“Bernice Reagon is a living treasure in an institution used to dealing with static treasures. When you meet her, you know there’s something there – a vision, a focus, a drive, an intensity – and that’s never changed.”—Ralph Rinzler, Smithsonian Asst Secretary for Public Service

“For more than a half-century Bernice Johnson Reagon has been a major cultural voice for freedom and justice; singing, teaching—speaking out against reacism and organized inequities of all kinds. A child of Southwest Georgia, an African American woman’s voice, born in the struggle against racism in America during the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s. Reagon’s life and work supports the concept of community based culture with an enlarged capacity for mutual respect: for self, for those who move among us who seem to be different than us, respect and care for our home, the environment—including the planet that sustains life as we know it.”—from www.bernicejohnsonreagon.com

Anna Politkovskaya was murdered last week [October 7, 2006]—executed, actually. Someone followed her into the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow, shot her four times: twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and a final shot to the head. The pistol, its serial number filed off, was left next to the body, the sign of a contract killing.
 
Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist whose fearless, behind-the-scenes coverage of the Chechen war had exposed human-rights abuses in Russia’s southern province of Chechnya, where tens of thousands have been killed during two Kremlin campaigns. She documented not only the brutality of the conflict, but also the massive corruption and moral corrosion that was occurring at all levels and on both sides. She was not afraid to name names, and, on at least one occasion, to print the official’s phone number, inviting her readers to register their disgust personally.

In the months before her murder, she had been focusing on the Moscow-backed, Chechen Prime Minister Ramsan Kadyrov. In fact, just two days before her murder, on Kadyrov’s thirtieth birthday, she made him the subject of her last radio interview. The date was significant because it marked the day Kadyrov met the age eligibility requirement to stand for the post of president. Politkovskaya was well-aware of this fact and of his aspirations when she chose to accuse him of torture.
 
"Right now I have two photographs on my desk. I am conducting an investigation about torture today in Kadyrov’s prisons, today and yesterday. These are people who were abducted by the Kadyrovtsi [members of Kadyrov’s personal militia] for completely inexplicable reasons and who died… " (Politkovskaya/ RFE)  
 
At this point, the interviewer suggested that perhaps these were individual cases, representing only a small percentage of abuses. Politkovskaya responded in no uncertain terms:

Her unfinished, final article was published a week after her murder by the biweekly, independent Novaya Gazeta, her paper for the last seven years. The story included testimony from a Chechen torture victim and still photos from a video, which, according to the paper, said showed Chechen security forces beating two young men, apparently to death.
 
The mystery is not so much that Politkovskaya was killed, but where she found the courage to continue working in the face of so much danger. After all, she had been receiving death threats since 1999, when she first began documenting human rights abuses in Chechnya. (WiPC) Members of her family had been threatened. A few months before her murder, unknown assailants tried unsuccessfully to break into a car her daughter, Vera, was driving. As the obituary in the Guardian comments,

"She had already used up several of her nine lives as a reporter. She had been locked in a hole in the ground by Russian troops and threatened with rape, kidnapped, and poisoned by the FSB [former KGB] on the first flight to Rostov after the Beslan school siege in 2004… Her husband left her. Her son pleaded with her to stop. Her neighbors, cowed by the attentions of the FSB in an upmarket street in central Moscow, shunned her."(Hearst)
 
Who was this woman Anna Politkovskaya? Where did she find her courage? Was she super-human, immune to threats of torture and death?
 
Certainly, she could have chosen a different life. Born in 1958 in New York, the daughter of United Nations diplomats from the Ukraine, she had a privileged background and dual citizenry. After graduating from Moscow University in 1980, she wrote for the national daily Izvestia before switching to the smaller, independent presses. She had a husband and two children. Never envisioning herself as a war correspondent, Politkovskaya stated, “I was interested in reviving Russia’s pre-revolutionary tradition of writing about our social problems. That led me to writing about  the seven million refugees in our country. When the war started, it was that that led me down to Chechnya.” (Hearst)

Her first book,  A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, published in 1999, told horrifying anecdotes of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Russian military. This was followed three years later by A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, where Politkovskaya continued to put a human face on the horrors of war. Her latest book, Putin’s War: Life in a Failing Democracy, was published last year. According to  The New York Times, it was “a searing portrait of a country in disarray and of the man at its helm.”
 
But professional drive cannot explain the courage of Politkovskaya. There must have been something more, something deeper.
 
There are some clues in her account of the Moscow theatre hostage crisis in 2003, when renegade, Chechen hostage-takers, requested her as a negotiator. They had seized a theatre and were holding 850 people hostage. Unlike the sparse and impersonal accounts of her torture in 2000, this report is surprisingly subjective:
 

“Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief.”--Wilma Mankiller
 
Wilma Mankiller, the first female Chief of the Cherokee Nations died on April 6, 2010. She served as their Principal Chief from and 1985 to 1995.
 
Her story contains and reflects the history of her people, retracing archetypal paths of displacement and homecoming. And her story is the story of a powerful woman—negotiating motherhood and intimate partnerships in a patriarchal landscape, meeting and overcoming resistance to serving in a leadership position. It is also a story of a person living with disabilities, both congenital and accident-related. Mankiller’s lifework was a steady demonstration of what could be possible, for an individual, for a community, for a nation. As her best-selling autobiography emphasizes, political and personal resistance require an understanding of place, knowledge of one’s history, spiritual roots, and a love of one’s people.

Mankiller’s father was Charley Mankiller, a Cherokee, and her mother, Irene, was of Dutch-Irish descent, but acculturated to Cherokee life. She had ten siblings and grew up on her father’s allotment, near Rocky Mountain, Oklahoma. She remembers her first ten years at “Mankiller Flats” with affection. She and her siblings would walk three miles each way to school, but, in Mankiller’s words, “I didn’t know the difference between being poor and having money until one day at school. A little girl… saw my flour-sack underwear while we were in the outhouse. She ran and told some other girls, and they all teased me about it. That was really the first time I had any inkling we were different.”
 
In 1950, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) came up with a plan for dealing with what they termed “the Indian Problem.” This new policy, ominously called “termination,” had been hatched by Dillon S. Myer, the then-commissioner of the BIA. His credentials for the job? He had been the director of the Japanese War Relocation Authority that, during World War II, had implemented the internment of Japanese-American citizens in camps in California. As Mankiller notes in her autobiography, “The Cherokees and other native tribes should have recognized that the assorted Trails of Tears of our ancestors served in large part as models for the removal of the Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americas in the 1940’s.”

On August 1, 1953, Congress adopted a resolution making Indians “subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States…”
 
This policy became the excuse for breaking up Native communities and putting tribal lands, no longer non-taxable, on the market. Mankiller’s family was offered the option of “relocation” to a large, urban city. Her father, having been taken from his home as a boy and forced to attend an Indian boarding school, was reluctant to leave his land, but eventually became persuaded that moving to San Francisco would offer a better future for his children.
 
Mankiller remembers this government facilitated relocation as her own personal “Trail of Tears”—referring to the infamous forced relocations from 1831 to 1838 of five autonomous tribes living in the Deep South. Four thousand of the 15,000 “relocated” Cherokee died from exposure, starvation, and disease during this forced march to Oklahoma.
 
“No one pointed a gun at me or at members of my family. No show of force was used. It was not necessary… I learned through this ordeal about the fear and anguish that occur when you give up your home, your community, and everything you have ever known to move far away to a strange place. I cried for days, not unlike the children who had stumbled down the Trail of Tears so many years before. I wept tears … tears from my history, from my tribe's past. They were Cherokee tears.”

The better life that the Mankillers had been promised turned out to be low-paying factory jobs and housing in an urban ghetto. Feeling neglected by her parents, who had their hands full supporting the large family, Mankiller became a rebellious teenager, running away to her grandmother’s ranch near Modesto. She had to run away five times, before her family finally allowed her to stay. She credits her year on the ranch as a turning point in her life, where she took an active role in the farm, shadowing her tough and outspoken grandmother.
 
At the end of this year, she moved back in with her family, who were now living in Hunter’s Point, an area near the shipyards that had been settled by African American families fleeing the Dust Bowl. By 1960, Hunter’s Point was a neighborhood filled with racial tension and gang violence. Mankiller writes how her years on these “mean streets” began to shape her perception of the world: “The women are especially strong. Each day they face daunting problem as they struggle just to survive. They are mothers not only of their children, but of the whole community.”

After high school, Mankiller moved in with her sister, taking a job as a clerical worker. She met an Ecuadoran student from an aristocratic family, and after a dizzying summer courtship, they flew to Reno to get married. Mankiller was seventeen. A year later, she gave birth to a daughter, and then two years later, she had a second daughter. She began to take classes at a community college and then, through a minorities educational opportunity program, she entered San Francisco State University. By the mid-1960’s the Bay Area was exploding politically and culturally. Mankiller describes taking her daughters to Haight-Ashbury: “…I think the people of the Haight had to be as curious about us as we were about them. My daughters wore shiny patent-leather shoes and little-girl dresses, and I looked like what I was at the time, a young housewife who liked to observe… but was unwilling to get fully involved.”
 
What changed all that was the Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in the fall of 1969. The island had been occupied briefly five years earlier by a group of Sioux, as a symbolic act of reclamation. In a hundred-year-old Sioux treaty, the US government had agreed that any male Native American older than eighteen, whose tribe had been party to the treaty, could file for a homestead on abandoned or unused federal property. As the island had been declared surplus federal property since the closing of the penitentiary in 1963, Native American activists were claiming their right to take possession.

In October 1969, a fire of suspicious origin gutted the American Indian Center in San Francisco. In an act of protest, fourteen Native Americans landed on Alcatraz and claimed it in the name of “Indians of All Tribes.” Within a day, the Coast Guard arrived to escort the protesters off the island, but ten days later, nearly a hundred activists returned—this time with provisions, and the occupation lasted for nineteen months. During this time, Mankiller would visit the island with her daughters, running support for four of her siblings and their children who had joined the protest. In her words, “The occupation of Alcatraz excited me like nothing ever had before. It helped to center me and caused me to focus on my own rich and valuable Cherokee heritage.”
 
Mankiller was also feeling the effects of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and against her husband’s wishes, she bought herself a car and began driving to tribal events up and down the coast. She took a job directing the Native American Youth Center in East Oakland and began volunteering with the Pit River people in Northern California, helping them with their fierce battle to regain tribal land from a utility company. Meanwhile, her brother Richard had gone to Pine Ridge and participated in the shoot-out at Wounded Knee.
 
Mankiller separated from her husband and moved with her daughters to Oakland. Her husband, after picking up nine-year-old Gina for a trip to the circus, informed Mankiller that he would not be returning her. After an agonizing year of separation, he finally brought Gina back, and Mankiller, afraid that he would try to abduct her daughter again, decided it was time to go home to Oklahoma.

“I looked to the east, where the sun begins its daily journey. That was where I had to go, not to heal for a few weeks after a marital squabble, not to lay a loved one to rest and then leave again—I had to go back to stay.”
 
She finished her degree in social work and was hired to work for the Cherokee Nation as an economic stimulus coordinator. Her daughters were adapting to their new school, Mankiller was building her home on ancestral lands, and everything seemed on track—and then tragedy struck. She was in a car accident that crushed her face, her legs, and broke her ribs. Worst of all, her best friend had been the driver of the car that hit her, and she had not survived her injuries. The accident required two months’ hospitalization and seventeen surgeries, and it became another turning point.
 
Having come so close to dying—“walking into the spirit world,” as she put it—Mankiller began to turn toward the Cherokee spiritual path, seeing herself as “the woman who lived before and the woman who lives afterward.”
 
Shortly after this, she was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis and underwent surgery for removal of her thymus. Drawing on the strength of her ancestors and of present-day Cherokee medicine people, she regained her health, returning to her work “with a fury.” She founded the Cherokee Nation Community Development Department and managed the self-help construction project of a sixteen-mile water pipe that revitalized an impoverished Native community.

The project affirmed her belief that the Cherokee people had the capacity to solve their own problems, and it also brought her together with the man who would become her life partner and best friend—Charlie Soap, a full-blooded Cherokee who worked with the tribal Housing Authority.
 
In 1983 she was asked to run for deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation. Stunned by the sexism she encountered, Mankiller was accused of being an affront to God, and of making the Cherokees a national laughingstock. She even had foes within her own campaign, but she managed to win the election. In 1985, when the Principal Chief was called to Washington, she inherited his office for the remainder of his term, and then ran on her own for Principal Chief and was elected for two more terms. The Cherokee Nation membership is currently 290,000, making it the second largest tribe in the country, after the Navaho. Mankiller was not only the principal guardian of Cherokee tradition and customs, but she managed a budget of seventy-five million dollars. She saw that much of this income went into health care, education, and job training.

Mankiller had been diagnosed in her twenties with polycystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that ran in her family, and in 1990, she underwent an operation to replace one of her affected kidneys. Her brother Don was the donor.
 
In 1995, she made the decision to retire from public office, but she remained a force in tribal affairs, offering counsel and mediation. Later she taught as a guest professor Dartmouth College. In 1998, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. Mankiller’s health problems continued to escalate, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer and lymphoma. In 2010, the cancer metastasized to her pancreas, and she died on April 6, at the age of sixty-four.
 
Mankiller wrote, “Western movies always seemed to show Indian women washing clothes at the creek and men with a tomahawk or spear in their hands, adorned with lots of feathers. That image has stayed in some people's minds. Many think we’re either visionaries, ‘noble savages,’ squaw drudges or tragic alcoholics. We’re very rarely depicted as real people who have greater tenacity in terms of trying to hang on to our culture and values system than most people.” Her courageous life of leadership and activism has given the world a visible alternative to the racist stereotypes.

Terri Lynn Jewell, a self-described "Black lesbian feminist poet and writer," died on Sunday, November 26, 1995, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Jewell's work has appeared in more than 300 publications, including Sinister Wisdom, Woman of Power, Sojourner, Kuumba, The American Voice, Calyx, The African-American Review, and The Black Scholar. Her writings have also appeared in the anthologies Riding Desire and A Lesbian of Color Anthology. Her calendar of Black women's history, Our Names are Many, is scheduled for publication by Crossing Press in 1996, and at the time of her death she was editing a collection of Black lesbian poets.

Jewell was the editor of The Black Woman's Gumbo Ya Ya (Crossing Press, 1993), an anthology of quotations by Black women. In her introduction, she writes: "This collection was born out of my personal need for affirmation as a Black woman. I needed a coping mechanism for the growing conservatism in this nation... We are all here, calling out to and reaching one another, gathering at one another's feet and sharing the sustenance that has kept us alive and moving in the directions we must go."

The quotations she selected are a testimonial to the values she expressed in her life and in her writing:

"There's nothing neat and tidy about me, like a nice social revolution. With me goes a mad, passionate, insane, screaming world of ten thousand devils
and the man or God who lifts the lid off this suppressed world does so at his peril." - Bessie Head

"From my own study of the question, the colored woman deserves greater credit for what she has done and is doing than blame for what she cannot so soon overcome." - Fannie Barrier Williams

"... victory is often a thing deferred, and rarely at the summit of courage...
What is at the summit of courage, I think, is freedom. The freedom that
comes with the knowledge that no earthly power can break you; that an
unbroken spirit is the only thing you cannot live without; that in the end it is
the courage of conviction that moves things, that makes all change possible." - Paula Giddings