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Åbo Akademi, the open university, the centre for continuing education
Intercultural communication
Course: In the Melting Pot of Religions, 2003
Module 7 – Literature essay
Teacher: Ruth Illman
Date: 20.06.2003
Nina Michael
Frantz-Schubert-Str. 4a
D- 85540 HAAR
Tel.: 0049 89 4605117
E- post:
Mary Crow Dog: LAKOTA WOMAN
Written down by Richard Erdoes
An intercultural reflection
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. THE INDIAN ISSUE
3. MARY CROW DOG
3.1 The childhood
3.2 Mary as a vagabond
3.3 The turning point
3.4 The significance of the religion
3.5 Wounded knee
3.6 Mary marries a medicine man
3.7 Mary – a full-fledged Indian woman
4. RICHARD ERDOES
5. SUMMARY
5.1 A summary of Mary’s story
5.2 How my understanding of the cultural encounter between Indians and whites grew
6. ANALYSIS OF THE CULTURAL ENCOUNTER
7. CONCLUSION
8. EPILOGUE
9. SOURCES
ONLY WHEN THE LAST TREE HAS BEEN CUT DOWN,
ONLY WHEN THE LAST RIVER HAS BEEN POISONED,
ONLY WHEN THE LAST FISH HAS BEEN CAUGHT,
ONLY THEN WILL YOU REALIZE THAT MONEY CANNOT BE EATEN.
Cree Indian prophesy (Morgan, 1995, p. 9)
1. INTRODUCTION
This essay is about Mary Crow Dog’s difficult struggle to find her identity, and about her cultural encounters as a Sioux Indian woman who has grown up in a reservation in the USA. Richard Erdoes has written down her experiences in the book Lakota Woman (1990). Mary says it is difficult as an Indian to hold on to your life style and your language when surrounded by a foreign and more powerful culture. The average American admits that from a historical point of view a great injustice has been done to the Indians, but most are ignorant to the fact that this is still happening (Coyote, nr 54 2002). For the analysis of the cultural encounter between Mary Crow Dog and the white people I mostly used literature from the course compendium, and the Indian psychologist Eduardo Duran’s thoughts on the problem (1995). I am trying to understand and interpret this process, as well as forming a hypothesis. My hypothesis consists of the fact that I think the process of colonisation is still continuing, and that the Indians react to this with powerless hate. This inhibits the will and ability to adapt to the majority culture. Weak adaptation leads to communication difficulties. It would be worth striving for biculturalism, which would enable the Indians to move freely in two cultures.
2. THE INDIAN ISSUE
I will take up this question here so that it will be easier to understand the story. The Indian issue consists of background factors that still have influence today, and the present circumstances concerning the relationships between Indian tribes and the dominating white society. The arrival of Christofer Columbus to America in 1492 led to the conception that America was a country of unlimited opportunities and no inhabitants. Columbus called the people he met Indians because he thought he had come to India. The Indians they encountered were in their way, and the colonisation led to history’s largest genocide through war, murder, forced relocation, slavery, intentional and unintentional spreading of contagious diseases, forced assimilation, and cultural destruction. According to the white people the Indians were savage heathens without any human value (this information according to Wearne, 1996). The term Indian is actually misleading, as there are 250 - 300 different tribes in North America only, of which some speak languages as different to each other as Swedish and Chinese. Nowadays we talk about Native Americans, and in the USA the term First Nations is also used. However, changing the name does not change deeply rooted opinions. I will here use the term Indian because it is the one used in the book.
The destruction of the Indian way of life continues in different ways, among other things by exploiting the natural resources on their land, so that they no longer are able to make their living off for example hunting and fishing. There is great unemployment in the many reservations (Frantz, 1993). Many of the previously proud Indians lack the strength to re-establish the customs, practices and ceremonies that are so important for their identity. The Indians are fighting to regain land and lost identity. “I have white friends. They are good people. Man to man I can relate, but with Americans as a whole, that’s different” (Leonard Crow Dog,1996, p.57).
3. MARY CROW DOG
In this section I only account for the content of the book. All information is from there, apart from a few parenthesis with complementary information.
3.1 The childhood
Mary Crow Dog:
“If you want to be born into this world you should see to it that you are WHITE and MALE. It is not the big, dramatic events that press you down, it is enough that you are Indian. Traditional Indian knowledge and experience is called barbaric superstition by the white missionaries, teachers and employers. They say we must kill the Indian in us to get ahead in this world.”
Mary Brave Bird is a Sioux Indian woman. Between 1870 and 1880 all Sioux Indians were forced into reservations, and had to leave behind everything that gave their life meaning – horses, hunting, weapons. Mary was born in 1955, in the Rosebud-reservation in South Dakota. The Sioux Indians in the west were called Lakota, and the ones in the east were called Dakota. In connection with the birth of Mary’s sister Sara their mother was sterilized: “Some think that the fewer Indians there are, the better.” Mary was ‘iyeska’, a half-blood Indian woman, she had some white blood from her father’s side. She wished she could purify herself from this.
The centre of Sioux Indian life was the extended family. In this collective the children were never alone, they experienced love and security. Corporal punishment did not occur, and it was here that the traditions the white men wanted to destroy, because they constituted a barrier for “progress and civilisation”, were upheld. The Indians were therefore forced to live in nuclear families. The white people meant that a healthy egoism brings advantages without which a higher civilisation is not possible.
Mary’s father left her mother after she was born. Suddenly he was gone. Her stepfather drank, and Mary used to argue with her mother about this: “I was born a rebel”. From her stepfather she learnt how to drink at the early age of ten, and she lived as a vagabond: “This was my way of punishing my mother.” The men drank because they had no work and nothing to live for. Mary’s mother underwent training and became a nurse. She had to travel 100 miles to work. The grand parents took care of the six children. The family was poor, but Mary did not suffer because of this, as she was not aware of it and knew no other way of living.
Mary was then forced to go to a boarding school. It was there that she first came into contact with racism, there that her cultural encounters with white people begun. In a shop she was holding an orange that she wanted to buy, but she did not have enough money. Her teacher was also in the shop, and she said: “Why do these filthy Indians have to touch the groceries? Now I’ll have to buy fruit in another shop. How disgusting!” In the playground a white child said to Mary: “You monkey, you smell and look like an Indian.” The children were not allowed to speak Sioux in school. The missionaries often said: “You must kill the Indian in you to free the human.” In the boarding school the sisters of Christ’s holy heart taught the children with a leather strap in their hands. After the boarding school Mary was neither Indian nor white. Towards white people she felt only hatred and distrust. Mary’s involvement in the resistance movement started with a hippie who came to interview the children and thought they should do something. They put together a newspaper, “Red Panther”, in which they described the incongruities. This led to great trouble for Mary. After an argument with a teacher she punched his nose bloody. She left school: “I will not be treated this way.”
3.2 Mary as a vagabond
Mary describes herself as a loner. She was constantly afraid of white people and felt uneasy in their company. She also felt unsure about whether or not the full blooded Indians accepted her. She always felt an inner anxiety, she always longed to get away. Her mother was a catholic, and she had brought Mary up according to her faith. One day Mary told her mother that when she grew up she wanted to live as an Indian. Her mother would not hear of it. Mary considered her mother puritan, and that there were walls of misunderstanding between them. The mother led a normal life, worked hard, owned a house, a car and a television. Mary said their mother did not have it easy with them. She did what her older sister Barbara had done; she ran away. Their mother had called Barbara a worthless whore when she was pregnant. The doctors said they had to do a caesarean section, and her uterus was surgically removed without her knowing – forced sterilisation.
Mary calls this time of her life, when she roamed around without a goal, her vagabond life. St Francis, Parmelee, Mission – they were all reservation towns without any hope. The houses were made of tar paper and almost everything you can steal. An old rusty trailer or the couch part of a car served as a living room, the kitchen was made up of orange cartons, and a tent constituted the nursery. The toilet was outside. These towns were full of drunken Indians standing around doing nothing. They took their desperation out on each other in often bloody fights. If they were having a good day they drove around in their cars, packed with people, from bar to bar. Barbara was Mary’s best friend, and the only one who really loved her. She tried to raise her little sister not to drink or smoke, though she herself did.
Mary spent some time in different towns in the reservation, drinking, smoking marijuana, joined groups where you stole to survive, and where fights were common. She found nothing wrong in stealing, she felt she was only taking back what the white people had taken from her. Drinking was part of normal life in the reservation. Once during the time she was drinking she went for a beer in a saloon in Rapid City. This town was notorious among Sioux Indians as being the most racist town in the whole country. Several saloons had a sign above the door saying: “No Indians allowed”. Mary sat down next to a white woman who cast a contemptuous gaze on her and said: “Damn it, you filthy INJUN, get back out to the street and the gutter where you belong!” Mary asked the woman to repeat herself. “You heard me, this place is not for Indians. Bloody hell, is there nowhere a white man(!) can have a drink in peace and quiet without having to look at you people?” Mary felt her blood boil, broke an ashtray, cut the woman in the face with the pieces, and at that felt better.
During her time as a vagabond Mary had a short marriage, and got pregnant. The only thing she mentions about this man is that he was not suitable to be a husband and a father.
As an Indian woman in the ghetto Mary constantly had to defend herself against violence and rape. She says that in a “me-or-you” situation she would kill a person if that was the only way out.
3.3 The turning point
Mary quit drinking when she came to realize that she had a meaning in life as an active member of the Indian movement AIM (American Indian Movement). AIM broke out in the reservation like a whirlwind, like an ever increasing strong wind. Her first encounter with the movement aroused in Mary something like an earthquake. In 1971 she heard Leonard Crow Dog speak. He said that through generations Indians have tried to talk to the white man, but that he has not got ears that hear, no eyes to see with, and no heart to feel with. He said that this is why they now must speak with their bodies, and that he is not afraid to die for his people. Another man spoke about the white people who had been stealing their land and massacred them for centuries. He had wrapped himself in an inside-out American flag, and said that each star represents a state stolen from the Indians. He spoke in contempt about those Indians who crawl for the white man, and about the Indian chiefs who sell their land “on sale”. A young man said: “We are the AIM, and we are changing the conditions.”
The AIM was founded in 1968. In the beginning they concentrated on the problems in the Indian ghettoes in St Paul’s slums. The name AIM was chosen because of its implication of goal, action and direction. A lot was learned from the black movements. However, Mary emphasizes the fact that there is a fundamental difference: “In many Indian languages black people are called BLACK WHITE PEOPLE. They want what the white people have, they want to get in there. We Indians want out!” Crow Dog said they wanted to fight the white system, not the white man. Mary noticed that these Indians were different, they moved with more self-confidence compared to the subdued Indians she knew in the reservation.
3.4 The significance of the religion
The movement for Indian rights was above all spiritual. Indian religion was forbidden until the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt (president of the USA 1901-09), and Indians were thrown in jail for taking part in ceremonies. Mary also chose this religious way. Her grandfather Fool Bull had taken her to her first “Peyote-Meeting” when she was a child. Peyote is the most important medicine for Indians as it produces visions. They strive to reach these conditions before all important decisions and actions. In her vision Mary heard her dead relatives speak. After this she felt very happy and at high spirits. Taking part in ceremonies and rituals gives spiritual and mental strength. Re-establishing these was therefore an important aim for the AIM.