S1E4 - S1.E4: Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog

Misty Bloom Book Club

Hi! This is Ada, I hope you‘re taking good care of yourself and doing well. So guys, I'm so proud to be taking you on this lit global journey with me and I can’t wait to go even more places with you. It’s only episode 4. And we’ve been to inner city US, northern Nigeria, South Africa, and today, we're returning to America. Native America that is. So, in this episode, I’ll be talking about Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog. You ready? Lets get into it.

So, Lakota Woman is Mary Crow Dog’s memoir . And if you remember from episode zero, I mentioned that in the Misty Bloom Book club I would be reviewing mostly fiction and on rare occasions would consider nonfiction. So I guess today is the rare occasion. It came early. This book reminded me a tiny little bit of Born A Crime by Trevor Noah. Not at all in terms of style or substance. They are very dissimilar in those regards because Born A Crime is Trevor Noah’s account of growing up in apartheid South Africa while Lakota Woman follows Mary Crow Dog’s story as an activist fighting for the rights of Native Americans. But my comparison here is in terms of Mary Crow Dog and Trevor Noah being compelling storytellers, not professional writers. And so for that reason I'm not going to do a typical review of Lakota Woman. I feel like how do you qualitatively assess or critique somebody's lived experience. You really can't judge it, you know what I mean?

And also these are people, Mary Crow Dog and Trevor Noah just trying to tell us an honest story of oppression, all that matters is that these are stories that we should all be paying attention to and be provoked into positive actions. They are not trying to be professional writers so it feels dishonorable to critique their style of writing. So, I'm just not gonna do it. Instead I'll take a different approach and just chat with you about the book, okay?

I think a great place to start this conversation is to ask who is a Native American? Because that's a question that always seems to keep popping up in public discourse. And Mary Crow Dog answers this question. She says, "I should make clear that being a full blood or breed is not a matter of bloodline, or how Indian you look or how black your hair is. The general rule is that whoever thinks, sings, acts, and speaks Indian is a skin, a full blood and whoever acts and thinks like a white man is a half blood or breed, no matter how Indian he looks."

This book covers Mary Crow Dog’s life in the seventies and it’s interesting how 30, 40 years later people still try to claim a Native American heritage even though they do not think, sing, act, or speak like a Native and do not have familiarity with native traditions. I wonder what Mary Crow Dog would have thought of today's world where people benefit from and will fully exercise not being seen in the world as Native but will claim being Native when it's convenient and profitable. So your classic case of eating your cake and having it too. I’ve seen that happen where the majority of their existence in society is as an oppressor because of course, of the privileges attached to whiteness and then they switch over to oppressed when they wanna benefit from a minor advantage of their native heritage. So basically wanting to participate in the scarce wins but participate in zero of the struggle, pain and bloodshed that has to occur for those tiny wins. I've seen people do this. I find it to be pretty dark and disturbing.

But moving along, I also wanna say that it felt like a treasure and a privilege to read this book. I felt like Mary Crow Dog was like letting me or us, since y’all are listening to this, into a sacred people and tradition that we do not deserve to know about but she is generous enough to share her people’s customs with us. In this case, obviously Lakota which is part of the Sioux people. Each chapter in this book starts with a saying or a poem or the lyrics of songs by select Native American people. Chapter 8 for example starts with what appears to be the first verse of a poem by a young man from Eagle Butte. And it goes like this, "I knew when I brought my body here, it might become food for the worms and magpies. I threw my body away before I came here." This verse brought tears to my eyes, broke my heart and it feels like desecration to even attempt to dissect it because the verse has said all that needs to be said. And the verse lays bare that even though this book is Mary Crow Dog's story it is also a chronicle of Native American suffering. And that is the proper place to start the conversation.

This book covers the systematic stealing of indigenous lands by white settlers, the forced sterilization of Native Women including the author’s sister. It recounts the organized erasure of the native customs, and traditions, the introduction of poverty, addiction, and hopelessness into Native life. So it's both a story of a people and a person.

Lakota Woman starts out on the Rosebud Indian reservation in South Dakota where Mary is raised by her grandparents in a loving but extremely poor home, a shack with no electricity or indoor plumbing. The grandparents try to raise the author and their other grandchildren as Catholic and to adopt White culture and norms for practical reasons, you know, to make it possible for their grandchildren to survive in the world beyond the reservation. But it is also heartbreaking where the author reveals that her grandparents still subconsciously turn to some of the traditional ways to find healing because the old ways is their truth, you know. At some point Mary Crow Dog is forced by the government to go to boarding school where they employ inhumane methods in unsuccessfully forming her into a good white Catholic girl. The memoir also recounts her time as a young adult trying to find herself in the world, roaming the United States with a band of other footloose and fancy free Native youth also trying to find their place in a world that’s been stolen from them. As a sentence in the book reads, “He had himself wrapped up in an upside down American flag, telling us that every state in this flag represented a state stolen from Indians.” It’s honestly overwhelming to even think about the depravities that America thrust upon and continues to do to Native America.

But anyway, during their youthful, aimless wanderings, Mary Crow Dog and her merry band of Natives of course suffer police brutality and violence from random racists. It is during this time Mary Crow Dog becomes exposed to AIM, A.I.M which is the American Indian Movement. So her memoir also follows her activism in the AIM movement some of which includes historically significant actions like the March in Washington DC as well as the siege at Wounded Knee. Thereafter, Mary Crow Dog or Mary Ellen Brave Bird at the time marries Medicine Man and civil rights leader, Leonard Crow Dog. And she becomes a mother wife and the stepmother all at the same time, at the ripe old age of, wait for it? 18! So Mary Crow Dog lived a lot of life in one. But anyway. towards the end, a significant part of Lakota Woman also follows Mary’s time as a wife fighting for the release of her husband, Leonard Crow Dog, when he’s imprisoned for his activism.

In this book, Mary Crow Dog spends a lot of time talking about how Native Americans are intentionally and systematically pushed out of society with little to no access to jobs, education or opportunities, the loss of their language, traditions, and ceremonies, the stripping of who they are as a people and them having to turn to alcohol to you know deal with the trauma that their lives have become. And in this book she addresses how alcohol becomes a coping mechanism because people often say things like oh you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps, oh why don't you want better for yourself. And there's a line that took my breath away and it's on page 54 “people talk about the Indian drinking problem but we say it is a white problem. White men invented whiskey and brought it to America. They manufacture, advertise and sell it to us. They make their profit on it and cause the conditions that make Indians drink in the first place.” It’s the same thing today. Go to the hood, same situation, same conditions, flooded with liquor stores, pun intended.

Moving along, remember I mentioned earlier that Mary Crow Dog joined AIM, the American Indian Movement? Well, there's a line on page 74 which I thought was really very insightful and articulates what I’ve always thought about activism and its effects on an activists’ lives. Here it goes, “I recognize now that movements get used up and the leaders get burned out quickly. Some of our men and women got themselves killed and thereby avoided reaching the dangerous age of 30 and becoming elder statesmen." This is why I have the utmost regard for activists. They live a principled life and they pay dearly for it, because it is marred with great sacrifice and suffering. Secular martyrs. And while we are on this, here is a quick plug. Please be supportive of and kind and generous to an activist.

Also, this book made me reconsider the meaning of Thanksgiving in a new way. While I’ve always known Thanksgiving to be a troublesome holiday, and that’s understating it, I don’t think I realized the breadth of the pain it represents to Native Americans. I'm gonna read a short paragraph from page 75. By the way, this is the author's first encounter with AIM, the American Indian Movement. On page 75 she writes "he talked about not celebrating Thanksgiving, because that would be celebrating one's own destruction. He said that white people, after stealing our land and massacring us for 300 years, could not now come to us now saying celebrate Thanksgiving with us, drop in for a slice of turkey." So yeah.

Okay, so I found something very interesting on page 77, where Mary Crow Dog says, and this is relative to the American Indian Movement, “we took some of our rhetoric from the blacks, who started their movements before we did. Like them we were minorities, poor and discriminated against, but there were differences. I think it's significant that in many Indian languages a black is called a black white man. The blacks want what the whites have, which is understandable. They want in. We Indians want out. That is the main difference.” It’s such a shrewd observation. But I think there is a bit more nuance that I’d like to offer here based on historical context. So yeah black people want in on a country that was built entirely and completely on their forced labor. And Natives want out because they are indigenous to America, with a complex and established civilization, until the advent of the white settler state known as the USA. They want out of the white settler state and the return of America to them. But I’d love to hear what you all think about this. The author also talks about how being radicalized sent her back to her Indian traditions. She writes, “To white friends this may seem contradictory but for me and my friends it was the most natural thing in the world. This process had already begun when I was still a child. I felt that the kind of Christianity the priests and nuns of St Francis dished out was not good for my digestion. Jesus would have been all right except I felt he had been co-opted by white American society to serve its purpose. The men who had brought us whiskey and the smallpox had come with a cross in one hand and the gun in the other. In the name of an all merciful Jesus they’d use that gun on us.” Can all the colonized say amen? Huh.

Anyway, Mary Crow Dog says something that I think it's really profoundly interesting on page 111. “I do not consider myself a radical or revolutionary. It is white people who put such labels on us. All we ever wanted was to be left alone, to live our lives as we see fit. To govern ourselves in reality and not just on paper. To have our rights respected. If that is revolutionary, then I sure fit that description. Actually I have a great yearning to lead a normal, peaceful life, normal in the Sioux sense.” That right there is what every oppressed person is trying to scream above the noise of the oppressor. We just want a normal, peaceful life. It’s really that simple.

Mary Crow Dog also makes another really astute point in the book. In fighting her husband’s incarceration, Mary Crow Dog visits New York for the first time and she's comparing the cost of things in New York versus on the reservation and this is what she says on page 112. "Everything was so much cheaper than on the reservation where the trading posts have no competition and charge what they please. Everything is more expensive if you are poor." This is an ongoing conversation that I'm always having in real life about how poverty is expensive, and capitalism is built on and sustained by racism. If you're poor you're working so many jobs which is detrimental to your physical and mental well-being because there’s no leisure time to recharge, you're not taking time off, you’re not taking long walks, you’re not hanging out in the park, you don’t spend time with your family, you're not going on vacations. And all of these things have a cumulative effect and impact your overall well-being pretty quickly. So you break down and because you’re poor you can’t afford adequate healthcare so you have to pay a massive sum out of pocket or be riddled with debt or both. So, yes poverty is expensive. And think about the demographic of people who typically work multiple jobs to make ends meet and you’ll realize why I said capitalism is sustained by racism. When you are poor you also don't have access to quality and affordable safe foods so you're spending your scarce dollars on cheap meals that are not good for you so that also has an impact on your health and then you develop expensive physical problems that you can not afford. So here we go again. Or when you’re poor you don’t have emergency savings so that when something big happens you are forced to borrow at exorbitant rates from predatory lenders because you don’t have collateral to negotiate a cheaper rate. So it’s like wash, rinse, repeat. I could go on and on but I think you guys already know this already. Poverty is expensive.

This memoir as you’ve obviously seen so far is full of quotable quotes. From page 241, Bill Kunstler, who is the attorney for Leonard Crow Dog. Anyway, here is what Bill Kunstler says and before I read the quote when I say they, you, or we in the quote, it refers to the oppressor, okay? "they are most afraid of the fact that the claims are morally right, because when you are confronted with the moral imperative against an immoral imperative on your part you got to hate the people who assert that moral imperative. And I think there is an irrational, guilt-caused hatred now that is beyond my ability to analyze. We hate them because their claims are totally justified and we know it." I encourage you to rewind this if needed. This very eloquently explains the oppressor’s illogical denial of the claims of the oppressed. This underpins the whataboutisms, the all lives matter crew, And in my opinion, it’s why the oppressed should not devote too much energy to debating the oppressor’s arguments because they are irrational. To me, the energy is best spent working for equity and justice.

Many things are so familiar in this book. On page 244 Mary Crow Dog says and I quote "to me, women's lib was mainly a white, upper-middle-class affair of little use to a reservation Indian woman." I mean, I’ve always thought the same thing that the feminist movement is not inclusive of minorities. It felt validating to read this.

I mentioned before that reading this book felt like a privilege. And the reason for that is that Mary Crow Dog lets us into Native or more specifically Sioux ceremonies. I learned about the peyote, the curing ceremony, the traditional Sioux family, which is the tiyospaye, that is the traditional extended family unit that people from most indigenous cultures around the world can relate to, and which was you know intentionally destroyed by white settlers and replaced with the nuclear family system. I learned about vision seeking, the sweat lodges which I kind of knew about before but learned a lot more about the sacredness of sweat lodges. I learned about the Ghost Dance, the Sun Dance. On page 253, Mary Crow Dog writes, and I’m paraphrasing just a tiny bit. "in 1883 the government and the missionaries outlawed the dance for being barbaric, superstitious, and preventing the Indians from becoming civilized. The hostility of the Christian churches to the Sun Dance was not very logical. After all, they worship Christ because he suffered for the people, and a similar religious concept lies behind the Sun dance, where the participants pierce their flesh with skewers to help someone dear to them. The main difference is that Christians are content to let Jesus do all the suffering for them whereas Indians give of their own flesh year after year to help others. The missionaries never saw this side of the picture, or maybe they saw it only too well and fought the Sun Dance because it competed with their own Sun Dance pole - the cross." She roasted Christianity and made also cringe thinking about the sundance channel and they should consider renaming it. So I’m gonna end this episode and close out with page 262 which is the epilogue. Mary Crow Dog ends with a recap of the activists associated with the American Indian Movement who participated in the siege at Wounded Knee and Mary Crow Dog says, "those are the survivors, many of the former brothers and sisters are dead. Some were killed but most died from natural causes. I think that the wear and tear of the long struggle just burned them up, ruined their health and took years off their lives. The best always die young." And this my friends, like I said before, is the high price of activism.

Mary Crow Dog, while being an activist herself, also discusses the other perspective which is the toll that being the wife of an activist can take. And she writes, "Cooking and cleaning up for innumerable guests most of them uninvited, listening to countless woes and problems. It became too much for me. I was going under. Wherever Native Americans struggle for their rights, Leonard is there. Life goes on." And just so you know Mary died at the age of 58.

And there, my friends, I think is a poignant place to end on.

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