53 pages • 1 hour read
Mary Crow DogLakota Woman
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Ghosts Return”
Like the first Wounded Knee, the second Wounded Knee is very much about religion. Leonard, the spiritual leader, brings back the outlawed Ghost Dance.
Leonard performs ceremonies, negotiates, fixes machinery and, using traditional medicine, even tends to gunshot victims. White medics praise his work, and he teaches them his ways. He doesn’t fight, however, as “[h]is being a medicine man forbade it” (148).
Crow Dog describes how in 1889, Short Bull, “a famous warrior who had fought Custer,” told Leonard’s great-grandfather Crow Dog that “[a] new power will strip off like a blanket this world which the wasičun [non-Indian] has spoiled, and underneath will be the new world, undefiled and green” (148). The buffalo will be restored, and dead ancestors will return. This Ghost Dance religion had been passed to Short Bull and his friends by a holy man who’d received it “in a dream on the day the sun had died”; he’d made Short Bull and his friends die, “walk on the new world that was coming” (149) and be reborn, and then had given them dances and prayers.
Leonard’s great-grandfather Crow Dog and his friends brought the religion to their people. The people embraced the religion, which revived “the old world of the Indians” and “brought them hope” (150). Entranced participants were said to have “‘died,’ and in death wandered among the stars” (150) to speak with their ancestors.
Amazing things happened to the Ghost Dancers. One man, wearing a ghost shirt, invited people to shoot him; when they did, the bullets bounced off him onto the ground. Another man, emerging from a trance, was struck by lightning; when he awoke, in his hand was “a rock from the stars” (152).
Though it “was a religion of love,” the Ghost Dance was seen by white people “as the signal for a great Indian uprising” (149). Leonard’s ancestor Crow Dog and his people were driven into the snowy landscape; Crow Dog, to save the people, surrendered. Other leaders did not surrender, and many of their people were killed.
Leonard believes the dance is about bringing back not the dead but “their ancient beliefs,” “the sacred hoop,” and “Indian unity” (153). At the second Wounded Knee, people prepare Ghost Dance shirts, and Leonard prepares them for what to expect. In a sacred hollow, in the spot where their people were massacred generations before, they revive the Ghost Dance. Crow Dog states that “we mended the nation’s hoop” (155).
Chapter 11 Summary: “Birth Giving”
Crow Dog is disappointed when Leonard (still, at this point, strictly her spiritual adviser) goes to Washington, DC to see the president right around the time her baby is due. Though people are hopeful negotiations will be successful and that they will go home soon, Crow Dog wants to have her baby at Wounded Knee “in the old Indian manner—well, old, but not too old” (157). She is determined not to go to a hospital or to have white doctors help her; she prefers to be surrounded by friends and midwives and to be blessed with a Sioux prayer.
Crow Dog goes into labor and, with the help of the staunch women at Wounded Knee, delivers her son, Pedro, to the cheers of people outside. The men congratulate her with tears on their faces, assuring her that her son will be a warrior. However, the cheering alerts the federal marshals, who misinterpret their cries as an uprising and begin shooting. Crow Dog bundles Pedro in her arms and runs across the gunfire to the safety of a house’s basement. When Leonard returns, he gives Pedro a Native American name.
When Buddy Lamont is killed, his family asks Crow Dog to leave Wounded Knee and help plan the funeral. Though the marshals had told her she wouldn’t be arrested, they immediately take her into custody and are about to place Pedro in foster care when Buddy’s sister intervenes, offering to care for Pedro while Crow Dog is in jail. After she’s released—“it was bad PR to hold a nursing mother” (166)—her mother is waiting outside the jail. At first, she berates Crow Dog for living such a dangerous life. However, after she expresses anger at the arrest of her daughter and grandson, mother and daughter “could understand each other” (167).
A negotiation is reached, and many men at Wounded Knee are devastated, believing it’s “[j]ust another treaty to be broken” (168). Sure enough, upon leaving Wounded Knee, Leonard is taken away in handcuffs and the government negotiator voids the agreement, claiming the Native Americans hadn’t relinquished all their weapons and that the government “need not fulfill its commitment” (168). After, the buildings at Wounded Knee are destroyed. Crow Dog believes the government wants to eliminate all memory of their stand but that it will live on “in our hearts” and in “generations still unborn” (169).
Chapter 12 Summary: “Sioux and Elephants Never Forget”
Crow Dog had not looked at Leonard as a romantic interest, for he was much older and a spiritual leader. However, after Wounded Knee, Leonard begins courting her and asks her to marry him twice. The third time, she finally accepts.
Leonard lives in “a settlement for […] the whole tiyospaye” (172); at the entrance is a huge tire on which Leonard’s father, Henry, had painted, “CROW DOG’S PARADISE.” Crow Dog struggles to adjust to life as the wife of a medicine man. She knows nothing of cooking, and she feels judged by Leonard’s older children. As Leonard receives a lot of guests, their poor, humble home serves as “a free hotel for anyone who cares to come through” (174). These guests, often staying for long periods of time, expect to be fed and to have their laundry washed, and they leave the house a mess. Leonard is compassionate with anyone who needs help. He siphons gas from his own tank to help people stranded on the road, and he throws a lavish feast for his friends and family with money intended to purchase a truck. Crow Dog confesses “it can be hell on a woman to be married to such a holy one” (176).
Crow Dog, “a half-blood” who was “not traditionally raised” and who “could not speak Sioux” (176), is not immediately accepted into Leonard’s traditional family. Her marriage is also criticized by her own family, who had tried to raise her as a Christian.
The Crow Dogs revere their ancestor Kangi-Shunka, the first Crow Dog. A great warrior and medicine man, he took the name “Crow Dog” when two coyotes and a crow saved his life after an attack by white men. Later, he murdered his cousin Chief Spotted Tail who, unlike himself, “cooperated with the whites in most things” (181). Though he was sentenced to death, he was released because there was “no law for punishing an Indian for killing another Indian” (182). Afterward, the Crow Dogs were ostracized for four generations, but “[t]hey suffered their ostracism with a certain arrogance” (183), believing Kangi-Shunka a hero.
Mary Crow Dog succumbs to the pressure of living up to this legend and becomes physically ill. A peyote man tells her she is suffering from “love sickness” (184), and Crow Dog’s family embraces her. She has a vision of her former self dying, and she feels better.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
From the Ghost Dance to the birth of Pedro to the Crow Dogs’ reverence of Kangi-Shunka, these chapters focus on the “sacred hoop” and are central to the book. The Ghost Dance, given in a dream to a holy man at a time when “[l]ife was so hard for [Crow Dog’s] people,” seeks to “bring back the old world of the Indians which the wasičun had destroyed” and “our dead relatives whom the wasičun has killed” (149). By reviving the outlawed Ghost Dance at the scene of a massacre (Wounded Knee) nearly a century before, the people celebrate, and make amends for, “the spirits of those lying in the mass grave” (148). It represents the rebirth of the dead and of the dedication to their cause; it’s a “rebirth of Indian unity,” a “bringing back [of] the sacred hoop” (153) for the sake of “whole unborn generations” (154). The birth of Pedro at Wounded Knee, therefore, is inspirational; it’s a literal rebirth that seems symbolic of the rebirth of the people’s spirit. Crow Dog acknowledges the significance of this birth when she comments that she felt she “had accomplished something for [her] people” (163).
Their own continued persecution makes their ancestors’ sacrifices that much more poignant. Crow Dog writes that “[t]he more the Crow Dogs and other traditional families were persecuted for their beliefs, the more stubbornly they held on to them” (105). Their subsequent disapproval of her marriage to Leonard exacerbates her already deep-seated anxieties about identity and fitting in, and she suffers a physical breakdown. It’s only when she sees a vision of her former self dying that her spirits are lifted. Just as the Ghost Dance represents the people’s revival—just as the original leaders of the Ghost Dance had to “die and walk on the new world that was coming” (149), before coming to life again—Crow Dog herself is reborn as a newer, more knowledgeable version of herself.
Lakota Woman offers many examples of people finding comfort in visions; visions help people step outside themselves to see an overall truth. Wovoka, the holy man who is given the religion in a dream, holds the universe in his hat and shows it to Short Bull and his friends. The Ghost Dancers, Crow Dog writes in Chapter 7, “went around and around in a circle, chanting until they fell down in a swoon, leaving their bodies, leaving the earth, wandering along the Milky Way and among the stars” (99), sharing their new knowledge upon awakening. Peyote helps people “‘get into the power,’ other-world power given specially to you and no one else” (100). These rituals thus encourage people to recognize that we are all a small part of the universe, that a vastness exists that we can understand only when relieved of our limited physical beings.
