In 1992, Wilma Mankiller gave the commencement address at Flagstaff’s Northern Arizona University.
Several years earlier, Mankiller had become the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, that community’s highest executive office. “Mankiller” is an old Cherokee word for “keeper of the village” – an apt description for a woman who devoted much of her adult life to the tribe.
“Even in my own community I have heard people talk about the environment, housing, homelessness, or any of the problems that we have: ‘Well, they’re going to solve that problem.’ In American society it is always, ‘They’re going to solve that problem.’ I don’t know who ‘they’ are,” Mankiller told the graduates . “I do not think that a great prophet is going to come along and save this country or save us and deal with all of these problems in a vacuum. We all have to take part.”…