Mary Crow Dog's memoir Lakota Woman is a firsthand account from the frontlines of the major American Indian movement clashes of the 20th century. As the wife of medicine man Leonard Crow Dog, imprisoned and persecuted for his associations with AIM member Leonard Peltier, she took part in both the 1972 occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building and the 1973 occupation of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Lakota Woman centers on Wounded Knee especially, where Crow Dog--then Mary Brave Bird--birthed her first child, in the middle of an FBI siege and firefight.
As a primary source, Lakota Woman is remarkable. Not just for her accounts of the occupations, but also her account of growing up in a repressive Indian boarding school (the brutality and cultural depredation she suffered there sounds just like the story told by Zitkala-Sa, though separated by more than a half-century) and traditional Native American ceremonies like the Sun Dance and the use of peyote. (I'm especially thankful for her account of the peyote ceremony--I was hoping to find something in David Treuer's history of Native America to complement the peyote ceremony in House Made of Dawn, but he's strangely silent about the Native American Church.)
Lakota Woman really helps the outsider, this outsider, understand the contours of the American Indian Movement, including the way that it brings together Native American of radically different tribal affiliations and traditions, including native activists from Mexico and Canada. But it also reveals some of the divisions between Native Americans, even in the same communities. It helped me understand, for example, why the occupation of Wounded Knee was in protest of the Sioux tribal chairman Dick Wilson rather than the U.S. government--as Crow Dog describes it, the tribal chairmen were often the least racially or culturally committed members of the nation because they were the most willing and able to participate in power structures imposed by the federal government, and Wilson in particular ran the reservation through paramilitary violence that was ignored, or tacitly supported, by federal officials. Crow Dog describes the difficulty of being a "mixed-blood" Sioux woman, and having to overcome the suspicion of Leonard Crow Dog's family, who are, according to the memoir, famous among the Sioux for their cultural isolation and traditional ways. Mary Crow Dog also describes being caught between the pressures of white liberal, especially feminist, allies, and the traditionalist activists who often made up the movement's core. Lakota Woman really lays the contours of the American Indian Movement bare.
I was interested in the difference between this account and David Treuer's description of the AIM in Heartbeat of Wounded Knee. I could be misremembering, but Treuer seems to regard the AIM as something between a sloppy embarrassment (both the occupation of the BIA and Wounded Knee were largely unplanned) and a violent overreaction. Mary Crow Dog often discusses her affection for her friend Annie Mae Aquash, the Mi'kmaq woman who was found dead and frozen at Pine Ridge in 1973; throughout the memoir she seems to infer that Aquash's death occurred at the hands of the AIM's opponents, but fails to mention the popular theory that it was leaders of the AIM who were responsible for her murder. Should we be reading Crow Dog's account, then, with a grain of salt? And how does that connect to her account of the persecution and imprisonment of her husband, Leonard Crow Dog (whose experience in jail really does sound awful), or cause celebre Leonard Peltier?
Of course, no one would accuse Lakota Woman of being un-ideological. More than anything, it's a full-throated defense of the American Indian Movement's strategies and methods. Its style is conversational, straightforward; it seems to come right out of Mary Crow Dog's mouth, and that's part of what makes it so worthwhile.
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