Mary Crow Dog - Lakota Woman

A LSO BY R ICHARD E RDOES

Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

The Sun Dance People

The Rain Dance People

The Pueblo Indians

The Sound of Flutes

Picture History of Ancient Rome

Saloons of the Old West

The Woman Who Dared

American Indian Myths and Legends (with Alfonso Ortiz)

A.D. 1000, Living on the Brink of Apocalypse

Crying for a Dream

Contents

Copyright 1990 by Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs by Richard Erdoes.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or .

First published in 1990 by Grove Weidenfeld

Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-0-8021-4542-0 (pbk.)

eISBN: 978-0-8021-9155-7

Cover Design by David Zimet/Robert Anthony, Inc.

Cover photograph Richard Erdoes

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

Epilogue

T he rest of the story is quickly told. I am thirty-seven years at this moment. Leonard is fifty. Im not all that skinny anymore and he got heavier. He used to be a champion hoop-dancer, jumping through seven swiftly moving hoops. He cant do that anymore. I have borne Leonard three children: two boys, Anwah and June Bug (Leonard Jr.), and one girl, Jennifer. Leonards daughters Ina and Bernadette also have babies of their own, making Leonard a grandfather.

Old Henry died six years ago in his late eighties. He and his wife spent their last years in a regular tribe-built house with running water, a bathtub, and a flush toilet. So, belatedly, he made the jump from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Up to the very last Henry could still run a Native American Church meeting, ride a horse, and chop wood. He often used to say, I am the last genuine aborigine left. Now he is gone. They found him lying in front of his door. It looked as if he had fallen asleep but it was the sleep from which one does not awake. A year later Grandma Mary Gertrude followed him to another world.

My own mother quit nursing, went back to school, got her degree, and is now teaching school at Rosebud. Now that I am a mother myself, I have more understanding of what she went through trying to raise a wild kid like me. Finally we are friends. Barb has married Jim, a good man, one of the sun-dancers. He is a carpenter and right now is fixing up my mothers house.

Pedro just had his nineteenth birthday. He has become a yuwipi man. He runs meetings and puts on sweat lodges. He is a good singer. He has pierced many times as a sun-dancer. The youngest child of our close friend Jerry Roy was stabbed to death by a member of a motorcycle gang. The poor kid was still so young, real sweet and friendly. Everybody called him Teddy Bear. Pedro has made a vow to hang from the tree at the coming Sun Dance for Teddy Bears ghost.

As for those who were at Wounded Knee with us, the AIM leaders and the once young kids, they have calmed down considerably. Dennis Banks was for a number of years a university professor at Davis, California. At present he is running a limousine service in Rapid City, South Dakota. He has not lost his sense of humor. Russel Means is at the moment married to a Navajo lady and lives at Chinle, Arizona. He is one of the founders of a new, multiracial party. He was running for president or vice-president a while ago, but Ronald Reagan was too much competition. There are also rumors that he wants to establish an all-Indian bank. John Trudell, whose family was destroyed in a mysterious fire, has made a new life for himself as musician and song writer. I hear that he is very good. Those are the survivors. Many of the former brothers and sisters are dead. Some were killed but most died from natural causes. I think that the wear and tear of the long struggle just burned them up, ruined their health and took years off their lives. The best always die young.

As for wear and tear: Having four children, being a medicine mans wife, cooking and cleaning up for innumerable guests, most of them uninvited, listening to countless woes and problems, became just too much for me. I was going under. So a few years ago I panicked, packed up the kids, and simply ran away. My flight stopped at Phoenix, Arizona. Of course, Leonard found me. We made up.

We are now back in Rosebud, where we still have the yearly Sun Dances at the old Crow Dog place. Archie Lame Deer has taken the place of Uncle Bill Eagle Feathers as intercessor. He puts on the dance together with Leonard, runs the sweats, and does most of the piercing.

Everybody still comes to Leonard with their problems. We have been heavily involved for years helping the traditional Navajos and Hopis fight their long battle of Big Mountain. During the 1988 drought, white farmers in Ohio asked Crow Dog to perform a rain ceremony for them. He did, and the rain came down. He also performs sweat lodges and pipe ceremonies for Indian prisoners in Americas penitentiaries. Wherever Native Americans struggle for their rights, Leonard is there. Life goes on.

Lakota Woman

Lakota Woman

Lakota Woman

by

Mary Crow Dog

and

Richard Erdoes

CHAPTER 1

A Woman from He-Dog

A nation is not conquered until

the hearts of its women

are on the ground.

Then it is done, no matter

how brave its warriors

nor how strong their weapons.

Cheyenne proverb

I am Mary Brave Bird. After I had my baby during the siege of Wounded Knee they gave me a special nameOhitika Win, Brave Woman, and fastened an eagle plume in my hair, singing brave-heart songs for me. I am a woman of the Red Nation, a Sioux woman. That is not easy.

I had my first baby during a firefight, with the bullets crashing through one wall and coming out through the other. When my newborn son was only a day old and the marshals really opened up upon us, I wrapped him up in a blanket and ran for it. We had to hit the dirt a couple of times, I shielding the baby with my body, praying, Its all right if I die, but please let him live.

When I came out of Wounded Knee I was not even healed up, but they put me in jail at Pine Ridge and took my baby away. I could not nurse. My breasts swelled up and grew hard as rocks, hurting badly. In 1975 the feds put the muzzles of their M-16s against my head, threatening to blow me away. Its hard being an Indian woman.

My best friend was Annie Mae Aquash, a young, strong-hearted woman from the Micmac Tribe with beautiful children. It is not always wise for an Indian woman to come on too strong. Annie Mae was found dead in the snow at the bottom of a ravine on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The police said that she had died of exposure, but there was a .38-caliber slug in her head. The FBI cut off her hands and sent them to Washington for fingerprint identification, hands that had helped my baby come into the world.