Lakota Woman Themes

In her memoir Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog recounts her experience as an activist in the American Indian Movement (AIM). The movement advocated for Native Americans’ civil rights and a revival of the indigenous traditions that the U.S. government had long been trying to suppress. While Mary acknowledges that many people saw AIM’s radical—and sometimes violent—methods as controversial, she also believes that AIM “gave [Native Americans] a lift badly needed at the time. It…

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…

In the first paragraph of Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog states that being “a Sioux woman […] is not easy.” Throughout the memoir, she describes many ways in which Lakota women—and Native American women in general—face oppression. Native Americans have long suffered from poverty, police brutality, and unemployment at disproportionate rates. Moreover, Mary argues that the U.S. government (and white society more broadly) racially discriminates against Native Americans by stripping them of their civil…