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Reviewed by:
  • Mankiller by Valerie Red-Horse Mohl
  • Anne Makepeace (bio)
Mankiller
directed by Valerie Red-Horse Mohl
2017 Red-Horse Native Productions and Valhalla Entertainment

valerie red- horse mohl’s brilliant documentary, Mankiller, tells the story of a true American hero, Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to become principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. Against all odds, Wilma won three elections and served as principal chief from 1985 to 1995. Mankiller takes us from her childhood on the reservation through her family’s bewildering relocation to California, her activist education in San Francisco, her rediscovery of her roots during the occupation of Alcatraz, and her return to Oklahoma and the Cherokee Nation as a young mother. The film follows her tireless community work there and her hard-won rise to political power, profiling a woman who led her people with determination, compassion, and vision.

I was fortunate to interview the film’s director, Valerie Red- Horse Mohl, about the making of the film and the messages Wilma’s life has for us today. Valerie is of Cherokee ancestry and spent most of her working life in the financial sector, structuring financial offerings for tribes and their projects while also making documentary films. Today she serves as executive director of a national nonprofit focused on social impact in business (Social Venture Circle). She is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, teaching entrepreneurialism through a social impact and racial equity lens. Below is a summary of our recent interview.

AM:

How did you get involved in making Mankiller?

VRM:

I had directed and produced two films with Gale Anne Hurd as executive producer for PBS: True Whispers: The Story of the Navajo Code Talkers (World War II) and Choctaw Code Talkers (World War 1). Shirley Sneve, executive director of Vision Maker Media, suggested that we consider making a documentary film about the life story of Wilma Mankiller, and of course we were interested. The first thing I did was read Wilma’s book, and I discovered so many parallels with my family and my heritage and my work, especially in economic development. [End Page 152] Her family and my father were brought to San Francisco under the same relocation program. Wilma’s father was a full- blood Cherokee, as was mine, and our mothers were both white. Being half white and half Cherokee, we could both walk in two worlds, so she was very much able to sit with Bill Clinton at the White House and at the table with Cherokee people.

AM:

How did you begin thinking about how to structure the film, what to include and what to leave out?

VRM:

In her autobiography, Wilma said that if anyone ever makes a film about her, she wanted it to be tied to the history of her people, the history of the Cherokee Nation. She loved Cherokee as if it were another human being. Gale and I both wanted to honor that responsibility. So I learned a lot about my own history while planning the film. We traveled to Oklahoma to interview people and also to gather archival material.

AM:

You have so much terrific archival footage and photographs in the film: of the civil rights movement in the Bay Area, of the Alcatraz occupation, lots of news footage of Wilma with people like Bill Clinton and Gloria Steinem, but what I love the most is the beautiful black- and- white footage of Cherokee in the forties and fifties. How did you find that?

VRM:

Finding archival footage was the hardest part, and it is why the film took so long. Wilma was born in the 1940s and died in 2010, so we had to get footage and images from that entire time period. We went to the Cherokee Nation archives, to friends and family. We went to people’s houses and interviewed the community, asking if they had any photos or home movies. There are 750 individual pieces of archive, and it was a true challenge not only finding them but also researching ownership and clearing rights. With my other documentaries, I could find all the material...

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