My Life on the Road

by Gloria Steinem

  I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach. In Minnesota, a young woman from Women of All Red Nations, a group born of the activism of the 1970s that forms local women’s circles and also speaks out on everything from land rights to health dangers, explained to me that Native nations were often matrilineal: that is, clan identity passed through the mother, and a husband joined a wife’s household, not vice versa. Matrilineal does not mean matriarchal, which, like patriarchal, assumes that some group has to dominate—a failure of the imagination. Rather, female and male roles were distinct but flexible and equally valued. Women were usually in charge of agriculture and men of hunting, but one was not more important than the other.

  Women were also quite able to decide when and whether to have children. Sometimes when Native women came up to talk to me after meetings, they listed traditional herbs used as contraceptives or abortifacients, whether or not they were still in use. They knew that in the 1970s the Indian Health Service of the U.S. government admitted that thousands of Native women had been sterilized without their informed consent. Some called it a long-term strategy for taking over Indian lands, and others said it was the same racism that had sterilized black women in the South. Both the traditionalists and the young radicals of the American Indian Movement called it “slow genocide.” It also took away women’s ultimate power.

  I discovered that Native languages, Cherokee and others—like Bengali and other ancient languages—didn’t have gendered pronouns like he and she. A human being was a human being. Even the concept of chief, an English word of French origin, reflected a European assumption that there had to be one male kinglike leader. In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance. Men and women might have different duties, but the point was balance. For instance, men spoke at meetings, but women appointed and informed the men who spoke.

  I found plenty of non-Native testimony to this different way of life. For instance, in the early days of this nation, white women teachers in Native schools wrote about feeling safer in tribal communities than in their own. Ethnographers and journalists described the rarity of rape. Abuse of women was right up there with theft and murder as one of three reasons a man could not become a sachem, or wise leader. Anything that is prohibited must have existed, but it shocked Europeans by its rarity. I found testimonies like that of General James Clinton—no friend of the Indians he hunted down—who wrote in 1779, “Bad as these savages are, they never violate the chastity of any woman, [not even] their prisoner.”11

  In California, I sat at a lunch table with a professor of premonotheistic spirituality, plus several women from some of the tribes in this state that has more Native Americans than any other. All agreed that the paradigm of human organization had been the circle, not the pyramid or hierarchy—and it could be again.

  I’d never known there was a paradigm that linked instead of ranked. It was as if I’d been assuming opposition—and suddenly found myself in a welcoming world; like putting one’s foot down for a steep stair and discovering level ground.

  Still, when a Laguna law student from New Mexico complained that her courses didn’t cite the Iroquois Confederacy as the model for the U.S. Constitution—or explain that this still existing Confederacy was the oldest continuing democracy in the world—I thought she was being romantic. But I read about the Constitutional Convention and discovered that Benjamin Franklin had indeed cited the Iroquois Confederacy as a model.12 He was well aware of its success in unifying vast areas of the United States and Canada by bringing together Native nations for mutual decisions but also allowing autonomy in local ones. He hoped the Constitution could do the same for the thirteen states. That’s why he invited two Iroquois men to Philadelphia as advisers. Among their first questions was said to be: Where are the women?

  Unlike the Native model, the Founding Fathers’ Constitution allowed slavery and private property as well as the exclusion of women. But like its model, the Constitution upended every system of governance in Europe, from ancient Greece to the Magna Carta, by putting all power in the hands of the people, creating layers of talking circles from local to federal, separating military and civilian power, and doing away with monarchies and hereditary rulers. It seemed to me that Americans could at least say thank you. Instead, there was a notion that democracy was invented in ancient Greece, despite the fact that it had slavery as well as excluding women from citizenship, had citizenship also limited by class, and much more.

  As a Native spokeswoman said with irony when Indian nations were being lectured about democracy in the 1970s, “We, the Indian people, may be the only citizens of this nation who really understand your form of government…copied from the Iroquois Confederacy.”13

  III.

  Before Houston, I’d been proud of the diverse experiences and geography represented on the board of the Ms. Foundation for Women. Afterward, I couldn’t believe there was not one woman from Indian Country.

  In that way, I came to work closely with four women who joined us in the 1980s and 1990s, and we’ve continued to work informally ever since. Each of them could have been a success anywhere, yet chose to stay within a way of life that was, by conventional standards, marginalized, impoverished, and in danger of disappearing. Each of them had one Indian and one non-Indian parent, and that, too, would have made conventional success easier. Their choice to stay and struggle proved the value of warmth and relatedness, of balance and a sense of the natural world. All I knew was that being around them made me feel oddly understood and hopeful.

  Rayna Green made our lively board meetings even more so. As a Cherokee writer, folklorist, and anthropologist for the American Indian Program at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., she enriched our work and extended it to new places. So did her down-home sense of humor. Thanks to her, I began to learn about the Trickster, a common figure in Native mythologies, a boundary crosser who can go anywhere. Unlike the Jester and the Clown, who are at the bottom of a hierarchical pile and survive only by making the king laugh, the Trickster is free, a paradox, a breaker of boundaries who makes us laugh—and laughter lets the sacred in. In Native spiritualities, there is often a belief that we cannot pray unless we’ve laughed. Because the Trickster is sometimes female and is the spirit of free space and the road, I began to feel I’d found a totem of my own.14

  For instance, whenever I or others at our board meetings explained some injustice at too great a length, or otherwise stated the obvious with an air of discovery, Rayna’s humor restored proportion. When she cycled off the board after five years, she left behind a saying that I would only understand later: Feminism is memory.

  With the help of Paula Gunn Allen, I finally did understand. “Feminists too often believe,” she wrote, “that no one has ever experienced the kind of society that empowered women and made that empowerment the basis of rules and civilization. The price the feminist community must pay because it is not aware…is necessary confusion, division and much lost time.”15

  Her conclusion was simple and mind-blowing: “The root of oppression is the loss of memory.”

  —

  NEXT ARRIVED WILMA MANKILLER, someone I admired but had never met. She was the first woman to be elected deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation and soon would be appointed to serve out the term of principal chief. Two years later, in 1987, she would go on to become the first woman ever elected principal chief in modern times.

  Wilma’s gift for helping people find confidence in themselves—for creating independence, not dependence—was exactly the wisdom that the Ms. Foundation needed. If she could work this miracle in Indian Country despite centuries of loss of life, land, and respect, she could help diverse women and girls find their strengths, too.

  I’d heard about Wilma’s hard and pioneering work before she and I had lunch to talk about her joining the Ms. board, so
I was surprised to find myself in the presence of a quiet, warm, listening woman. It was hard to believe she was eleven years younger than I; her wisdom was so much older. I felt as if I were being sheltered by a strong and timeless tree. Just being with her made it hard not to be as authentic and shit free as she was. Her humor didn’t come along often, but when it did, it was as natural as the weather. For instance, when anyone asked about her name with honest curiosity, she would explain that Mankiller was a hereditary title for someone who protected the village. But you knew one too many people had asked her about it in a condescending way when she just deadpanned, “I earned it.”

  After many board meetings and over dinners, I learned that she was the sixth of eleven children born to a Dutch and Irish mother and a full-blooded Cherokee father. Her maternal grandparents had disapproved of this marriage, but her mother fell in love—and never looked back.

  Wilma spent her first ten years on her paternal grandfather’s land, called Mankiller Flats, in rural Oklahoma. This was his allotment at the end place of the Trail of Tears, the infamous forced march of the 1830s that deprived Cherokees of their Georgia homeland. More than a third of all the men, women, and children on this march perished from cold, starvation, and disease. Thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold.

  Mankiller Flats had no electricity or running water, but there was a creek with medicinal herbs growing along its banks, acres of woods to explore, a garden with enough fruits and vegetables to preserve for the winter, and games to play by lantern light with her brothers and sisters. Only when the white church ladies came to distribute donated clothing did Wilma understand that her family was seen as needy. She acquired a lifetime aversion to the phrases bless your heart and poor dears.

  Then in one of Washington’s many attempts to “mainstream” Native Americans through relocation and assimilation—and also to get them off valuable land—her parents were persuaded to move to San Francisco for “a better life.” At ten years old, Wilma suddenly found herself in the rough life of an urban housing project—a particular surprise for a girl who had never seen a phone or indoor plumbing or that many people in one place. It was, as she remembered, “like landing on Mars.” Despite being given a hard time at school for being different, and despite her family’s need to survive on her father’s minimum-wage job, they found community and support in an Indian center with other relocated families.

  When her father became a longshoreman, Wilma began to learn about union organizing at the kitchen table. Such jobs were not for girls, so she went to a local college with the hope of becoming a social worker. Then, just before her eighteenth birthday, she fell in love with a young man from Ecuador who had come here to study. By twenty-one, she was a married woman with two daughters and a husband who expected her to be a stay-at-home wife.

  When Wilma and I began to spend more time together as friends, she talked about looking over at her young husband and wishing with all her heart that she could be the traditional wife he wanted. But she also longed to be part of the political activism exploding all around her in San Francisco in the 1960s. She kept studying for a degree and took part in the nineteen-month-long occupation of Alcatraz, an abandoned prison on a federally owned island that was supposed to revert to Indian ownership. This experience of activism and community made her feel reconnected to her own life at last.

  In 1974 Wilma and her husband went their separate ways. She continued college and found support among other single mothers, but still felt far from her own land. In the summer of 1976, she left her comfortable home, bought a red car with the last of her money, and set off with her two teenage daughters for Oklahoma and Mankiller Flats.

  The family house had burned down years before, but they camped in their car by a lake near the ancestral land that her father had refused to sell, no matter how broke he was. Wilma and her daughters swam, caught fish, and harvested wild foods as she had done as a child. They learned to tell time by the sun, played Scrabble by lantern light, and listened to music from a portable radio by the campfire. Far from feeling insecure with no money and no home, Wilma said she felt free for the first time since she had left there. It made me realize how deep her connection to the land was.

  Later, she found an abandoned house nearby, made it into a makeshift home, and applied for an entry-level job at the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah. Several rejections later, she was hired as a writer of funding proposals. She not only worked harder than anyone else but began to prove her unique gift as an organizer. By respecting and expecting self-authority in others, she drew people out of passivity and despair. It was the beginning of her long and rocky path to leadership.

  Three years later Wilma was driving on a deserted country road and suffered a head-on collision with another car. Her body was crushed, and she barely survived. She wasn’t told until later that the driver of the other car was a woman friend—who had died instantly.

  Wilma was in a wheelchair for what was supposed to be the rest of her life. Only after seventeen surgeries—plus a bout with myasthenia gravis, a weakening neuromuscular disease—did she walk again. Even then, she had to wear a metal brace from knee to ankle on one leg, suffered swelling and pain, and needed specially constructed shoes.

  All this had happened long before we met. Her flowing skirts concealed the brace, and her calm concealed the pain. I never would have guessed any of it.

  Together with Charlie Soap, a full-blooded Cherokee who also worked for the nation—and who was fluent in Cherokee, as Wilma was not—she took on what was seen as an impossible project: trying to make positive change for the residents of Bell, an isolated rural community of three hundred families. It was such a place of poverty and despair that even people who escaped were ashamed to say they ever lived there.16

  Because Wilma was patient, respectful, listened, and understood that people could only gain confidence by making decisions for themselves, she slowly persuaded families to trust her enough to come to a community meeting and decide what they needed most. Wilma thought it might be a school, but they chose something that would help everyone, young and old: running water. They had been surviving with one pump by carrying pails every day. To connect to the main water supply would mean digging eighteen miles of deep ditches, laying large pipes, and adding two miles of smaller ones to every house. Wilma told them she would raise the money and find the equipment—if they did the work themselves.

  No one had thought this was even a possibility, but Wilma’s faith in them raised the hope that they could help themselves. Entire families, from children to the elderly, did the work of digging and laying pipe. It took fourteen long and hard months, but in the end there were two successes: running water and a community with confidence instead of despair. It was such a feat that CBS News covered it, people around the country were inspired, and so were viewers in the underdeveloped parts of the world that Bell so resembled.17 In times to come, this story of Wilma and Bell would be made into a feature movie, The Cherokee Word for Water.

  Charlie and Wilma bonded over this long struggle, and in 1986, the same year she joined the Ms. board, they were married.

  Once after a painful Ms. Foundation meeting, with too many proposals from rape crisis centers and too little money to give them, Wilma told me the story of something she hadn’t dealt with herself. In a movie house near her housing project in San Francisco, she was sexually assaulted by a group of teenage boys. She had talked with them because she felt flattered that anyone wanted to talk to her—and then was betrayed. She didn’t tell her parents or her friends. She didn’t go into much detail with me either. The experience still felt both too serious and not serious enough. Only sitting in a circle of women, listening to similar stories, allowed her to realize that she wasn’t alone, it wasn’t her fault, she could speak up.

  From then on I realized she had said yes to joining us for a reason, conscious or not. I thoug
ht of this again when she and Charlie and I spent a winter holiday in Mexico with Alice Walker. At the very end of our stay, Wilma said to us quietly, “This is the first time in my life that I’ve been with people who didn’t need anything from me.” It gave me a glimpse of the price Wilma had paid for leadership among a people who had been so long prevented from leading themselves.

  In 1987 she ran to be elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, a very controversial thing to do. There had never been an elected female Cherokee chief in modern times, and many Cherokees had come to assume that male leadership was as inevitable as Christianity and store-bought food. In the long past, the Cherokee Nation’s council of female elders had chosen leaders and even decided if wars should be fought. Treaties with Washington had to be signed by female as well as male elders, something officials there mercilessly ridiculed as “Petticoat Government.” Some modern Cherokees still feared this ridicule, or thought a woman couldn’t represent the Nation in Washington, or both.

  Her election campaign had all the complexities of any statewide campaign, plus the necessity of reaching enrolled Cherokee voters in states outside Oklahoma and in foreign countries. I found myself in the familiar role of helping with fund-raisers and even a television commercial. But in the end, Wilma won because of her record of helping people to help themselves, as she had in Bell, and also because Cherokee traditionalists, who had rarely voted before, saw her leadership as a return to the balance and reciprocity of the past.

  After that, I watched as she quietly, person by person, one rural community at a time, one Washington lobbying battle at a time, helped people build their own water systems, youth programs, and a health care delivery system that was a model for other rural areas. Gradually she brought the Cherokee Nation from being mostly dependent on government allotments to being mostly independent through communally run businesses. In order to honor other Native women leaders, she interviewed many for her book, Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women.18