Montgomery Fellow Wilma Mankiller, former president of the Cherokee Nation, told a crowd of about 300 she thinks Native Americans will improve their lot in the next century.
"We will enter the 21st century more on our own terms than we have entered any other century," Mankiller said last night in Cook Auditorium.
Although she said reservations are rife with welfare dependency, poverty, alcoholism and lack of opportunity, she is not without hope.
Native Americans' reluctance to abandon their traditional languages and customs will enable them to preserve their identity in the future, she said.
"One of the most precious things that we have today as a people ... is a sense of interdependence and a sense of community," she said.
Mankiller said she is hopeful, in part, because Native Americans have begun to trust their own unique thinking.
College President James Freedman, who introduced Mankiller, said the Montgomery Fellowship has provided for a number of other distinguished guests to visit the College, such as Phillip Roth and Toni Morrison.
The fellowship was established by Kenneth Montgomery '25, who passed away last week.
Freedman said Montgomery was "pleased to know before his death that Wilma Mankiller was this term's Montgomery Fellow."
After the speech, Native American Program Director Mike Hanitchak presented Mankiller with a pendant representing the 5-pointed Cherokee star and Dartmouth's lone pine symbol.
In her speech, Mankiller also described the history of the Native American peoples since the arrival of Columbus.
She said few people realize tribal governments, such as the League of the Iroquois, had existed for thousands of years before the advent of European colonization.
After the arrival of Europeans in the New World, what Mankiller referred to as the "war era" began. During this time, European nations made treaties with native peoples and fought with them for the land.
"Native people fought ... for the right to remain in their homeland," Mankiller said. But, she said, the history books seldom tell Native Americans' side of the story.
After this era of fighting, Mankiller said President Jackson instigated an era of removing and relocating Native Americans. Mankiller said the U.S. government attempted to "take entire bodies of people away from their homeland."
Mankiller used her own tribe, the Cherokee, as an example of a nation dramatically affected by the removal process.
In 1838, the U.S. Army forcibly removed the Cherokee from their land in Georgia, moving them to reservations in Oklahoma. The journey became known as the "Trail of Tears."
After the journey, "fully one fourth of ... the entire tribe was dead," Mankiller said.
Once there, Mankiller said the tribe remained hopeful, attempting to rebuild their lives and community.
Before Oklahoma became a state, the Cherokees had established their own education system and institutions, beginning what Mankiller called a "golden era" of the Cherokee Nation.
When Oklahoma became a state in 1906, the Cherokee government collapsed, she said.
New policies caused a severe decline of the Cherokee Nation, during which they had few allies in Washington and no central tribal government, she said.
But Mankiller said the idea of a united Cherokee Nation never disappeared. In 1971, the rebuilding process began.
Since then, the Cherokee Nation has become one of the major employers in the state of Oklahoma, Mankiller said.
Mankiller described the great diversity of Native American tribes but said there are many similarities between tribes, including the problems they face.
The Occom Pond Singers, a traditional Native American College music group, concluded the event by singing a Native American song honoring Mankiller.
