Mankiller talks about Native American future
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.