Lakota Woman

Published in 1990, Lakota Woman is a memoir by Mary Crow Dog, member of the Brule Tribe of the Western Sioux and activist in the American Indian Movement. Crow Dog’s book recounts her increased awareness of the subjugation of her people and of women within her own tribe. It also discusses how poverty, alcoholism, and crime on the reservations are the inevitable results of government regulations that have oppressed and dehumanized Native Americans, forcing them to assimilate into a society that does not accept them. Crow Dog grows up with a nebulous sense of identity and finds comfort in the American Indian Movement, which revives in her the connection to her religion and traditions and provides her with a sense of purpose. Her book is an account of the journey by which she becomes “a traditional Sioux woman steeped in the ancient beliefs of her people” (251) and of how she reconciles her history with the changing world around her.

Mary Crow Dog is from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. The daughter of a white father who abandoned the family and a Sioux mother, she is teased by white people and Sioux alike and grows up feeling that she doesn’t belong in either community.