had the backing of an entire nation’s resources as chief, Hoskin said.

“When you’re chief, you have a fair bit of resources,” Hoskin said. “When she was a community organizer — trying to inspire people and communities that had been underserved over generations — that was her almost all by herself. That was her, in some ways, against the world. That was her speaking truth to power.”

She led community advocacy groups in San Francisco for Native American youth and joined the Women’s Rights Movement.

Mankiller met feminist icon Gloria Steinem when she joined the board of the Ms. Foundation for Women, an organization Steinem founded in 1972.

Mankiller's biggest contribution to the feminist movement, Steinem said in a 2010 Tulsa World article, was that she could show political and social causes were connected and many issues were one and the same.

"Her gift was to create independence, not dependence," Steinem said then. "Wilma paved a way for all young women, not just Cherokee women."

Steinem later introduced Mankiller to Kristina Kiehl, an activist who co-founded Voters for Choice, which was the largest independent, nonpartisan abortion-rights political action committee.

Mankiller spoke at a reproductive rights fundraiser for Voters for Choice, and she and Kiehl worked together for many years advocating for women’s rights.

Kiehl, who became a trusted friend and colleague to Mankiller, still works to this day to fulfill Mankiller’s mission of uplifting women.

“Wilma would always bring other women to the table,” Kiehl said. “People wanted to meet and spend time with Wilma, and she would use that interest in her as a prism to show those people a wider range of feminism or Indian issues or any number of social justice causes she cared about.”

This kind of prism Mankiller used for more than just women, Soap said.

When she fought for more tribal sovereignty for the Cherokee Nation in Washington, D.C., she would bring other, sometimes smaller, tribes with her to give them a voice.

“When she was working on tribal sovereignty, she would bring other tribal leaders to the table,” he said. “She worked to strengthen tribal sovereignty not only for her own people, but for all tribes. That’s had a major impact on where tribal sovereignty stands to this day.”

According to Hoskin, that is in no small part thanks to Mankiller’s work.

When Mankiller was the Community Development Department director in the early 1980s, she and Soap helped the small Cherokee community of Bell by creating a 14-mile water line to bring its people clean water.

“There are so many communities that are lacking good, safe water in their homes,” Soap said. “We were trying to get water to the communities in their homes.”

In April 2021, the Cherokee Nation continued that mission by passing the Wilma P. Mankiller and Charlie Soap Water Act, which calls for a study to figure out why some Cherokee communities still don’t have adequate access to water utilities and systems.

“That was quite an honor and surprise that they would enact that legislation to honor us in that way,” Soap said. “That was something we enjoyed doing: working with people in the communities. Even now, the tribe is doing a very much needed job, and I’m happy that we were able to inspire others in our tribe to keep that going.”

Additionally, the Cherokee Nation Council in November 2021 approved the construction of a $400 million hospital in Tahlequah.

Hoskin said it is only because of Mankiller that is even possible.

“The only reason I am in a position today to work with our council to build a $400 million hospital by Cherokees for Cherokees is because of what she did as chief concerning self-governance,” Hoskin said. “Had she not done that, we might still be struggling ... as opposed to a system built by Cherokees for Cherokees. (Mankiller) built that system, and we’re building on that system.”

Not only in policymaking has Mankiller paved a way for a better future, her feminist activism has also changed an institution that once mocked her chiefdom into one where female leaders are the norm.

Women make up half the Cherokee Nation cabinet, and Hoskin said that diversity has benefited the tribe.

“It caused us to think about systemwide if we’re achieving things like pay parity in our work force,” he said. “The pay compensation that we’re undertaking is, in part, to expose and remedy what could be pay gaps between genders. When we think about Wilma Mankiller, we think about whether we’re doing what we should to empower women in this tribe.”

When thinking about his late wife’s legacy, Soap remembers her most as a nurturer, a friend, a lover of all people and a person who made time for anyone.

Soap said he hopes Mankiller’s legacy can still inspire young Cherokees and people of all races and can show people how to embrace women’s leadership.

“The legacy she has left is profound,” Soap said. “Most important for her would be to see that her story would encourage both men and women to respect, embrace and support women’s leadership. She had hoped women would become leaders, just like they were in our tribe’s early days.”