Two release events for the third 2022 American Women quarter dollar, honoring Wilma Mankiller, are scheduled for June 6 and 10, the first at the Cherokee National Capital Museum in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and the second at the auditorium of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C.

The June 6 event, a circulation launch ceremony, will be attended by senior U.S. Mint officials and “noted friends of Mankiller’s,” while the second is a film screening of the 2017 documentary Mankiller, hosted by the National Women’s History Museum in partnership with the D.C. Public Library, with support from the U.S. Mint. A panel discussion with the film’s director, Valerie Red-Horse Mohl, and special guests from a number of institutions, including the Mint, will follow the screening. 

The Wilma Mankiller quarter dollar is the third American Women quarter released in 2022, the first year of the four-year program.

Its obverse design, shared by all the American Women quarter dollars, is Laura Gardin Fraser’s bust of George Washington.

U.S. Mint Artistic Infusion Program artist Benjamin Sowards designed the reverse, sculpted by U.S. Mint Medallic Artist Phebe Hemphill, which depicts Mankiller wrapped in a “traditional shawl” with the wind at her back and “a resolute gaze to the future,” according to the Mint’s website. It also features the seven-pointed star of the Cherokee Nation.

Wilma Mankiller (1945 to 2010) was a Native American civil rights activist and politician who in 1985 became the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation after then-Principal Chief Ross Swimmer took a position in the Bureau of Indian Affairs; she had been elected deputy principal chief in 1983 alongside Swimmer. She was elected in her own right in 1987 and re-elected four years later. Her decade-long tenure is regarded as highly successful.

The June 6 launch event, hosted by a partnership of the Cherokee Nation, BancTrust, the U.S. Mint, and Wilma Mankiller Trust marking the release of the quarters into circulation, is to take place on the lawn of the Cherokee National Capital Museum and begins at 10 AM. T.V. Johnson, chief of the Mint’s Office of Corporate Communications, who is originally from Oklahoma, will “serve as the senior U.S. Mint representative” at the Wilma Mankiller Quarter Release and Celebration event and deliver remarks, according to Mint spokesperson Michael White. Among Mankiller’s friends who are to attend the event are feminist leader and writer Gloria Steinem, former Principal Chief Swimmer, and current Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr.

Collector sales

Forty-coin rolls of the quarter dollars are to be available for purchase for $10 each at the June 6 event with a limit of two rolls per customer. The Mint provided $50,000 worth of the quarters to BancTrust. Rolls and bags of the quarters were to become available on the Mint’s website June 14, though the Mint’s entire inventory of the rolls and bags has been depleted by enrollments, according to White.

At time of writing, confirmed guests for the panel discussion at the June 10 event include Red-Horse Mohl and Michele Thompson, chief of the United States Mint Program Management Office and the American Women Quarters Program Manager; the discussion moderator is National Women’s History Museum board member Mary Smith, the first woman Native American president-elect nominee of the American Bar Association. Other confirmed participants include Richard Reyes-Gavilan, executive director of the D.C. Public Library and Susan Whiting, National Women’s History Museum board chair, who is to deliver introductory remarks prior to the screening. Thompson is to deliver the event’s concluding remarks, according to White.

The event will take place at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, 901 G St. NW, Washington, D.C., at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free.

The documentary Mankiller premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 19, 2017. It was directed by Valerie Red-Horse Mohl, with Gale Anne Hurd as an executive producer. Interested readers can learn more about the film at http://www.mankillerdoc.com/

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