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 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Two Cut-off Hands”
Crow Dog describes her friend Annie Mae Aquash, “a rock to lean on, a rock with a lot of heart” (187). Originally from Nova Scotia, at age seventeen she moved to Boston, where she married and had two children, living “like a white middle-class housewife” (188) until her husband turned abusive. A member of AIM, Annie Mae takes part in the BIA building takeover and also Wounded Knee. She marries again, this time “in the Indian way” (190), but she divorces her second husband after he, too, beats her. She stays for a time at Crow Dog’s Paradise and takes leadership positions in AIM. She also travels frequently to join protests.
When someone at Crow Dog’s Paradise steals her jewelry, Annie Mae states she doesn’t need it. She gives all her possessions to Crow Dog, believing her dedication to her cause will bring her an early death.
Meanwhile, violence continues at neighboring Pine Ridge Reservation under the “regime of terror” (192) of Wilson, the tribal chairman, and “the violence spilled over onto Rosebud” (193). Annie Mae goes to Pine Ridge to help Wilson’s opponents and is there when a shootout with the FBI leaves two agents and one Sioux man dead. Among those suspected of the killings is Annie Mae’s friend, Leonard Peltier.
While Annie Mae is staying with Crow Dog, Crow Dog’s settlement is swarmed by FBI agents claiming to be looking for Peltier. Though she hadn’t been near the shooting, Annie Mae is arrested and questioned. When they release her, agents warn that she would die in the near future if she didn’t reveal all information to the agents. Mae tells Crow Dog she is being watched and that she should take care of Leonard, “an important man to his people” (196).
In 1975, Annie Mae is raped and killed; her body is found on Pine Ridge. As a “needless cruelty,” her hands are cut off and sent to Washington for identification. Though the autopsy finds no evidence of alcohol, the report claims she’d died of exposure, implying “that here was just another drunken Indian passing out and freezing to death” (197). At the demands of friends and family, a second autopsy is performed: it reveals she’d been shot in the head and that her hands had been buried with her.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Cante Ishta—The Eye of the Heart”
When Crow Dog marries Leonard, she does not yet see through the eye of her heart—she “knew little of traditional ways” and, like white observers, watches ceremonies “without really understanding them” (199). She learns from Leonard, whose gifts had been noticed early and who had been kept from boarding school, which would “spoil him.” Learning from her husband isn’t easy, as Crow Dog knows all his weaknesses and isn’t prepared to respect him simply because he is male. However, she respects his “raw power, spiritual Indian power” (200), unsullied by “white-man intellectualism” (201). She appreciates his teaching her how to listen to “the sound of nature and animals” (202). Finally, she’s encouraged by his telling her he’d learned from a medicine woman: her experiences growing up had made her “unsure about […] the part women […] were allowed to play, in Indian religion” (201).
Crow Dog describes learning to take part in the sweat bath, “the oldest of all our rituals” (202). Taking place in a lodge made from willow sticks, and utilizing hot stones doused with cold water, the sweat baths purify participants, connecting them to the spirit. Different communities use different amount of stones; those unused to higher heat struggle to endure the ceremonies. Leonard “has been in so many of them that he does not seem to feel the searing heat” (206). He can’t understand why people react as they do in his high-heat ceremonies.
Leonard is a yuwipi man; Crow Dog had never been to a yuwipi ceremony before meeting Leonard. After constructing a complex, highly symbolic environment, people gather around a tied-up, covered yuwipi man and allow the spirits in. At the end of the ceremony, in which “[l]ittle sparks of light danced through the room” (211), the yuwipi man, now carrying a message from the spirits, is revealed to have been untied.
Leonard and his father, Henry, host their second Ghost Dance in 1974. It attracts Native Americans from as far away as Alaska and Mexico. In an incident Crow Dog now finds humorous, FBI agents are found observing them from the trees; upon discovery, they insist they’re insurance salesmen.
The Crow Dogs believe they’re cursed for the original Crow Dog’s killing of Spotted Tail. Leonard, recalling “that the guilt lasts for four generations,” says “only his sons will be free from it” (214).
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Eagle Caged”
Though he sees himself as a medicine man, not a radical, Leonard is sentenced to thirteen years in prison for his leadership during Wounded Knee. He receives a suspended sentence but in 1975 is sentenced to another five years after he defends his family against a white man who assaults them in their home. Later that year, two drunken men crash into their yard and provoke a fight in which one man’s jaw is broken. In response, federal agents and SWAT teams descend on their home, threatening and taunting them before arresting Leonard. They bring him ninety miles away, to Pierre, where they interrogate him about Peltier.
Years later, the Crow Dogs discover why this seemingly minor incident is treated with such seriousness: in trying to pin the two agents’ deaths on somebody, the FBI had settled on Peltier, who was falsely rumored to be staying with the Crow Dogs. The drunken crash had been staged, and Leonard’s arrest was a cover-up.
Leonard is sentenced to a total of twenty-three years in prison over the course of three trials. His friends raise money to free him, quickly learning that the justice system is stacked against the poor. Crow Dog feels sorry for “the many nameless kids who had stuck their necks out in all the AIM confrontations languishing in the slammer, unable to raise money” (226).
In prison, Leonard endures isolation and “mind torture” (228) and is held in small rooms with no windows, where he loses sense of the date and time. Wardens mock his religion and refuse to give him his sacred pipe, telling him they “can put [him] in the hole whenever we feel like it” (229). Though Leonard is “a model prisoner” (227), suffering these indignities with a staunch sense of purpose, “they left their mark on him” (230). He’s distraught when he learns that his family home has been burned to the ground.
While Crow Dog is distracted by supportive friends and by her work—she delivers speeches, speaks with lawyers, and writes materials—Leonard “survived through his spiritual power” (234). He believes birds in the yard are messengers and that he is always has spirits near to him. He also makes friends with a diverse group of inmates.
After two years and two hundred thousand dollars, Leonard is released by a judge who has received countless petitions on his behalf. He is warmly welcomed back to Rosebud after three months of red tape, though he remains on parole.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
Annie Mae Aquash is murdered and mutilated. Though “endless violence [against Native Americans] was totally ignored by the government” (218), Leonard Crow Dog is dramatically removed from his home and imprisoned for two years over breaking the jaw of a white man. In Chapter 8, we learn that Wesley Bad Heart Bull’s killer is charged only with manslaughter. In the second chapter, Crow Dog relates how her two uncles died of tuberculosis in an institution, though details can be only guessed at, as her grandmother never received any records. Through these examples, Crow Dog paints a picture not only of injustice but also of dehumanization: Native Americans are seen as expendable, their deaths unworthy of investigation.
Crow Dog explains that the justice system is stacked in favor of those with money and that “laws are framed by those who happen to be in power and for the purpose of keeping them in power” (225). Toward the bottom of the power structure are the prison workers who have little save for their power over the prisoners. Prisoners like Leonard, who remain calm and seemingly unaffected, make them feel “inferior or impotent”; the workers in turn “try to bring such a man down to their level by humiliating him,” in order to preserve “whatever feelings of self-esteem they have left” (228).
The indignities Native Americans endure at the mercy of those above them in the power hierarchy are often needlessly, maliciously cruel. For example, after her death, Annie Mae’s hands are cut off, presumably for identification—later, Crow Dog learns that they hadn’t been used for identification after all. While in prison, Leonard is told by a doctor that he’s being sent to New York for a lobotomy; for days he is plagued with terror, only to find it’s a hoax. The day he’s released for the pending appeal, prison guards play “miserable little power games” (236) with his family, making them move their car just so and having them walk a mile to the prison perimeter. By humiliating and degrading Native Americans, the white oppressors dehumanize their victims and further empower themselves.
Crow Dog states that “moral power is always more dangerous to an oppressor than political force” (222). Indeed, Leonard stirs people’s hearts and makes them feel deserving of their rights, of dignity, and of humanity. Leonard, a medicine man, speaks to people in a way they understand both mentally and emotionally. He is therefore “a threat to the system” (216) that continues to prop up those with power.
The theme of dying for one’s cause is embodied first in Kangi-Shunka, the original Crow Dog, and then in Leonard himself, at Crow Dog’s first AIM meeting, when he states that “he was not afraid to die for his people” (75). It is also embodied in Annie Mae Aquash, who’d “rather die than stand by” while her friends are killed and who in fact “almost cheerfully” (191) predicts her own death. It’s one more way in which the people are driven to extreme measures, to ultimate sacrifices, by a system in which they are subhuman. In Chapter 8, Crow Dog notes that when they politely request their rights, they’re ignored. History has taught them that they must fight for, rather than ask for, equality, and that many will die in the process.
