Ms. Muse: Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller's Lost Poems

Ms. Muse: Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller’s Lost Poems
9/2/2022 by Chivas Sandage




Ms. Muse is a discovery place for riotous, righteous and resonant feminist poetry that nourishes and gives voice to a rising tide of female resistance—brought to you by Ms. digital columnist Chivas Sandage.


Her name means leader or warrior who guards the village. Before she became the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation and the first woman to be chief of a major tribe, Wilma Mankiller published a poem about “the edges of / something called freedom.” In another poem about listening to the seasons, wolves and a raven, she asks if there are others who can still hear. She writes about remembering “that the sound of a million / colored televisions / has drowned out almost all / echoes of our being.” Longing for freedom—juxtaposed with a dystopian perspective of the modern world and the consequences of living in it—emerge as core subjects in the posthumously published Mankiller Poems: The Lost Poetry of Wilma Mankiller, just out from Pulley Press.

These two poems, part of a group of 10, were published in a 1982 college magazine when Mankiller was in her late 30s. But until now, the world has not known that this great chief, community developer, activist and author also wrote poetry throughout her life. With the support of Charlie Soap, Mankiller’s husband for over 30 years, editors Frances McCue and Greg Shaw found the magazine and nine other poems tucked randomly into boxes of paperwork stored in Mankiller’s old barn in August 2021. They wanted to publish her lost poems to show “how an activist reflected on her life through art and that art itself is activism.”




When Mankiller’s poems appeared in that slim journal, she was a grant writer, community organizer and a single mother of two teenagers. While she felt deeply connected to her Cherokee culture and ancestry, she had chosen to not be a traditional housewife. She knew strong Cherokee women, but without a female role model to look to, she worked to make her own way, refusing to let her identity be chosen for her, and in the process became a leader of her people and an icon for countless women and girls. In Mankiller’s poem, “Reality {Again},” the narrator says, “…I care about Cuba, / South Africa, Jemez Pueblo, Navajo, / Bosnia, and Jay, Oklahoma / Some would say / not womanly things to care about.”

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ms-muse-cherokee-chief-wilma-mankiller-feminist-poetryWilma Mankiller. (Ilka Hartmann)


(Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society)
. . .

Wilma Mankiller was featured in Ms.’s January 1988 issue as one of its Women of the Year.


Wilma Mankiller, Charlie Soap and Gloria Steinem. (Courtesy of Kristina Kiehl)

Mankiller’s poem, “Smoke Signals,” speaks of “a time when messages / had to be sent long distances.” The narrator describes how the smoke “carried messages along the wind / sometimes even to the heavens…” However, the narrator dryly notes that today “no one can read them anymore.” Twelve years after her death, Wilma Mankiller’s lost poems are smoke signals rising in the wind. The poems teach the reader how to read them, “how to / accept the friendship of the wind / or love deeply and radically.” The lost poems sing of how to seek out the old medicine of the natural world to discover, again and again throughout our lives, another kind of freedom.

https://msmagazine.com/2022/09/02/ms-muse-cherokee-chief-wilma-mankiller-feminist-poetry/