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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lakota Woman, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Activism and Resistance
Assimilation, Tradition, and Identity
Unity, Inclusion, and Equality
Racism and Sexism
Summary
Analysis
Mary introduces herself as Mary Brave Bird and says that, after she gave birth to her first child during a firefight that was part of the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee, she was given another name by her people: Ohitika Win, or Brave Woman. Being a Lakota woman, she notes, is not easy.
By mentioning that she gave birth during the Occupation of Wounded Knee, a political demonstration, she immediately establishes her dedication to activism—the implication is that advocating for civil rights is so important to her that she participated even while giving birth. Her giving birth while literally under fire is symbolic of the challenges that Native Americans—and Native American women in particular—experience; in this case, U.S. government officials fired upon Mary and the Native American protestors, even while Mary was going through labor.
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Themes
As soon as Mary left Wounded Knee and before she had even healed after giving birth, “they” put her in jail and took her baby son from her. A few years later, government officials put guns to her head, threatening to kill her. It’s hard, she notes again, to be a Native American woman.
Mary gives two examples of how government officials mistreated her. First, government officials imprisoned her even though she was still physically unhealed from giving birth. On top of this, they separated Mary from her newborn son, which illustrates a lack of empathy for both Mary’s emotional state and her baby’s health. Mary then implies that they were this cruel to her because she is a Native American woman. The second instance mentioned in this passage is that government officials used excessive force on her, which suggests their unconcern for Native Americans’ lives.
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Themes
Mary describes the deaths of two Native American women: her best friend Annie Mae Aquash and Delphine, her sister-in-law. The fierce and tough Annie Mae was murdered by a gunshot, but the police initially declared that she died from exposure to the cold. Delphine died after a drunken man beat her and left her outside in a blizzard.
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Themes
When Mary’s sister Barbara went to a government hospital to give birth, the providers sterilized her while she was under anesthesia. Her baby died only two hours after birth. Once more, Mary notes that it’s hard to be a Native American woman.
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Themes
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When Mary was still a young girl, she attended the St. Francis Boarding School, a Catholic school where the nuns brutally punished the young girls for inoffensive acts, like holding hands with a boy. When Mary was 15, she was raped.
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In addition to big, dramatic traumas, Native Americans struggle every day to protect their cultures and languages from “an alien, more powerful culture.”
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On top of this, women in particular face additional hardships—Native American men expect women to perform sexual favors and then care for any resulting children. Mary believes that this sense of male superiority compensates for what Native American men have suffered at the hands of white society, which has stripped them of their livelihoods and disparaged their wisdom as “savage superstition.”
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Themes
Mary is a Lakota woman from the Sicangu, or Brule Tribe, in South Dakota. Her tribe is one of the seven tribes of the Lakota, or the Western Sioux. The Lakota have a legacy of being fierce warriors and “a horse people.” But in the late 1800s, the U.S. government forced the Lakota onto reservations and took away many aspects of Lakota life. Nonetheless, they never fully gave up their traditional beliefs and pride.
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Themes
The reservation that Mary grew up on was called He-Dog, after a chief. On the Native American side of her family, Mary is related to the Brave Birds and Fool Bulls, including Old Grandpa Fool Bull, who was the last maker of a kind of traditional flute. He lived 100 years and has memories of the Wounded Knee Massacre—he was camped by Wounded Knee when the massacre took place. Later, he saw the corpses of the Lakota men, women, and children who were murdered.
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Themes
Although Mary wishes that she could tell more stories of her relatives’ bravery, she doesn’t know much of her family’s history before the year 1880. She does know that her people on the Rosebud Indian Reservation did not participate in many battles because their chief at the time, Spotted Tail, decided that fighting and resisting the wasičuns, or “white people,” was a doomed effort. Mary’s family treated Christianity the same way, with many of them converting because they feared retribution—like reduced rations—for resisting white culture.
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Themes
When Mary’s mother gave birth to her, her mother had to go to the Rosebud hospital because there was a pregnancy complication. That hospital wasn’t properly equipped for any kind of surgery, so they drove Mary’s mother to Pine Ridge to a different hospital. After Mary’s mother gave birth to Sandra, Mary’s sister, the doctors sterilized Mary’s mother against her will, which was not uncommon—sterilization was another way to perpetuate the genocide of Native Americans.
Mary is an iyeska, which means she is part Native American and part white. She often wishes that she could wash away all traces of whiteness in her body and remembers longing for the summer sun to tan her skin darker.
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Themes
The people of Mary’s husband’s family, the Crow Dogs, don’t struggle with identity, as they are “full-blood[ed]” Lakota. The Crow Dogs isolated themselves as much as they could from white society, refusing to go to church or give up their religious ceremonies. Mary commends their courage.
The first Crow Dog was a chief who got his name after a coyote and crow helped him while he was lying wounded after a battle. The white interpreter bungled the name, calling him Crow Dog instead of Crow Coyote. This first Crow Dog chief became famous after being a part of many historic incidents, from when he led the Ghost Dancers to when the Supreme Court freed him after deciding that the federal government had no jurisdiction on Native American reservations.
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Themes
Native American land is also a legend in and of itself—it is central to Native American people’s lives and cultures. The land is studded with historically and culturally important sites. But one cannot only reminisce about the great deeds of one’s ancestors—one must “make [one’s] own legends now. It isn’t easy.”
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