ALL through her life, white people tried to help Wilma Mankiller. As she walked to school, two miles down the hilly, narrow lanes of north-eastern Oklahoma, women in big cars would stop and offer her a ride. She didn't want one. The same women would appear sometimes at the wood-frame house, where her family of 11 lived in three rooms, burning coal-oil and hauling water from the spring, and offer them second-hand clothes. She would run away. If they caught her, they would pat her on her black-haired, Indian head. “Bless your little heart,” they murmured.

In 1956, when she was ten, white people suggested her family should move from their farm at Mankiller Flats to San Francisco. The government, having forced her ancestors in 1838 along the Trail of Tears from eastern Tennessee to Indian Territory, now promised them a better life even farther west. They caught the passenger train from Stilwell; she wept Cherokee tears all the way to California. No one had forced them out this time. But they ended up in a drab, violent housing project where her father found back-breaking work in a rope-factory and she was mocked at school for her stupid name. She knew it meant “guardian of the settlement”; but that all seemed far away and irrelevant now.

Many years later, when she was principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, a white woman offered money for college scholarships for Indians. She said she wanted to “give pride back” to them. Ms Mankiller had never heard such arrogance. Yes, her tribe needed schools, clinics, day care, Head Start programmes, and all these she was busy procuring for them. But it did not need the patronising charity of white people. Under Ms Mankiller, the Cherokee were learning to rely on themselves again.

It had taken time. Over the years the tribe had been absorbed until almost everything was lost. In 1907 the tribal lands in Oklahoma had been broken up into allotments, one of which was given to Ms Mankiller's grandfather at Mankiller Flats; and nothing did more damage to the tribe, she believed, than that loss of commonalty and spiritual, as well as physical, interdependence. Her family had tried to preserve it, bartering with and working for other people. But the Cherokee could not easily find their sense of oneness again.

She herself was almost lost to the tribe for a while, married to a Latino at 17, having two daughters early, living a middle-class Californian life. But the San Francisco of the late 1960s gradually radicalised her. The stiletto heels were swapped for sandals; the husband was sidelined; the two small daughters were taken by boat to be part of the Native-American reclamation of the prison-island of Alcatraz; and in 1976 she went back with them in a U-Haul van to Mankiller Flats. There, on the land that was still her family's, they camped under the stars and learned to tell the time by the sun, Cherokee-fashion. Nine years later she was chief of the Cherokee Nation.

Hard graft was required. When she first ran for office in 1983, the entire tribal council opposed her: not because she was an activist, but because she was a woman. No woman had led such a large tribe before. She slogged on, “keeping steady”, until she had won them over. Organising in California for other tribes had taught her how to type, draw up grant applications and analyse land treaties; she brought in revenue and social programmes. But firstly she taught self-reliance. She had never forgotten the women at the Indian Centre in San Francisco, poor single mothers who made themselves ballgowns from cast-offs and went out to dance on Saturday nights, their hair piled up under Aqua Net lacquer, determined to unite and shine.

She was credited with many things, including the expansion of the tribe from 55,000 to almost 200,000 members, its control of a $75m budget, the revival of the Sequoyah high school and the broadening of horizons for all Indian women. But her own favourite project was one she had masterminded in 1981 in the village of Bell, 14 miles from Mankiller Flats. There she persuaded a dying Cherokee settlement of 300 people, mostly chicken-catchers in run-down shacks, to build their own 16-mile water-line to the mains supply. If they dug or drilled, they would get new houses. The people took a year of persuading; but they built the line. No white person helped them. The “shiftless” Cherokees proudly did everything necessary.

The healing spring

Ms Mankiller was not an easy taskmaster. She scolded the people of Bell until they obeyed her. When the tribal council cavilled about her disregard for ceremony, she turned off their microphones. Because the owners of smokeshops refused to pay their taxes, she shut them down. She battled on through constant illnesses, ending with pancreatic cancer, but still considered her biggest challenge was to restore the Cherokees' lost faith in themselves.

One cure she knew. At Mankiller Flats, where she went back to live, the old wooden house had been burned down by hunters, but the spring still flowed. A Cherokee ritual called “going to the water” could heal negative thoughts as poultices healed wounds. So there, among the rocky slopes of bending hickory and walnut trees, her feet slightly wary of crawfish in the icy water, she would gather positive strength for herself, as well as for her tribe.