She Persisted: Wilma Mankiller

CHAPTER 1: ᎠᎨᏳᏣ ᏋᏱᎵ ᏧᏙᎢᏓ- A Girl Called Pearl

Wilma Pearl Mankiller led the Cherokee Nation as its first female chief. But before she visited with US presidents and met with world leaders, she was known by family and friends as a girl called Pearl.

Pearl arrived in late autumn on November 18, 1945. Born at the old Hastings Hospital in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, she already had five siblings waiting at home for her. Her father, Charley, was a Cherokee Nation citizen living in the nearby Rocky Mountain community. Irene, her mother, was a white woman whose family had moved to the area. Her parents grew up around each other and married young. When Pearl was three, Charley built a four-room wood home for the family on land owned by his father.

Traditionally, Cherokee individuals did not own land on the tribe’s reservation. The Cherokee Nation, meaning all the people in the tribe, shared the land together. Families owned their homes, gardens and crops, but not the land itself. But the US government did not want the Cherokee people to continue living together and sharing land this way. So the US Congress passed a law to divide up the tribe’s reservation. Each Cherokee person received land. That is how Pearl’s grandfather received the land where his family lived.

But originally, all Cherokee people lived on the tribe’s lands in the Southeast, not on the reservation within what would later become northeastern Oklahoma.

In 1838, the US government rounded up Cherokee people like Pearl’s ancestors at gun-point to force them to move west. They couldn’t pack up their homes or bring their animals. Over four thousand Cherokee young and old-died during the roundup before the forced march and also along the way. That means one-fourth of the tribe’s population died. Lots of children became orphans. Many Native Nations also suffered similar removals from their own homelands and a horrific loss of lives.

Pearl learned some of this difficult history while growing up on Mankiller Flats. This is what people called the land that her grandfather and others in his family had been assigned to live on.

Just like her ancestors’, Pearl’s life wasn’t always easy while she was growing up. The tiny tin-roofed house her father built had no running water or electricity. That meant no flushing toilet, no sink with running water, and no television to watch. This was normal for homes in that area in the 1940s and 1950s.

Many Cherokee people at that time found it hard to find regular work. The rocky soil was not good for farming. Pearl’s dad and oldest brother went all the way to southeastern Colorado each summer to work, harvesting crops to earn money.

Everyone had chores to do at home, from chopping wood to hauling water. Pearl and her sisters hauled water from a cold spring a quarter mile away to their house for cooking, cleaning clothes and baths.