Book 10: Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog with Richard Erdoes

Last year I was discussing the book Killers of the Flower Moon with a friend. She mentioned that it was written by a white man and not from the Osage Indian point of view. I thought of that conversation when I saw this book at a recent book sale and bought it. 

Mary grew up in poverty on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. But she says that she and her siblings did not suffer from being poor because they weren't aware of it. It was only when she was sent to a Catholic mission school that she suffered from efforts to make her more "white." Rules were strict; food was bad; punishment was harsh. After she left school Mary spent her time as the other teens on the reservation did, drinking, doing drugs, driving recklessly, and fighting. 

As she described it, 

"The little settlements we lived in...were places without hope where bodies and souls were being destroyed bit by bit. Schools left many of us almost illiterate. We were not taught any skills. The land was leased to white ranchers. Jobs were almost nonexistent on the reservation, and outside the res whites did not hire Indians if they could help it."

Mary found meaning when she learned about the American Indian Movement (AIM.) She later joined the group and participated in the 1972 occupation of the Washington, DC office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs as well as the 1973 Wounded Knee Occupation. In fact, Mary gave birth to her first child at Wounded Knee during a firefight. After Wounded Knee, she married AIM's spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog.

I have to admit I had a bad feeling about that marriage. Mary wasn't interested in Leonard originally. He seemed to pressure her into marriage. Mary was still a teenager with a newborn and took on caring for stepchildren, and all the visitors that flocked to Leonard as a medicine man and civil rights leader. Mary wrote that she loved him but they later divorced.

Mary was only six months older than I. For women living at the same time and in the same country, the gulf between us is unfathomable (thanks to Katie Maloney of Vanderpump Rules for re-acquainting me with that word.) I feel naive for not realizing how extreme prejudice against the Indians continued into my lifetime.

I'm glad I read this book.