From the Publisher

A unique autobiography unparalleled in American Indian literature, and a deeply moving account of a woman's triumphant struggle to survive in a hostile world.

Chicago Tribune

A powerful autobiography...feisty and determined, warm and even funny.

New York Times Book Review

Simply told—and at times simply horrifying.

Publishers Weekly

Mary Brave Bird gave birth to a son during the 71-day siege of Wounded Knee in 1973, which ended with a bloody assault by U.S. marshalls and police. Seventeen years old at the time, she married fellow activist Leonard Crow Dog, medicine man and spiritual leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Written with Erdoes ( Lame Deer ; Seeker of Visions ), her searing autobiography is courageous, impassioned, poetic and inspirational. Her girlhood, a vicious circle of drinking and fighting, was marked by poverty, racism and a rape at 14. She ran away from a coldly impersonal boarding school run by nuns where, she reports, Indian students were beaten to induce them to give up native customs and speech. The authors write of AIM's infiltration by FBI agents, of Mary Crow Dog helping her husband endure prison, of Indian males' macho attitudes. The book also describes AIM's renewal of spirituality as manifested in sweat lodges, peyote ceremonies, sacred songs and the Ghost Dance ritual. Photos. (Apr.)

Library Journal

Born in 1955 and raised in poverty on the Rosebud Reservation, Mary Crow Dog escaped an oppressive Catholic boarding school but fell into a marginal life of urban shoplifting and barhopping. A 1971 encounter with AIM (the American Indian Movement), participation in the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington, and giving birth to her first child while under fire at the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee radicalized her. Anglo-Indian confrontations are characterized by extreme prejudice and violence, but some whites (the Erdoes family, William Kunstler, Marlon Brando, and others) offer genuine support. Caustic humor sparks the matter-of-fact narrative. Wife of a Sioux medicine man, Mary Crow Dog exemplifies the contemporary movement back to Native land, religion, and values. Highly recommended for American history, Native American, and women's history collections.-- Rhoda Carroll, Vermont Coll., Montpelier

School Library Journal

Mary Crow Dog narrates the story of her youth in this anguished account of growing up Indian in America. After participating in AIM (the new American Indian Movement), she joined the stand-off at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where she gave birth to a daughter. Her marriage to Leonard Crow Dog, a medicine man who revived the sacred Ghost Dance, was a learning experience for her; she was assimilated into his family. Short, choppy sentences impart a sense that Mary Crow Dog is speaking directly to readers, and her story is startling in its intensity of feeling and its directness about the Indians' reliance on their heritage and religion. A unique account of a way of life unknown to most Americans, this pulls readers in and hold them. By no means a pretty account--the author is graphic in her accounts of drunkenness, lawlessness, killings, and drug use--the book is an important bridge to cultural understanding, and a volume that should be in every library. --Dorothy L. Addison, Woodlawn School, Fairfax County, VA

What People Are Saying

Oliver Stone
"A piercing look into the ancient yet modern mind of a Sioux woman."

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Lakota Woman

Rebound by Sagebrush

A Woman from He-Dog

I am Mary Brave Bird. After I had my baby during the siege of Wounded Knee they gave me a special name - Ohitika Win, Brave Woman, and fastened an eagle plume in my hair, singing brave-heart songs for me. I am a woman of the Red Nation, a Sioux woman. That is not easy.

I had my first baby during a firefight, with the bullets crashing through one wall and coming out through the other. When my newborn son was only a day old and the marshals really opened up upon us, I wrapped him up in a blanket and ran for it. We had to hit the dirt a couple of times, I shielding the baby with my body, praying, "It's all right if I die, but please let him live."

When I came out of Wounded Knee I was not even healed up, but they put me in jail at Pine Ridge and took my baby away. I could not nurse. My breasts swelled up and grew hard as rocks, hurting badly. In 1975 the feds put the muzzles of their M-16s against my head, threatening to blow me away. It's hard being an Indianwoman.

My best friend was Annie Mae Aquash, a young, stronghearted woman from the Micmac Tribe with beautiful children. It is not always wise for an Indian woman to come on too strong. Annie Mae was found dead in the snow at the bottom of a ravine on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The police said that she had died of exposure, but there was a .38 caliber slug in her head. The FBI cut off her hands and sent them to Washington for fingerprint identification, hands that had helped my baby come into the world.

My sister-in-law, Delphine, a good woman who had lived a hard life, was also found dead in the snow, the tears frozen on her face. A drunken man had beaten her, breaking one of her arms and legs, leaving her helpless in a blizzard to die.

My sister Barbara went to the government hospital in Rosebud to have her baby and when she came out of anesthesia found that she had been sterilized against her will. The baby lived only for two hours, and she had wanted so much to have children. No, it isn't easy.

When I was a small girl at the St. Francis Boarding School, the Catholic sisters would take a buggy whip to us for what they called "disobedience." At age ten I could drink and hold a pint of whiskey. At age twelve the nuns beat me for "being too free with my body." All I had been doing was holding hands with a boy. At age fifteen I was raped. If you plan to be born, make sure you are born white and male.

It is not the big, dramatic things so much that get us down, but just being Indian, trying to hang on to our way of life, language, and values while being surrounded by an alien, more powerful culture. It is being an iyeska, a halfblood, being looked down upon by whites and full-bloods alike. It is being a backwoods girl living in a city, having to rip off stores in order to survive. Most of all it is being a woman. Among Plains tribes, some men think that all a woman is good for is to crawl into the sack with them and mind the children. It compensates for what white society has done to them. They were famous warriors and hunters once, but the buffalo is gone and there is not much rep in putting a can of spam or an occasional rabbit on the table.

As for being warriors, the only way some men can count coup nowadays is knocking out another skin's teeth during a barroom fight. In the old days a man made a name for himself by being generous and wise, but now he has nothing to be generous with, no jobs, no money; and as far as our traditional wisdom is concerned, our men are being told by the white missionaries, teachers, and employers that it is merely savage superstition they should get rid of if they want to make it in this world. Men are forced to live away from their children, so that the family can get ADC-Aid to Dependent Children. So some warriors come home drunk and beat up their old ladies in order to work off their frustration. I know where they are coming from. I feel sorry for them, but I feel even sorrier for their women.

To start from the beginning, I am a Sioux from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. I belong to the "Burned Thigh," the Brule Tribe, the Sicangu in our language. Long ago, so the legend goes, a small band of Sioux was surrounded by enemies who set fire to their tipis and the grass around them. They fought their way out of the trap but got their legs burned and in this way acquired their name. The Brules are part of the Seven Sacred Campfires, the seven tribes of the Western Sioux known collectively as Lakota.

The Eastern Sioux are called Dakota. The difference between them is their language. It is the same except that where we Lakota pronounce an L, the Dakota pronounce a D. They cannot pronounce an L at all. In our tribe we have this joke: "What is a flat tire in Dakota?" Answer: "A bdowout. "

The Brule, like all Sioux, were a horse people, fierce riders and raiders, great warriors. Between 1870 and 1880 all Sioux were driven into reservations, fenced in and forced to give up everything that had given meaning to their life - their horses, their hunting, their arms, everything. But under the long snows of despair the little spark of our ancient beliefs and pride kept glowing, just barely sometimes, waiting for a warm wind to blow that spark into a flame again.

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Excerpted from Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog Copyright ©1991 by Mary Crow Dog. Excerpted by permission.
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