Mankiller considers her own story as a struggle parallel to the overall struggle of her people. But as she herself points out, this way of relating her story is not different from the ways other native people choose to tell their own life stories, as she relates: "When asked to tell a writer about his life, the great Geronimo reportedly replied, 'First, let me tell you about my people'" (259). Rooted both in past and present, both Mankiller's personal narrative and that of the Cherokee people seek to bring the events and traditions of the past into a modern context. Past is not exclusive of the present just as person is not exclusive of the people. Even more unique about Mankiller's story is that woman is not exclusive from women, as she fully realized that her actions as the first female Chief of the Cherokee Nation would reflect upon the potential for women in leadership positions within the tribal community, and indeed, upon the potential of women in overall society.
In fact, I think the issue of gender is one of the most important aspects about Mankiller's story as it exemplifies one of Mankiller's avowed goals: to emphasize to Cherokees that "we have indigenous solutions to our problems" (251). Where external forces absorbed from broader society have worked to disjoin the Cherokee and other Indian communities, the ways to restore cohesion and new direction lie internally. The effects of removal, relocation, cultural tyranny, racism, and sexism have fractured the Cherokee people, and traditional values provide unique answers to remediating these fragmentary forces. Mankiller's example, in overcoming imported Western stigma about her gender to restore the respected place of women in Cherokee society, proves that point--Cherokees need only to look to their traditions to apply solutions to modern obstacles. Indigenous solutions, such as the inclusive strength of tribal kinship, can overcome prejudices and promote cooperation needed to rejuvenate communities such as Bell.
Though I suppose Mankiller's story is different in the broader context of biographies, and is also uniquely Cherokee, the inclusive power of tribal kinship to pave way for her rise to leadership despite gender and to formulate her identity as a self-assured woman places Mankiller's story in direct connection to the stories of other native people. Her story especially reminded me of the autobiography of Lakota Sioux activist Mary Crow Dog,
Lakota Woman. Mankiller briefly mentions Mary and her husband, Leonard Crow Dog, as "a vital cog in the Native American movement" (197). Though Mankiller doesn't relate it directly, both come to realize their potential and strength as women through involvement in Native American activism and through the vital roles other women have played in their lives. The greatest model for Mankiller were the Ghigau, or Beloved Woman, those who had achieved the highest honor a Cherokee woman could achieve, like the Ghigau Nancy Ward (207). These "brave women who followed their husbands and brothers into battle" taught her the strength of will to fight for what she believed in despite the odds (207).
Women all around Mankiller impressed upon her sense of self and expanded her sense of community, clearly evident in all the references she makes to friends and family she admired. First there were her sisters, especially Linda, who shared in the struggle of relocation and trying to fit in at school with "Okie" accents (103), and Vanessa, who shared in her activism at Alcatraz. Her grandmother Sitton took her in and showed her how to make it during her troubled youth in California. Of course her daughters highlight this female communal bond, especially Gina, who continues to take up the activist cause of her mother and whose bond with her mother and sister persisted despite her time away, forced to live with her father. The inclusiveness of kinship tradition unites Mankiller with other women in common activist goals and intertribal connection. There are people like Annie Oakes, a Pomo woman and wife of activist Richard Oakes, whose story she remembers in the faces of other Cherokees, not just as a Pomo (195). She details the solid friendship of women formed at meetings in the kitchen of her friend Lou Trudell, wife of Sioux activist John Trudell, and the inspiration she drew from Gustine Moppin, Klamath, Susie Steel Regimbal, Pomo, and Linda Aaronyado, Creek & Filipina, friendships which continue to resound with her despite time and the loss of life.
The inclusiveness of kinship also crosses racial divides, combating prejudice there as in gender, as Mankiller forms bonds with black, latina, and white women laboring against racial and economic struggles. Some of her first inspiration for community organizing came from the urban activity of Black Panthers, and because of their similar struggles, Mankiller relates that "[e]ven today, more than thirty years later, the sisterly company of black women is especially enjoyable to me" (108). Some of these women outside her tribe and race became as family to her, as with Rose and Judy Bastidas, her sisters in law with whom she "shared the births of our children, our twenty-first birthdays, and the transition from youth to womanhood" (149). Sherry Morris, though a white Southerner with "very few similarities" to herself, immediately became close to Mankiller because of their shared passion about improving rural health care; the car crash they suffered in a tragic coincedence, in which Sherry perished, forever tied Mankiller spiritually to her friend (220).
Mankiller's strength of narrative comes from the essential element of Cherokee people to adapt their inclusive kinship traditions to modern experiences. Her role as a woman exemplifies this ability to revive older traditions in modern contexts for new results. It also shows how the tribe can expand and survive beyond terms of full blood and mixed blood; as in her own mixed family, the sense of tribal inclusion goes beyond gender or race and should instead be about the strength of unified community to get things done and determine its own course.
