Former chief of the Cherokee Nation Wilma Mankiller and best-selling author Cornel West will present President's Lectures Dec. 11 and 12 respectively. The lectures will begin at 8 p.m. in Room 101 of the Salomon Center for Teaching, and admission is free.
During the last decade, both Mankiller and West have emerged as leading voices against racism and discrimination.
Mankiller and her family were relocated from their home in Adair County, Okla., to San Francisco in 1957 by the Bureau of Indian Affairs under its Relocation Program, which moved tribal people from their homelands.
In the San Francisco Bay area, Mankiller was active in the community, directing a Native American youth center, volunteering for the Pit River Tribe's land reclamation project and co-founding an alternative school for Native American children. She also gained knowledge about treaty rights and human services for tribal people as well as skills in program development and grant writing. In 1977 she returned to Oklahoma to work for the Cherokee Nation.
Although the 1987 election was Mankiller's first to a full four-year term as principal chief, her career with the Cherokee Nation started in October 1977, first as a volunteer, then as a grant writer and later, founding director of the new community development department. She was elected deputy chief in 1983, and by 1987 already had served two years as chief after Ross Swimmer resigned in 1985 to take a position in Washington, D.C. Mankiller was re-elected to a second term as chief in 1991 with 83 percent of the votes.
During her terms as deputy chief and principal chief, Mankiller led a team that dramatically increased the revenue, services and stature of the Cherokee Nation. She is particularly proud of the development of a comprehensive health care system. She met with Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton to discuss Native American issues. She also developed worldwide prominence as a speaker, not only for her people, but for countless women's rights and minority organizations.
Her 1983 book, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (St. Martin's Press), was published to good reviews. The book is equal parts history and autobiography. She is currently co-editing the Reader's Companion to the History of Women in the U.S. to be published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1996.
In 1994 Mankiller announced she would not seek reelection as principal chief. Her term expired this past August. Beginning in January, Mankiller will serve as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, teaching courses and giving lectures.
Cornel West, also from Oklahoma, was born in Tulsa. The West family moved a great deal and finally settled in a middle-class neighborhood in Sacramento, Calif. It was there that young West began what would become a lifelong habit of protest by refusing to salute the flag because of the second-class status of African-Americans in this country.
As a boy, West was greatly impressed by the Baptist church. (His grandfather had been a preacher.) He had been deeply touched by stories of parishioners who, only two generations from slavery, told stories of individuals maintaining their religious faith during the most trying of times. West was equally attracted to the commitment of the Black Panthers, whose office was nearby his boyhood church. It was from the Panthers that West began to understand the importance of community-based political action. But it was a biography of Theodore Roosevelt that would steer his academic future. West felt an affinity to Roosevelt as both were asthmatics. He read how Roosevelt had overcome his asthma, went to Harvard and became a great speaker. So, at age 8, even though he wasn't exactly sure what it was, West decided to go to Harvard.
He graduated in 1973 from Harvard magna cum laude in only three years. Martin Kilson, one of West's professors, recalls his former student as "the most intellectually aggressive and highly cerebral student I have taught in my 30 years here."
West went on to Princeton University where he received his M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1980). He then served as head of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Princeton. He recently returned to Harvard, where he serves as a professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy of Religion.
He is the author of 11 books, including the best-selling Race Matters (Beacon Press, 1993). West's latest book, Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin (Putnam/Grosset, 1995), was co-authored with Tikkun Magazine editor Michael Lerner.
Although West has been called a "prophet with attitude" by Newsweek and christened "our black Jeremiah" by his Harvard peer Henry Louis Gates Jr., West preaches a gospel of racial interdependence. As he writes in Race Matters: "To establish a new framework, we need to begin with a frank acknowledgment of the basic humanness and Americanness of each of us."