Wilma Mankiller Quotes (20 Quotes)


    I don't think anybody anywhere can talk about the future of their people or of an organization without talking about education. Whoever controls the education of our children controls our future.

    I think the most important issue we have as a people is what we started, and that is to begin to trust our own thinking again and believe in ourselves enough to think that we can articulate our own vision of the future and then work to make sure that that vision becomes a reality.

    A lot of young girls have looked to their career paths and have said they'd like to be chief. There's been a change in the limits people see.

    My name is Mankiller, and in the old Cherokee Nation, when we lived here in the Southeast, we lived in semi-autonomous villages, and there was someone who watched over the village, who had the title of mankiller. And I'm not sure what you could equate that to, but it was sort of like a soldier or someone who was responsible for the security of the village, and so anyway this one fellow liked the title mankiller so well that he kept it as his name, and that's who we trace our ancestry back to.

    I want to be remembered as the person who helped us restore faith in ourselves.


    America would be a better place if leaders would do more long-term thinking.

    If we're ever going to collectively begin to grapple with the problems that we have collectively, we're going to have to move back the veil and deal with each other on a more human level.

    We must trust our own thinking. Trust where we're going. And get the job done.

    Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief.

    The secret of our success is that we never, never give up.

    But what I learned from my experience in living in a community of almost all African-American people, and what I learned from my experience in living in my own community in Oklahoma before the relocation is that poor people have a much, much greater capacity for solving their own problems than most people give them credit for.

    Individually and collectively, Cherokee people possess an extraordinary ability to face down adversity and continue moving forward.

    I had no job, very little money, no car, had no idea what I was going to do, but knew it was time to go home.

    One of the things my parents taught me, and I'll always be grateful as a gift, is to not ever let anybody else define me that for me to define myself . . . and I think that helped me a lot in assuming a leadership position.

    In Iroquois society, leaders are encouraged to remember seven generations in the past and consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people.

    We've had daunting problems in many critical areas, but I believe in the old Cherokee injunction to be of a good mind. Today it's called positive thinking.

    I've run into more discrimination as a woman than as an Indian.

    Everybody is sitting around saying, 'Well, jeez, we need somebody to solve this problem of bias.' That somebody is us. We all have to try to figure out a better way to get along.

    There are a whole lot of historical factors that have played a part in our being where we are today, and I think that to even to begin to understand our contemporary issues and contemporary problems, you have to understand a little bit about that history.



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