She often resembles the heroines of Louise Erdrich`s novels-feisty and determined, warm and even funny, sometimes given to outbursts of rage or sorrow or enthusiasm, always unpretentious and straightforward.Īmerican Indians have produced a remarkable list of writers-among them, Erdrich, Michael Dorris, N. Mary Crow Dog`s personal story is what brings to life the historical events she reports. She makes it clear, however, that her love for her husband and her respect for his moral integrity have helped strengthen her pride in herself as a woman and an Indian.
Working with Richard Erdoes, one of the twentieth century’s leading writers on Native American affairs, Brave Bird recounts her difficult upbringing and the path of her fascinating life.''Confidentially, it can be hell on a woman to be married to such a holy one,'' she admits at one point, exhausted by housework.
It is a story of determination against all odds, of the cruelties perpetuated against American Indians, and of the Native American struggle for rights. Originally published in 1990, Lakota Woman was a national bestseller and winner of the American Book Award. Later, she married Leonard Crow Dog, the AIM’s chief medicine man, who revived the sacred but outlawed Ghost Dance. Inspired to take action, she joined the American Indian Movement to fight for the rights of her people. Mary was eighteen and pregnant when the rebellion at Wounded Knee happened in 1973. Rebelling against all this-as well as a punishing Catholic missionary school-she became a teenage runaway. With her white father gone, she was left to endure “half-breed” status amid the violence, machismo, and aimless drinking of life on the reservation.
Mary Brave Bird grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota in a one-room cabin without running water or electricity. The bestselling memoir of a Native American woman’s struggles and the life she found in activism: “courageous, impassioned, poetic and inspirational” ( Publishers Weekly ).
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