Mary Crow Dog

Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman, published in 1990 by Harper Perrenial.

 

Lakota Woman is the autobiography of Mary Crow Dog, the wife of Leonard Crow Dog, a traditional Sioux medicine man who was the "spiritual leader" of the American Indian Movement at the time of the Wounded Knee Occupation.

Born Mary Brave Bird, she grew up in a one room shack without indoor plumbing or electricity, raised largely by her grandparents as her father abandoned the family before she was born and her mother worked in another city. As a child, she was taken like many other Native Americans to a Catholic-run boarding school, where she was mistreated and indoctrinated with Christianity until she finally ran away in her teens. She wandered a while with groups of other "lost" teenagers, drinking, doing drugs, and living by shoplifting, until she ran into the American Indian Movement and discovered her ancestral religion. She participated in many of the well-known actions of AIM, such as the Custer Courthouse fight and the takeover of the BIA offices. She had her first baby at Wounded Knee during the siege.

Later, she married Crow Dog, and had to adapt to life as the wife of a prominent medicine man. Shortly after their marriage, he was arrested and sentenced to twenty-three years in prison for his role as religious leader of the Occupation, and for defending his home against invasion by some drunken whites (who it later turned out had been sent by the FBI as a provocation). While he was imprisoned she developed into a leader and speaker in her own right, touring for his defense committee. He was finally released on appeal after three years. As in many books about AIM, Mary Crow Dog describes the extreme lengths to which the FBI and even the military went to destroy the organization and its leaders, and the illegality and corruption of the South Dakota and even Federal courts when the defendant was an Indian, let alone a militant one.

As Crow Dog's wife, her perspective on AIM is quite different from those of Dennis Banks and Russell Means, whose autobiographies I have also read (Ojibwa Warrior and Where White Men Fear to Tread, both available in the Library). She sees the struggle less as a political than as a religious one, essentially as a struggle against religious persecution. Of course, one of the surest ways to destroy a native culture is to supplant its religion, and Native American ceremonies were outlawed by the government and suppressed by the Christian missionaries for over fifty years in an attempt to force the Indians to convert to Christianity; they are still subject to harassment to the present day. Leonard Crow Dog played a role in reviving these ceremonies, and organized the first Ghost Dance in almost a century at Wounded Knee. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the description of the Sun Dance, Ghost Dance, and yuwipi ceremonies.