Lakota Woman

Crow Dog sees Leonard for the first time at an AIM meeting and asks a woman about his hair, which he wears long and in braids. During the meeting, he delivers a speech that makes people weep. They cross paths in their travels with AIM; as he is in a position of great responsibility, he seems much older to her. He becomes a more important part of her life in 1973, during Wounded Knee, when she relies on him as a spiritual leader. She is disappointed that he is in Washington, D.C. when Pedro is born, but when he returns, he gives the baby a Native American name. Later, he demonstrates his romantic interest in Crow Dog. She accepts his third proposal and marries him, moving with him to Crow Dog’s Paradise.

Leonard revives the tradition of the Ghost Dance while at Wounded Knee. As one of the Wounded Knee leaders, he is imprisoned for two years and endures psychological cruelty and religious discrimination. He is a peyote priest who sees different traditions as a single tradition and performs ceremonies in the style of visiting tribes. Also a yuwipi man and a Sun Dancer, he receives many letters asking him to perform ceremonies and fulfills almost every request. In addition, he always gives money to those who ask, even if he can’t afford to do so. He knows hundreds of songs from a variety of tribes and has written many himself; when he sings, he can make his voice sound like that of an animal or of several people singing together. Crow Dog states that “[w]hile his songs are traditional, he puts something new and special into them” (102). This observation is reminiscent of Leonard’s believed that the Ghost Dancers of 1890 “had misunderstood Wokova and his message,” in that “[t]hey should not have expected to bring the dead back to life, but to bring back their beliefs by practicing Indian religion” (153). In this way, Leonard shows himself to be traditional but open-minded, perhaps even progressive, when it comes to religious beliefs. However, upon returning home after prison, he still struggles to adjust to the more modern practices that have become accepted during his absence.

The Crow Dog family is proud of their legendary ancestor Kangi-Shunka, the first to take the name “Crow Dog.” The importance the family places on living in his image is partly why Mary Crow Dog is not immediately accepted into their family. Leonard’s eagerness in welcoming her, and his patience in teaching her, further demonstrates his open-mindedness.

Though the original Crow Dog is long gone by the time Mary Crow Dog’s memoir is written, his presence is felt in Leonard Crow Dog’s family and therefore, in Mary Crow Dog’s life. The great-grandfather of Leonard Crow Dog, Kangi-Shunka, or “Crow Dog,” was given the Ghost Dance religion by a great warrior named Short Bull, who received it from a holy man named Wovoka. He becomes “not only one of the earliest Ghost Dancers among the Sioux, but also one of their foremost leaders” (148). His killing of Spotted Tail, a chief who accepted the ways of white society, earns the family four generations of ostracism, a mantle of righteousness his descendants wear with pride. Instead of a war bonnet, he wears a white man’s cap with a feather in it, signifying that he lives under the wasičuns’ government but that he does not “let the wasičun’s world get the better of me” (183). He drives himself over a hundred miles to be executed for his crime but is released and sent home.

Throughout Lakota Woman, Kangi-Shunka is held up as a pinnacle of staunchness and bravery in the face of oppression. His descendants see him as a hero and continue to live as “voluntary outcasts” (177). Crow Dog contrasts this formidable history with the lack of history in her own family; while she herself searches for “a clue as to who and what I was,” Leonard and his family “have no such problems of identity” (9).

Emily is Mary Crow Dog’s mother. Crow Dog writes early in her memoir that she and her mother, who had “Puritan” values, fought quite a bit as she was growing up: “We didn’t have a generation gap, we had a generation Grand Canyon” (56). When Crow Dog and Barb become pregnant, their mother criticizes them and worries over what her friends will think. She tries to raise her children as Catholics and disapproves not only of the wild lifestyle Crow Dog leads as a teenager but also of the traditional Sioux lifestyle she adheres to later. She objects to Crow Dog’s going with Grandpa Fool Bull to peyote meetings. Crow Dog also writes that her family objects to Crow Dog’s marriage to Leonard.

Despite their differences, Crow Dog’s mother defends her when she’s brought to the principal’s office after writing a newspaper critical of the St. Francis boarding school she’s been forced to attend. She also expresses outrage that Crow Dog was jailed and separated from Pedro during Wounded Knee. This incident brings mother and daughter together and helps them relate to each other. Looking back on her life, Crow Dog writes that they both needed to mature and that they get along very well now.

The urgency of Crow Dog’s mother, along with Grandmother Moore, to assimilate into white society and to suppress Sioux traditions contributes to Crow Dog’s nebulous sense of identity. 

Barbara, one of Crow Dog’s sisters, is “closest to [Crow Dog] in life-style and has had experiences almost exactly like [her]” (16). Barb protects Crow Dog at St. Francis and confiscates her cigarettes and alcohol when they’re teenagers. In her teenage years, she is “aimless” like Crow Dog and uses drugs, specifically LSD, until “she got tired of it,” for she “was waiting, waiting for something, for a sign, but she did not know what she was waiting for” (59). Barb becomes pregnant but miscarries when she’s asked to carry a heavy item at work; she struggles to forgive her mother, who’d called her a “whore.” Later, she delivers a baby in the hospital and is sterilized without her consent. After insufficient care, her baby dies two hours later. Barbara’s experience makes Crow Dog determined not to have her baby in a white hospital.

At one point, when Crow Dog and many of her friends are staying in a motel in Pierre, to support an AIM protest, Barb is sexually harassed by white men. Several Sioux men come to her defense. The Sioux men are attacked, and the incident quickly escalates until the police arrive and threaten to arrest the Sioux men. Crow Dog uses this incident as an example of Sioux men protecting Sioux women against sexual harassment by white men, even as rape and sexism occur within the tribe. It is also an example of how seemingly unimportant encounters turn into major events that endanger Sioux lives. 

On the second page of her memoir, Crow Dog tells us that her best friend Annie Mae was found dead on the Pine Ridge Reservation and that while the police claimed she’d died of exposure, an autopsy revealed that she’d been shot. Furthermore, as a final indignity, her hands had been cut off. The first few pages serve as an introduction to the struggles of the Sioux, struggles Crow Dog will protest in her days with AIM. Readers know early on that Annie Mae will be murdered, and this knowledge follows us as we read about Annie Mae’s strength and good deeds throughout the memoir.

Annie Mae and Crow Dog become friends at Wounded Knee; Crow Dog is impressed when Annie Mae chastises “loud-mouth city women” (138). Later, Annie Mae, along with other Native American women, helps Crow Dog deliver Pedro. After Wounded Knee, Annie Mae has “a premonition that her militancy would bring her a violent death” (138) and gives her possessions to Crow Dog. Her premonition isn’t the first time she talks about dying for her cause—she always carries a gun and is ready to fight, stating, “I don’t want to grow up to be an old woman” (191). As related in Chapter 4, Annie Mae is with Crow Dog and Leonard in 1975 when Leonard is harassed and attacked by white men.

Annie Mae is multi-talented and “could make something out of nothing” (138). Of the Micmac tribe from Nova Scotia, she divorces two abusive husbands before taking on a leadership role with AIM. She is thought by the FBI to know the whereabouts of Leonard Peltier, who is wanted for the murder of two FBI agents; she is interrogated and threatened, and ultimately is found dead on the neighboring Pine Ridge Reservation. Her death represents for Crow Dog the theme of ultimate sacrifice that runs through her memoir and her life. She compares Annie, in death, to the Sun Dancers, who make physical sacrifices so others can live.

Crow Dog’s grandparents treat their grandchildren lovingly. Grandma Moore, a Catholic, saves a little to buy her grandchildren crystal sugar and fruit for Christmas, and the family celebrates Thanksgiving with hamburgers. Though she speaks the Sioux language, she forbids Crow Dog to do so, believing that Crow Dog needs “a white man’s education to live in this world” and that “dressing and behaving like a wasičun” is “they key which would magically unlock the door leading to […] the white life with a white-painted cottage” (23). She discourages Crow Dog from going into white people’s homes, claiming “they make fun of us, because we are poor” (21). However, when a white mother chases Crow Dog home, threatening to beat her, Grandma Moore brandishes her butcher knife and warns the “goddam white trash” (22) not to come near. Throughout Lakota Woman, Crow Dog discusses the generation gap and how there is “a lost generation” (79) of people who give in to the pressures to relinquish their heritage. Like Crow Dog’s mother, Grandma Moore desires to raise Crow Dog to assimilate with white people because she thinks it’s the best chance Crow Dog has for a fulfilling life. She doesn’t realize that this denial of her heritage makes Crow Dog feel lost and aimless, ultimately reinforcing her need for tradition.