At of My Husband More Than Makes up for It
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A T o N A L BESTSELLE R "Her seoring autobiography is courageous, impassioned, poetic, and inspirational. II - publishers Week� Lakota Woman ALSO BY RICHARD ERDOES Lame Deer, Seeker ofVisions The Sun Dance People The Rain Dance People The Pueblo Indians The Sound ofFlutes Picture History ofAncient Rome Saloons ofthe Old West The Woman Who Dared rnerican Indian Myths and Legends (with Alfonso Ortiz) A.D. 1000, Living on the Brink of Apocalypse Crying for a Dream oman by Mary (row Dog and Richard Erdoes .. .. Harper Perennial A Division ofHarperCollinsPublishers Unless otherwise stated, all photographs are by Richard Erdoes. A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1990 by Grove Weidenfeld, a division of Wheatland Corporation. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Grove Weidenfeld, a division of Wheatland Corporation. LAKOTA WOMAN. Copyright © 1990 by Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. First HarperPerennial edition published 1991. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crow Dog, Mary. Lakota woman I by Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes. - lst HarperPerennial ed. p. em. Reprint. Originally published: lst ed. New York : Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. ISBN 0-06-097389-7 (pbk.) 1. Crow Dog, Mary. 2. Dakota Indians-Women-Biography. 3. Dakota Indians-Social conditions. 4. Rosebud Indian Reservarion (S.D.) I. Erdoes, Richard. II. Title. [E99.DIC833 1991] 978.3'62-dc20 [B] 90-55980 91 92 93 94 95 MPC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents A Woman from He-Dog 3 2 Invisible Fathers 12 3 Civilize Them with a Stick 28 4 Drinking and Fighting 42 5 Aimlessness 55 6 We AIM Not to Please 73 7 Crying for a Dream 92 8 Cankpe Opi Wa kpala III 9 The Siege 128 10 The Ghosts Return 144 II Birth Giving 156 12 Sioux and Elephants Never Forget 170 1 3 Tw o Cut-off Hands 186 14 Cante Ishta-The Eye of the Heart 199 1 5 The Eagle Caged 2 15 16 Ho Uway Tinkte-My Voice Yo u Shall Hear 242 Epilogue 26 1 Lakota Wonlan CHAPTER 1 A Woman fromHe-Dog Anation is not con qu ered until the hearts of its women are on the gro und . Th en it is done, no matter how bra ve its warriors nor how strong their weapons . -Cheyenneproverb am Mary Brave Bird. After I had my baby during the I siege of Wo unded Knee they gave me a special name Ohitika 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 openedup upon us, I wrappedhim up in a blanket and 3 LAKOTA WOMAN ran fo r it. We had to hit the dirt a couple of times, I shielding the baby with my body, praying, "It's all right if I die, but please let him live. " When I came out of Wo unded 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 fe ds put the muz zles of their M- 1 6s against my head, threatening to blow me away. It's hard being an Indian woman. My best friend was Annie Mae Aquash, a young, strong hearted woman from the Micmac Tr ibe with beautiful chil dren. It is not always wise fo r 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 Wa shington fo r fingerprint identification, hands that had helped my baby come into the world. My sister-in-law, Delphine, a good woman who had lived a hard life, was also fo und dead in the snow, the tears frozen on her face . A drunken man had beaten her, breaking one of her arms and legs, leaving her helpless in a blizzard to die. My sister Barbara went to the government hospital in Rosebud to have her baby and when she came out of anes thesia fo und that she had been sterilized against her will. The baby lived only fo r two hours, and she had wanted so much to have children. No, it isn't easy. When I was a small girl at the St. Francis Boarding School, the Catholic sisters would take a buggy whip to us for what they called "disobedience." At age ten I could drink and hold a pint of whiskey. At age twelve the nuns beat me for "being too free with my body." All I had been doing was holding hands with a boy. At age fifteen I was raped. If you plan to be born, make sure you are born white and male. It is not the big, dramatic things so much that get us 4 A Womanfrom He-Dog down, but just being Indian, trying to hang on to our way of life, language, and values while being surrounded by an alien, more powerful culture. It is being an iyeska, a half blood, being looked down upon by whites and fu ll-bloods alike. It is being a backwoods girl living in a city, having to rip off stores in order to survive. Most of all it is being a woman. Among Plains tribes, some men think that all a woman is good for is to crawl into the sack with them and mind the children. It compensates for what white society has done to them. They were famous warriors and hunters once, but the buffalo is gone and there is not much rep in putting a can of spam or an occasional rabbit on the table. As for being warriors, the only way some men can count coup nowadays is knockingout another skin's teeth during a barroom fight. In the old days a man made a name for himself by being generous and wise, but now he has nothing to be generous with, no jobs, no money; and as far as our traditional wisdom is concerned, our men are being told by the white missionaries, teachers, and employers that it is merely savage superstition they should get rid of if they want to make it in this world. Men are fo rced to live away from their children, so that the family can get ADC-Aid to Dependent Children. So some warriors come home drunk and beat up their old ladies in order to work off their frustra tion. I know where they are coming from. I feel sorry for them, but I feel even sorrier for their women. To start from the beginning, I am a Sioux from the Rose bud Reservation in South Dakota. I belong to the "Burned Thigh," the Brule Tr ibe, the Sicangu in our language. Long ago, so the legend goes, a small band of Sioux was sur rounded by enemies who set fire to their tipis and the grass around them. They fought their way out of the trap but got their legs burned and in this way acquired their name. The Brules are part of the Seven Sacred Campfires, the seven tribes of the We stern Sioux known collectively as Lakota. 5 LAKOTA WOMAN The Eastern Sioux are called Dakota. The diffe rence be tween them is their language. It is the same except that where we Lakota pronounce an L, the Dakota pronounce a D. They cannot pronounce an L at all. In our tribe we have this joke: "What is a flat tire in Dakota?" Answer: ''A bdowout." The Brule, like all Sioux, were a horse people, fierce riders and raiders, great warriors. Between I 870 and I 880 all Sioux were driven into reservations, fenced in and forced to give up everything that had given meaning to their life their horses, their hunting, their arms, everything. But un der the long snows of despair the little spark of our ancient beliefs and pride kept glowing, just barely sometimes, wait ing fo r a warm wind to blow that spark into a flame again. My fa mily was settled on the reservation in a small place called He-Dog, after a famous chief. There are still some He-Dogs living. One, an old lady I knew, lived to be over a hundred years old. Nobody knew when she had been born. She herself had no idea, except that when she came into the world there was no census yet, and Indians had not yet been given Christian first names. Her name was just He-Dog, nothing else. She always told me, "You should have seen me eighty years ago when I was pretty. " I have never fo rgotten her face-nothing but deep cracks and gullies, but beautiful in its own way.