In Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog recounts her struggle to reconcile the two cultures that make up her biracial identity. Mary’s father (who was “mostly white”) had no hand in raising her, and her mother (who was Native American) didn’t raise Mary with any Lakota cultural traditions, as she believed that the only way to prosper was to adhere to white American society’s standards. Throughout her early life, then, Mary felt neither white enough nor Lakota enough—and her personal struggle is reflective of the broader conflict between assimilation and preserving traditions that many indigenous people face. Not only does the U.S. government force Native Americans to assimilate, but there is also pressure within indigenous communities to conform. But through her own and other Native Americans’ experiences, Mary illustrates how assimilation has a devastating impact on indigenous peoples and their cultures. Not only does white society continue to reject and oppress Native Americans regardless of their attempts to assimilate, but assimilation also destroys indigenous cultures and estranges Native Americans from their indigenous heritage. Therefore, Mary suggests that the only way for Native American people to feel whole—and for tribes to preserve their cultural identities—is to fully embrace their indigenous cultures and pass those traditions on to the next generation.
Throughout her memoir, Mary depicts how both the U.S. government and indigenous communities pressure Native Americans to assimilate to white society. One of the most notorious methods of assimilation that the U.S. government levied against Native Americans was the implementation of missionary boarding schools. At these schools, Native American children were separated from their families, banned from practicing their language and customs, and forcibly converted to Christianity and white American culture. Mary attended the local Catholic missionary school, as did her mother and grandmother when they were young. Mary calls the boarding school “a curse for [her] family for generations”—it convinced her grandma to abandon her Lakota culture. The boarding schools weren’t the only way that the U.S. government waged war on Native American cultures. Mary describes how the U.S. government sent armed forces to stamp out the Ghost Dance and how the Bureau of Indian Affairs persecuted Henry Crow Dog, Mary’s father-in-law, for being a member of the Native American Church. As she puts it, “all Indian rituals were outlawed as standing in the way of ‘whitemanizing’ the native peoples.” But Native Americans also experience coercion from their own communities to assimilate. Some people shared Mary’s mother and grandmother’s beliefs that “going to church, dressing and behaving like a [white person] […] would magically unlock the door leading to the good life,” a life without the poverty and hopelessness that plagued reservations.
But Mary makes it clear that this assimilation has negative effects. Between the government’s concerted efforts to exterminate indigenous cultures and many Native Americans’ resignation that assimilation is the only way to survive, many tribes are losing “much of their language, traditions, and ceremonies,” and their cultures are threatened with extinction. As a result, identity crises are a common problem among Native Americans. Mary notes that the Native American children who were forced to attend missionary schools struggled to understand who they were and how they fit into society. Robbed of their language, religion, and culture, these indigenous children were “caricatures of white people […] that […] were neither wanted by whites nor by Indians.” The fact that white society still rejected “assimilated” Native Americans betrays how assimilation doesn’t spare Native Americans from racism or oppression. To highlight this point, Mary recounts the murder of Norman Little Brave, a Native American man who “had been a sober-minded churchgoer, but that had not saved him.” Norman’s murderer—a wealthy, white man—went unpunished. So, even though Norman tried to assimilate into white, Christian culture, the U.S. government (and white society more broadly) still racially discriminated against him.
As Mary takes the reader through her journey to reconnect with her Lakota heritage, she suggests that the only way for Native Americans to feel at peace with their identity is by embracing their indigenous culture and spirituality. From a young age, Mary knew that assimilation “was the wrong key to the wrong door […] it would not change the shape of [her] cheekbones […] or the feelings inside [her].” So, she sought out ways to learn more about her cultural heritage. She spoke with community elders who were “traditional people, faithful to the ancient rituals.” Participating in various Native American religious ceremonies made Mary feel in tune with her heritage and secure in her Lakota identity for the first time. When describing her participation in a Sun Dance, Mary says that “it was at that moment that I, a white-educated half-blood, became wholly Indian. I experienced a great rush of happiness.” By Mary’s account, many Native Americans feel similarly. The revival of spiritual and cultural traditions was a major aspect of AIM (a Native American civil rights and cultural movement that Mary was a part of) and one that drew many Native Americans of all tribes to various AIM events. Mary describes how when her husband, Leonard, hosted a Ghost Dance in 1974, “native people from as far away as Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and Arizona suddenly appeared to participate,” which indicates how strongly these indigenous people wanted to reconnect with Native American customs. As she put it, participating in traditional ceremonies—even those of other tribes—was “their way of saying ‘I am an Indian again.’”
Reviving and embracing indigenous cultural practices doesn’t just benefit individuals—it helps indigenous people as a whole. By passing on its traditions, a tribe ensures that their cultural identity will live on. Additionally, cross-cultural exchange strengthens intertribal relationships, which in turn helps indigenous nations fight together to protect their cultures and rights. As Mary puts it, reviving rituals “bring[s] back the sacred hoop—to feel, holding on to the hand of [one’s] brother and sister, the rebirth of Indian unity.”
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Assimilation, Tradition, and Identity Quotes in Lakota Woman
The Crow Dogs, the members of my husband’s family, have no such problems of identity. They don’t need the sun to tan them, they are full-bloods—the Sioux of the Sioux […] They have no shortage of legends. Every Crow Dog seems to be a legend in himself, including the women. They became outcasts in their stronghold at Grass Mountain rather than being whitemanized. They could not be tamed, made to wear a necktie or go to a Christian church. All during the long years when practicing Indian beliefs was forbidden and could be punished with jail, they went right on having their ceremonies, their sweat baths and sacred dances.
The whites destroyed the tiyospaye, not accidentally, but as a matter of policy. The close-knit clan, set in its old ways, was a stumbling block in the path of the missionary and government agent, its traditions and customs a barrier to what the white man called “progress” and “civilizations.” And so the government tore the tiyospaye apart and forced the Sioux into the kind of relationship now called the “nuclear family”—forced upon each couple their individually owned allotment of land […] So the great brainwashing began, those who did not like to have their brains washed being pushed farther and farther into the back country into isolation and starvation. The civilizers did a good job on us, especially among the half-bloods, using the stick-and-carrot method, until now there is neither the tiyospaye nor a white-style nuclear family left, just Indian kids without parents.
[Grandma Moore] thought she was helping me by not teaching me Indian ways. Her being a staunch Catholic also had something to do with it. The missionaries had always been repeating over and over again: “You must kill the Indian in order to save the man!” That was part of trying to escape the hard life. The missions, going to church, dressing and behaving like a wasičun—that for her was the key which would magically unlock the door leading to the good life, the white life with a white-painted cottage […] a shiny car in the garage, and an industrious, necktie-wearing husband who was not a wino. Examples abounded all around her that it was the wrong key to the wrong door, that it would not change the shape of my cheekbones, or the slant of my eyes, the color of my hair, or the feelings inside me.
One of the priests acted as the photographer, doing the enlarging and developing […] One day he invited Charlene into the darkroom. He was going to teach her developing. She was developed already. She was a big girl compared to him, taller too. Charlene was nicely built, not fat, just rounded. No sharp edges anywhere. All of a sudden she rushed out of the darkroom, yelling to me, “Let’s get out of here! He’s trying to feel me up. That priest is nasty.” So there was this too to contend with—sexual harassment. We complained to the student body. The nuns said we just had a dirty mind.
I haven’t touched a drop of liquor for years, ever since I felt there was a purpose to my life, learned to accept myself for what I was. I have to thank the Indian movement for that, and Grandfather Peyote, and the pipe.
In the beginning AIM was mainly confined to St. Paul and Minneapolis. The early AIM people were mostly ghetto Indians, often from tribes which had lost much of their language, traditions, and ceremonies. It was when they came to us on the Sioux reservations that they began to learn about the old ways. We had to learn from them, too. We Sioux had lived very isolated […] AIM opened a window for us through which the wind of the 1960s and early ‘70s could blow, and it was no gentle breeze but a hurricane that whirled us around. It was after the traditional reservation Indians and the ghetto kids had gotten together that AIM became a force nationwide. It was flint striking flint, lighting a spark which grew into a flame at which we could warm ourselves after a long, long winter.
Life was so hard for our people—starving, fenced in, without horses or weapons. The message brought them hope. And so they began to dance and sing, to bring back the buffalo, to bring back the old world of the Indians which wasičun had destroyed, the world they had loved so much and for whose return they were praying.
Leonard always thought that the dancers of 1890 had misunderstood Wovoka and his message. They should not have expected to bring the dead back to life, but to bring back their ancient beliefs by practicing Indian religion. For Leonard, dancing in a circle holding hands was bringing back the sacred hoop—to feel, holding on to the hand of your brother and sister, the rebirth of Indian unity, feel it with your flesh, through your skin. He also thought that reviving the Ghost Dance would be making a link to our past, to the grandfathers and grandmothers of long ago.
I had been promised that I would not be arrested, but the moment I passed the roadblock I was hustled to the Pine Ridge jail. They did not book me, just took all my things away and were about to take my baby too. They told me I would have to wait, they could not put me in the tank before the Welfare came for my baby. Being poor, unwed, and a no-good rabble-rouser from the Knee made me an unfit mother. The child would have to be taken to a foster home.
Beside being tumbled headfirst into this kind of situation, still in my teens, with a brand-new baby and totally unprepared for the role I was to play, I still had another problem. I was a half-blood, not traditionally raised, trying to hold my own inside the full-blood Crow Dog clan which does not take kindly to outsiders. At first, I was not well received. It was pretty bad […] [Henry Crow Dog] told me that, as far as he was concerned, Leonard was still married to his former wife, a woman, as he pointed out again and again, who could talk Indian.
But always, always I felt, and was enraptured by, [Leonard’s] tremendous power—raw power, spiritual Indian power coming from deep within him. It was raw because, never having been at school and being unable to read or write, there is no white-man intellectualism in him. At the same time, his thinking and ideas are often extremely sophisticated—unique, original, even frightening.
In May 1974, Old Henry and Leonard put on a Ghost Dance […] It was supposed to be a ritual for Sioux only, but somehow, through the “moccasin telegraph” which always spreads news among Indians in a mysterious way, everybody seemed to know about it, and many native people from as far away as Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and Arizona suddenly appeared in order to participate.
I pierced too, together with many other women […] I did not feel any pain because I was in the power. I was looking into the clouds, into the sun. Brightness filled my mind […] In the almost unbearable brightness, in the clouds, I saw people. I could see those who had died. I could see Pedro Bissonette […] Buddy Lamont […] I saw the face of my friend Annie Mae Aquash, smiling at me. I could hear the spirits speaking to me through the eagle-bone whistles […] I felt nothing and, at the same time, everything. It was at that moment that I, a white-educated half-blood, became wholly Indian. I experienced a great rush of happiness.
