The Wilma Mankiller Quarter is the third coin in the American Women Quarters™ Program. Wilma Mankiller was the first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation and an activist for Native American and women’s rights. She was born in the Cherokee Nation in 1945. After drought devastated her family’s land in the 1950s, her family was moved to a housing project in California, where the adolescent Mankiller experienced culture shock, exacerbated by poverty and racism.