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Mary Crow Dog‟S Personal Trail of Tears According to Native American

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Mary Crow Dog‟S Personal Trail of Tears According to Native American Mary Crow Dog‟s Personal Trail of Tears According to Native American folklore, an Indian child, even while in the womb, is taught to respect his brother‟s dream. After birth, the child is taught to integrate the spiritual and the physical. The earth is sacred. According to Mary Crow Dog, “These words are at the core of your being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take our land away and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies.” The heart of this story is in the longing for the land with all of its spiritual and physical connections that is so inherent to the survival of the Native American Indian. Mary Brave Bird, who later becomes Mary Crow Dog (Crow Dog), author of Lakota Woman, immediately begins to captivate you and pull you into her story with the frightening circumstances surrounding the birth of her son. She describes the chaos, fear and anguish during a firefight with the U.S Marshalls at Wounded Knee (1973). Bullets were flying as she shielded her newborn, feverishly praying, “It does alright if I die, but please let him live!”. (Dog 1990) Beginning with the massacre at the first Wounded Knee (1890) to the climax of the siege at the second Wounded Knee (1973), Crow Dog‟s story does not give pause to recover from her intensely emotionally and painful fight for survival. Mary Crow Dog‟s Personal Trail of Tears Mary Crow Dog gives a short genealogy of her blood and more detail of Leonard Crow Dog‟s family, her husband. The genealogical history of her relatives and those of her husband‟s is critical to grasp the long-suffering history of this people to Crow Dog‟s present. The significance is paramount to participating fully in the experience. The purpose of this paper is to summarize Crow Dog‟s story while examining how her experiences relate to the social, economic and ethical issues presented in class. GENEALOGY Mary Crow Dog was born an “iyeska,” a half-blood. She was half-Lakota Sioux and half- white. Crow Dog‟s mother drove 90 miles to a hospital where she was born among Crazy Horse‟s people. Crow Dog describes the pain of trying to decide where she belonged. In the mirror she saw the face of an Indian, but her skin was very light. She couldn‟t wait for summer so she the “prairie sun” could tan her skin and make her look like a real Indian. The Crow Dogs, members of her husband‟s family, did not have problems with their identity. They are very proud full-blooded Sioux, and there is no shortage of stories that make the history worth reading. The first Crow Dog was a well-known Chief who became famous for killing a rival chief while feuding over tribal politics then voluntarily drove over a hundred miles to Deadwood where he believed he would be hanged. The Supreme Court ordered him released because it was not a crime for one Indian to kill another. (Dog 1990) I am sure the relief of being set free was eclipsed by the cruel reality that one Indian killing another Indian was not a crime. He later became a spiritual medicine man and leader of the Ghost Dancers. The Sioux have always been known for their strong family ties, families caring for the “helpless ones”. At the center of Sioux society is the tiyospaye. This is the extended family Mary Crow Dog‟s Personal Trail of Tears group, the family structure which includes grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and in-laws, many mothers and many fathers looking after generations. For 200 years the heartbeat of Native American culture has been systematically cleansed from White America through essentially three methods: Assimilation; Institutional Discrimination; and Racism. ASSIMILATION The “whites, destroyed the tiyospaye, not accidentally, but as a matter of policy.” (DOG 1990) The traditions and customs of the tiyospaye was a huge impediment to government agents idea of „progress‟ and to the Christian missionary‟s ethnocentric definition of a „civilized‟ society. Forced upon the Native American culture, the „nuclear family‟ made allotments for single dwelling families while extolling the sanctimonious benefits of selfishness. The Native American family did not understand nor want to understand this new way of thinking. Eventually, the forced „civilization‟ of the Indian resulted in boarding schools. Mary Crow Dog was sent to a Catholic boarding school for her education. The white man not robbed them of their family culture, but not was robbing them of a family altogether. In order to beat the Indian out of these „savages‟, the children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools. Crow Dog describes her feelings of literally being kidnapped, and then, the „cleansing‟ began. While at these schools, the children were beaten any time they showed their Indian natures. Their braids (a symbol of bravery, maturity and culture) were cut, they were forced to wear white man‟s clothing, they were not allowed to speak their own language, and were forced to function on „white man‟s time‟ as opposed to Indian time, which is natural time” (DOG 1990). It was during Mary Crow Dog‟s Personal Trail of Tears her time at the boarding school that Crow Dog began to feel hate, something she had not really felt, for white people. White priests sexually harassed her and her friends. White nuns beat her for holding hands with boys and for being Indian. Crow Dog‟s sister was sterilized by white doctors (without her permission). The Indians who assimilated in order to survive were “white man-ized. “They went in Indian and came out white.” Crow Dog dreams and longs to be able to “purge it out.” The „it‟ is her own white blood. (DOG 1990) There are tremendous pressures on minority groups to assimilate, to abandon one‟s own culture and become a reflection of the dominant culture. Cultural genocide is a relentless predator that is patient and willing to hide in the shadows masking its true identity. INSTITUTIONAL DISCRIMINATION The moment the white man stepped foot on American soil, he began constructing policies and making laws that would forever change the course of the Native American people. The federal government and the state of South Dakota inflicted all sorts of unimaginable wrongs upon the Sioux. Laws were instituted to remove the Indian from the land and relocate them to reservations. Laws made spiritual and religious rituals illegal. Policy made it legal to kidnap children from their homes and place them in boarding schools. Policies were instituted to restrict freedom of movement, dictate how, when and where they would get their food. Laws and policies made it easy for corrupt officials to steal and neglect those placed in their care. These institutions played a huge part in the forced sterilization of Native American women, the theft and destruction of property, and the killing of numerous Indians without recourse. The fate of Indians was at the mercy of white men institutions on every level of power. Without this power, institutional abuse and cruelty is not possible. It is not unreasonable to assume that this is one reason the FBI reacted so relentlessly to Leonard Crow Dog and those at Mary Crow Dog‟s Personal Trail of Tears Wounded Knee. The white man‟s power was being threatened by the members of AIM rejecting government policies through moral arguments. Institutional cruelty and discrimination also flourished through a lack of awareness by the majority of white people in the U.S. Most had absolutely no idea about the many atrocities that were occurring on reservations in South Dakota. Corrupt institutional officials controlled the flow of information and may spin how history is written. The United States and South Dakotan governments masked their discrimination and cruelty in a stealth and fraudulent form of kindness. Multiple treaties were made and broken. Promises were given and discarded when convenient by the supposed friend and guardian of the Indian, The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which at the time, was mostly made up of white people. Native Americans were never asked about their pain and suffering nor were they given equitable treatment and resources to restore their homelands, culture and dignity. Fed up with oppression, corruption, racism, poverty, and genocide, Sioux Indians, several others from different tribes and an organization called AIM (American Indian Movement) occupied Wounded Knee as a means of spiritual and physical resistance. The state of South Dakota and the federal government laid siege for over 70 days. According to Crow Dog, “as the siege went on our women became stronger” (Dog 1990)(p. 137). It was at this time that Mary Crow Dog gave birth to her son, Pedro, refusing to leave her people, her cause, her soul. After Wounded Knee, Leonard and Crow Dog marry. The FBI has Leonard arrested on trumped up charges and he is sentenced to 23 years in prison. In an effort to basically make Leonard Crow Dog disappear the government continually transfers Leonard to several different prisons. Crow Dog persistently tracks him down again and again, and continues to fight for his Mary Crow Dog‟s Personal Trail of Tears release. She is assisted by churches, volunteers, AIM, celebrities, and a few lawyers. After serving nearly two years, he is eventually released for time served. RACISM When Crow Dog was in third grade she recalls her first experience with racism. She had tried to buy an orange for a nickel. The shopkeeper said that she couldn‟t buy the orange because the orange was large and cost more than a nickel.
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