53 pages • 1 hour read
Mary Crow DogLakota Woman
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “A Woman from He-Dog”
Mary Crow Dog describes how her first child is born during the siege of Wounded Knee, how she dodges bullets and is jailed and separated from her day-old baby. She also describes the persecution by the government of her female friends and family, stating, “It’s hard being an Indian woman” (3, 4). As an iyeska, or “half-blood,” she’s looked down on “by whites and full-bloods alike” (4). Men in Plains tribes subvert women to regain power taken from them by white society, “an alien, more powerful culture” (5). She explains that she is “a Sioux from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota”; her tribe, “Burned Thigh,” is one of the Seven Sacred Campfire tribes. These tribes of Western Sioux are “known collectively as Lakota” (5).
The Sioux were forced onto reservations in the late 1800s. Crow Dog is from a reservation in He-Dog. Her Grandpa Fool Bull remembered the terrors of the massacre of Wounded Knee. However, people from Rosebud likely didn’t take part in the battles against General Custer; Spotted Tail, the chief in those days, knew from his time in prison that Native Americans were outnumbered, and he prevented his people from leaving the reservation. Fearing retribution, people became Christian, or “whitemanized” (8).
After the birth of Crow Dog’s sister, Crow Dog’s mother, like many Native American women, was sterilized without her consent. Growing up, Crow Dog is teased by white children for being an iyeska, a taunt which ceases when they learn she’ll fight them. She “wished to be able to purge” her white blood, observing in the mirror her light skin and Native American features and “trying to find a clue as to who and what [she] was” (9).
Her husband’s family, on the other hand, “are full-bloods,” with “faces which make the portrait on the buffalo Indian nickel look like a washed-out white man” (9). Rather than become whitemanized, they’ve carried on their customs openly, despite risk of imprisonment. His family is full of legends, including how the first Crow Dog, a chief, drove himself to be hanged for killing his rival, Chief Spotted Tail, only to be released “because it was no crime for one Indian to kill another” (10). The land, too, is full of legends of the past. One must make new legends, Crow Dog says, though “[i]t isn’t easy” (11).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Invisible Fathers”
The tiyospaye, or extended family, was a system in which people took care of each other and in which “[k]ids were never alone”;this system is destroyed by the government, which in the name of “progress” imposes the concept of the nuclear family (13). Resistance earns the Sioux “isolation and starvation” in “the back country” (14).
Crow Dog has no relationship with her white father, Bill Moore, a former sailor and trucker who abandoned the family. Her stepfather teaches the kids to drink and makes Crow Dog uncomfortable with his stare. Crow Dog rebels by staying away from her mother’s house. Later, she realizes that in a place where “men were psychologically crippled” and “had nothing to live for” (15) but the bottle, her mother had little choice in husbands.
Her mother, a nurse, is the breadwinner, and as the only job she could find is hundreds of miles away, she leaves her seven children to be cared for by their grandparents. Crow Dog considers herself lucky, for many Native American children are taken from their poor grandparents and placed with white foster parents.
Her grandmother’s first husband was killed when, on the six-hour journey home from picking up his government-issued food, his horses were frightened and his cart overturned. Her grandmother marries a janitor named Noble Moore, whose son, Bill Moore, marries Crow Dog’s mother. Grandfather Moore, “as good and sober and caring as his son was the opposite” (18), stands in as Crow Dog’s father in his son’s absence. They are poor, living in a one-room house. Her grandmother, a Catholic, “tried to raise us as whites” (19).
At a grocery store, Crow Dog’s white teacher is disgusted that Crow Dog touches oranges she was going to buy; another time, Crow Dog is chased out of a white friend’s house. The children are not taught the Sioux language, for her grandmother believes “[s]peaking Indian would only hold you back” (22). Her grandmother wants “the good life” for them; Crow Dog believes her Native American appearance keeps that life out of reach. She goes to other relatives to learn about “our traditional ways” (23).
Crow Dog doesn’t suffer for being poor because she knows no other life; she feels her “overcrowded” house provides “womblike security” (27). She also enjoys riding horses, something even most white children don’t have.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Civilize Them with a Stick”
Children are torn from the warmth of their families and sent to “sterile, cold” boarding schools, where they encounter “an unfamiliar routine, language problems,” and “that damn clock—white man’s time” (29).
The boarding schools are the work of “the white Indian-lovers” (30), who in trying to solve “the Indian Problem” (31) see them “as an alternative to the outright extermination seriously advocated by generals” (30). Children are sent away for years, only to return in the awkward, uncomfortable clothing of white people. Rejected by Native Americans and white people alike, they often turn to drink.
Crow Dog, like her mother and grandmother, is sent to the mission school at St. Francis. The girls are regularly beaten by nuns and are forced to pray on strict routines. Crow Dog and two other girls write a scathing newspaper and, discovered distributing it around school, are brought to a board meeting with their parents. Crow Dog’s mother defends them, and Crow Dog is punished less severely than she’d expected.
Fed up with beatings, and feeling “too old to have our bare asses whipped that way” (37), Crow Dog and her friend decide to fight back. Crow Dog threatens a nun about to whip a little girl in the shower, and the nun transfers out of the dorm.
Nuns give “preferential treatment” to “[g]irls who were near-white,” while other girls are handed more unpleasant chores and punishments. As a result, “fights and antagonism” develop “between whites and breeds, and between breeds and skins” (38).
Crow Dog is chastised by a nun for holding hands with a boy. Calling out the nuns’ hypocrisy, she responds by noting that one of their priests had molested a girl. She also repeats a story her grandmother told her, about how the nuns give birth to, and discard, the priests’ babies.
One day, Crow Dog defends a boy being mocked by a priest. When the priest attacks her, she tells the principal she is not going back to school and demands her diploma. The principal obliges. The priest ultimately becomes a great friend to their people and to Crow Dog’s family; he “stood up” for them and “stuck his neck way out” (41). For that, and for helping her end her time in school, she is grateful.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The first three chapters paint a picture of life on the Rosebud Reservation, offering an overview of the joys and trials of being a Burned Thigh Sioux. Mostly, they contrast Lakota and white societies and detail how those on the reservation are dehumanized, abused, and “whitemanized” against their will.
Readers are immersed in the sufferings of the Sioux from the first paragraphs, in which Crow Dog describes how she gave birth during Wounded Knee and was separated from her baby. Her friend and sister-in-law were murdered, and her sister was sterilized without her consent. Crow Dog ends her first paragraph noting that it “is not easy” (3) being a Sioux woman, an assertion she repeats twice before the end of the following page. It isn’t until the tenth paragraph that she “start[s] from the beginning” (5) of her story. Her relating the hardships of Sioux women immediately, before the story begins, is purposeful, signaling to readers that the struggles of Sioux women will be the focus of her story.
The struggle to preserve one’s heritage is central to these chapters. On the reservations, the people are “forced to give up everything that had given meaning to their life” (6). The tiyospaye, the “warm womb” (13) that cradles extended family members, is dismantled. To avoid losing one’s government-issued rations, many people choose to “whitemanize” (8) by turning to Christianity. At the boarding school, children learn to follow the clock, or “white man’s time” (29).
The white customs to which the Sioux are forced to adhere are not only alien, but nonsensical. Instead of living as a large supportive family unit, they are divided into nuclear families. Children are taken from their grandparents and placed with white foster parents. They return from boarding school in “stiff, high collars” (30). On “white man’s time,” one eats when the clock says it’s time, not when one is hungry. All this is considered “progress” and “civilization.” The question, of course, is whether this civilization is truly progressive.
Being “whitemanized” leaves people without identity. Crow Dog’s grandmother refuses to teach her the Sioux language; she believes “behaving like a wasičun […] was the key which would magically unlock the door leading to the good life.” Crow Dog not only doubts she can achieve this life with “the shape of my cheekbones, or the slant of my eyes” (23), but she also misses the connection to her Sioux roots. She notes that children who return home from boarding school dressed like white children “were neither wanted by whites nor Indians” (30); she herself, as an iyeska, or “half-blood” (5), would “look at myself in the mirror, trying to find a clue as to who and what I was” (9). Desperate for an anchor, she goes to other relatives for knowledge of their language and customs.
Many Sioux resort to alcohol to fill the emptiness where purpose used to be. Men used to identify as “warriors and hunters” (5)—so much so that the name of their tribe, “Burned Thigh,” is a tribute to sufferings their ancestors endured in battle. On the reservation, however, with “nothing to live for,” they drink and live dangerously “to die a warrior’s death” (15). Men often “beat up their old ladies in order to work off their frustration,” believing women’s usefulness ends with sex and children; it is a way of reclaiming power after “what white society has done to them” (5). In this way, persecution trickles down from white oppressors to Sioux men and finally to Sioux women.
