Faith & Spirit Quote by Wilma Mankiller

Legacy, in Wilma Mankiller's framing, isn't a marble statue; it's an internal repair job. "I want to be remembered" signals the political reality that public figures rarely control policy outcomes, but they can sometimes shape a people’s self-concept. The ambition here is deliberately modest in scale yet radical in target: not land returned, not a bill passed, but "faith in ourselves" - the most easily stolen resource in any colonized community.

The verb "restore" does heavy lifting. Faith isn't treated as a mood you conjure up; it's something damaged by history and capable of being rebuilt. That word carries the quiet indictment: someone broke it. Mankiller doesn't name the culprits because she doesn’t have to; the context of Cherokee life in the 20th century - removal, assimilation pressure, poverty engineered through policy - sits inside the sentence like a ghost. It's rhetoric that refuses victimhood without erasing victimization.

The "us" matters as much as the "I". She’s not claiming to have delivered self-esteem from on high. She positions leadership as collective rehabilitation: a leader as facilitator, not savior. That aligns with Mankiller’s tenure as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, where visibility itself was a tool. A woman in a role historically denied to Indigenous women by imposed systems becomes evidence, not argument, that dignity and competence are not external grants.

The subtext is strategic: restored self-belief is infrastructure. Once a community trusts its own capacity, everything else - governance, health, education, economic development - stops feeling like charity and starts feeling like sovereignty.