Perhaps no coin ever issued by the US Mint has a more Star Wars-esque name than the Wilma Mankiller quarter. The Mint released this coin in 2022 as the third in its American Women Quarters Program.
Despite its fanciful name, the Wilma Mankiller quarter honors a great activist and social worker, the eponymous Wilma Mankiller. Since she deserves more than a writer’s snarky comment about her name, let’s discuss her life, the coin itself, and the reasons behind her placement on an American quarter dollar.
Wilma Pearl Mankiller was born on November 18, 1945, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. She was a full member of the Cherokee Nation and spent her first years on her family’s allotment in Adair County, Oklahoma.
Allotments were the creation of the Dawes Act of 1887, which sought to inspire agency in individual Native American families by carving homestead plots out of existing reservation lands. Despite the aims of the bill, Native American communities were notoriously and desperately poor. Mankiller herself grew up without running water or electricity.
Her life changed radically at the age of 11 when the Bureau of Indian Affairs issued a bold new policy. In the treatise, Native Americans were relocated into cities in order to urbanize and assimilate them into the general culture of the country, rather than allowing them to stay in somewhat segregated tribal communities.
Mankiller and her family were forcibly moved to San Francisco in 1956. Though Mankiller hated the move, calling it her own Trail of Tears, it placed her in a position to nurture and grow her budding activism.
Spurred by a 1969 takeover of Alcatraz Island by a group of Native Americans, claiming the island as their own through “right of discovery,” she began working with the numerous tribal groups in California to push for their rights against US corporate interests. Notably, she assisted the Pit River Tribe in its fight with Pacific Gas and Electric over the rights to large swaths of tribal lands.
After a divorce in 1977, Mankiller returned to Oklahoma with her two daughters. Her focus was clear – she wanted to help her own Cherokee Nation improve its conditions. Many Cherokee Nation families, despite the passage of 21 years since Mankiller’s departure, still had no running water or electricity.
Thanks to her experience with the Pit River Tribe, Mankiller began an effective stint as an economic stimulus coordinator and community developer. She quickly rose through the ranks of the tribal leadership to arrive at her most famous position – Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Her 1985 elevation to that role marked the first time that a woman had occupied that role in the history of the tribe.
Mankiller’s story did not go unnoticed by the general public. She was elected to several national halls of fame, including the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998.
She is also the subject of a feature film. The Cherokee Word for Water is a 2013 release that documented her efforts on behalf of the Cherokee residents in Bell, Oklahoma, who were living in abject conditions until she directed the efforts of the Community Development Department for the Cherokee Nation to assist them.
Sadly, she did not live to see the release of the film. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Mankiller passed away in August 2010. She was 64.
Needless to say, when the United States Mint announced its plans to honor prominent American women who made a significant impact on the culture around them, Mankiller was one of the names at the top of the list. The American Women Quarters program began issuing quarters in 2022, and Mankiller’s quarter was the third coin issued in that first year.
Like all the quarters in the series, the obverse of the coin is the familiar bust of George Washington, the first US President. It features the mint year, the motto In God We Trust, and a letter designator for its mint location.
The reverse is where the honorific to Wilma Mankiller exists. She is depicted as a younger woman, looking resolutely to the right with the wind in her hair. To the right of her image, the seven-pointed star of the Cherokee Nation further identifies her heritage, along with her English name, highest rank (Principal Chief), and her Cherokee name.
It is a fitting tribute to one of the more recent female pioneers in American history.