A Story of Strength of Lakota Woman - Essay Example

Lakota Woman: A Story of Strength One of the great fallacies of literature is the idea that from the dominant culture can accurately and appropriately convey a sense of the true conditions of life and perspective experienced by those in a minority culture. This can be found any time one expects to find an accurate account of the American Indian experience that is shaped and delivered through white understanding. Although the Indians had already developed a complex intercultural confederation of nations prior to the white man’s arrival on the North American continent, they were quickly overpowered by the greater numbers, unfamiliar diseases, tricky politics and more advanced technology of these devils from across the sea. As a result, they were forced to accept substandard living conditions and driven onto often barren and remote reservations, provided with little in the way of resources and denied access to basic services or opportunities. Expected to completely adopt a white person’s way of life, the American Indian was still aware that his best efforts at conversion would always be met with derision and oppression from the race he attempts to join at the same time that his Indian brothers will revile him for his selling out. White accounts would have readers believe that the negative issues found on the reservations are the result of Indian weaknesses and the degeneracy of the race while Indian writers reveal much deeper issues that place a great deal of the blame on the white culture and their insistence on bringing all races into conformance with their own ideals and beliefs. Although Mary Crow Dog focuses mostly on just telling her story of growing up Indian in a world dominated by white men in her novel Lakota Woman, she manages to convey a sense of the greater social problems that have faced our country and what has been necessary for ‘subcultures’ like hers to do to gain legal attention and power. The story is essentially an autobiography of Mary Crow Dog’s life from her earliest memories to the age of 37 when she wrote the text. Within this period of time, she has already lived a very full life having taken part in both Indian and white man’s traditional expressions of religious faith and decided on the Indian way as the only way that truly speaks to her soul. Her narrative starts with her early childhood on the reservation living with her mother sometimes and her grandparents most of the time. Her experiences are shaped by her grandmother’s Christian beliefs and the Indian heritage that hadn’t quite been wiped out of the family home. She stays with her grandmother until she is forced to attend Catholic boarding school and comes into direct conflict with the white man’s world. Her experiences at school teach her how to fight and how to resist as she is constantly forced to remain in controlled environments until she finally demands her release. However, even returning to the reservation does not provide her with the home or direction she seeks and she ends up living on the road in roving bands of Indian youth, all searching for meaning and purpose and finding little but trouble and pain. The methods by which Mary Crow Dog escapes this life of violent wandering and drug abuse is described as a combination of two events, one being the encouragement she received from a white woman to express her voice while still in school and the second being her encounter with the American Indian Movement. This encounter introduced her to the man who would one day become her husband and provided her with the sense of direction, purpose and belonging she’d been seeking. Her experiences with this group were both political and occasionally violent as she and others attempted to gain legal recognition of their grievances, which eventually landed her husband in prison with a sentence of 13 years for his involvement at the second Wounded Knee. It was at this point that Mary Crow Dog became more publicly active, speaking out across the country and attempting to gain support and freedom for her husband. She ends the book with a brief recap of how she and her husband have become more involved in traditional Indian ceremonies since his release from prison, adding an epilogue at the end that catches her reader up to the year she wrote the book with the various members of her family that have moved on to live more fulfilling lives as full-bloods. In telling her personal story, however, Mary Crow Dog is able to reveal a great deal of information about her natural culture and the various places in which it clashes directly with the values of whites. For example, in detailing her childhood lived in extreme poverty on the reservation, she says, “we kids did not suffer from being poor, because we were not aware of it. The few Indians nearby lived in the same kind of want, in the same kind of dilapidated shacks or one-room log cabins with dirt floors. We had nothing to compare our life to” (26). While this was an acceptable situation for them as children, though, the lack of opportunity for something better compared with an unavoidable comparison to white people upon maturity contributed a great deal to the types of issues widely considered ‘Indian’ problems – alcoholism, drug abuse and criminal activity. In her portrayal of the situation as it is experienced, Mary makes it understandable how the Indians justified their actions including drug abuse and crime. “We looked upon shoplifting as just getting a little of our own back, like counting coup in the old days by raiding the enemy’s camp for horses” (61). Her simple, straight-forward account shows again and again how the ‘Indian problem’ is actually instigated to a great degree by the overt racism and support received for the same by the white establishment. As she tells her story, Mary also provides her readers with indications of what might work to encourage Indians to follow a better path than the one of self-destruction they have been amply encouraged to follow. Her personal salvation began with the arrival of a white hippie girl at her school who let her know she didn’t have to always remain silent, simply accepting the unfair treatment she was victim of. It was this girl’s idea for Mary Crow Dog and her friends to express themselves more openly. “Why don’t you put out an underground paper, mimeograph it. It’s easy. Tell it like it is. Let it all hang out” (36). From this early introduction to the idea that she didn’t have to keep silent about the poor treatment, Mary was brought into contact with the American Indian Movement, which she describes as something that “hit our reservation like a tornado, like a new wind blowing out of nowhere, a drumbeat from far off getting louder and louder” (73). This led to her involvement in the second Wounded Knee, a movement in which the AIM was attempting, again, to force the attention of the white bureaucracy that was still oppressing them to significant degree. As she presents it, this second encounter between Indians and whites at Wounded Knee was the direct result of the white government’s failure to listen to the plight of the Indians who had finally been pushed beyond their extremist limits. This example illustrates how to push a group of people beyond endurance and into violence. In order to achieve a more peaceful solution to the Indian problem, Mary Crow Dog illustrates the various ways in which not only her family but many individuals involved in the AIM have settled down into peaceful and fulfilling lives on the reservations, living in the ways that they feel most comfortable with, the traditional ways of their ancestors without the interference of the national government. In telling her story, Mary Crow Dog illustrates the tremendous pain and harm being collectively committed on the individual members of the Indian community through the common practices of the white man’s system and policies. This story is instantly identified as being applicable culture-wide, affecting every individual she knows in some negative way. At no point have her people been treated with the kind of respect and honor they deserved simply because they were people, which worked to foster not only despair among the generations, but also significant resentment and mistrust between races – often justified. This build-up of negative emotion then fostered the forms of violence and social unrest of the AIM that was the Indian’s only means of gaining official attention and attempting to bring about change, even if it was just to allow them to be left alone. Inherent in this story is the story of all oppressed peoples who have lived on this continent, broadly defined as any individual with a skin tone darker than the average white. African Americans, Chinese Americans and other minority groups have continuously been led down the same road of oppression and resistance until the minorities are pushed into violent activities and large-scale social unrest as their only means of gaining an ear. By touching on these greater issues within her own story, Mary Crow Dog seems to be making a plea to her audience to learn from the past and the treatment of her race as well as others. Rather than using oppression and fear as a means of forcing others to an external ideal, she suggests simply making allowances for differences in standards, values and traditions and then finding a means of co-existing peacefully, with everyone gaining the equal access to legal rights and protections they are supposed to be guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution and Indian-U.S. Treaty negotiations. In the end, her book stresses the importance of equitable treatment of all peoples without basing it upon identical values or customs as a means of establishing public harmony Works Cited Crow Dog, Mary. Lakota Woman. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. Read More