Lakota Woman

Mary Crow Dog, later Mary Brave Bird, a half-blood native American woman, put her name on a book published in 1990. She was 37 at the time. I just finished reading this book.

Mary is from my own generation. We grew up at the same time, in the same country, but we we grew up in very different worlds.

It is one thing to look at history the way it really happened in previous generations. I look at my own family's history back in the 19th century. I see some very different times, and different events. But the essential way my ancestors lived was not so different from my life today.

Looking back at the lives of Mary's ancestors, it is rather different from mine. They were hunters, gatherers, people of the earth, people living with the earth. Their way of living, their social conventions, their physical and spiritual presence were of a separate reality. They lived this way from antiquity, back before recorded time here in this country, this land. They developed a culture rich in wisdom, strong in body and soul. Religious leaders and doctors were one in the same, medicine men. The mind, the body, the spirit were all one. They could have gone on forever, as long as the Sun god keeps the sun where it is.

Then the white man came. Native Americans were here, but their footprints were soft. Nonetheless, the natives were in the way of the white man. The natives ways were strange, primitive, savage, not the way the white man knew was best. So it began, the long, brutal, bloody, cruel rolling of the white man's wheel across the native landscape. It became official U.S. government policy to destroy native American culture. It moved across the continent like a glacier, crushing the natives, pushing them out. It dragged on for hundreds of years.

The modern white man might think all this ended with Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. The history books seemed to stop there. But it did not stop at all. It continued, and it continued with a vengeance. It is the American holocaust, the deliberate, organized effort of one culture to crush another. I find it almost unbelievable that while I was growing up in benign suburbia, Mary's people were subject to corporal punishment for speaking their own language. The opprobrious prairie schools of the 19th century were still in operation. Mary's people were being beaten, jailed, murdered for the crime of being a native. Incredibly, Mary's life was also little different from her more recent ancestors.

As long as we see others as others, we will never be at peace. We would not treat our family this way. But we are related. I perhaps slightly closer than some, with an ancestor woman coming from the Delaware group of natives. Only a drop in the ocean of blood, but as with all water, Mitakuye Oyasin, we are all related.