Early Life
Wilma Pearl Mankiller was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the sixth of eleven children, to Charley Mankiller (November 15, 1914 – February 20, 1971) and Clara Irene Sitton (born September 18, 1921). Her father was a full-blooded Cherokee and her mother was a Caucasian woman of Dutch and Irish descent who acculturated herself to Cherokee life.
The family surname, Mankiller, refers to a traditional Cherokee military rank; it is Asgaya-dihi in the Cherokee language. Alternative spellings are Outacity or Outacite.
The Mankiller family was destitute, and initially resided on Charley’s allotment lands of Mankiller Flats near Rocky Mountain, Oklahoma. In 1942, during World War II, the United States Army exercised eminent domain for military purposes and took over the land of 45 Cherokee families, including the Mankillers, in order to expand Camp Gruber. The Mankillers willingly left Oklahoma under the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Indian Relocation Program. The family relocated to San Francisco in 1956, and later settled in Daly City.
In 1963, at the age of 17, Mankiller married Hector Hugo Olaya de Bardi, an Ecuadorian college student. They moved to Oakland and had two daughters, Felicia Olaya, born in 1964, and Gina Olaya, born in 1966.
Mankiller returned to school, first at Skyline College, and then San Francisco State University. Her bachelor’s degree in the social sciences was from Flaming Rainbow University in Stilwill, OK, and she did graduate work at the University of Arkansas. She had been very involved in San Francisco’s Indian Center throughout her time in California. In the late 1960s, Mankiller joined the activist movement and participated in the Occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969. For five years, she volunteered for the Pit River Tribe.
After divorcing Hugo Olaya, in 1977 Mankiller moved back to Oklahoma with her two young daughters, in hopes of helping her own people. She began an entry-level job for the Cherokee Nation.
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