Analysis Of Mary Crow Dog's Lakota Woman

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In the memoir Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog, we dive inside the life of Mary Crow Dog, a Sioux Indian woman, almost instantly, right into a scene of her giving birth at the Battle of Wounded Knee. Mary Crow Dog starts the book off skipping through every ounce of sugar coating, right into the visually stimulating flashback of having her child during a fire fight. She says, “I had my first baby during a firefight, with the bullets crashing through one wall and coming out through the other”(3). This statement sets the tone for the entire book, making it blatantly obvious that Mary Crow Dog does not hold back with her story of growing up as a half blood Sioux Indian woman in the USA. Through the actions of the white man towards the Indian…show more content…
The idea of boarding schools was to “white-manize” the Indian people, to diminish their culture, traditions, language, everything a nation would need to survive. In the white man’s eyes, the Indians were a nation within a nation; a nation which white men believed only belonged to them. Mary writes about her experience in boarding school saying, “We had to mop the dining room twice every day and scrub the tables….if you were caught taking a rest..the nun would come with a dish towel and slap it across your face..you’re not supposed to be talking, you’re supposed to be working!”(34). This example alone of many that Mary Crow dog gives shows just how much these boarding schools were not for the purpose of learning material and enriching their minds, but more so for the sole purpose of brain washing and completely squashing any ounce of traditional Indian…show more content…
Being able to shed a light on the issues that were occurring not too long ago in this day in age, it’s almost like a Holocaust in a way. It is so unimaginably freighting to know that a short amount of years ago children were sent to “schools” to be brain washed, abused, and de-culturized by the white man in order to eliminate Indian life all together, and I had no idea about it what so ever upon reading this book. It makes me wonder what else is going on in the world, so awful, so disgusting, that broadcasts don’t want to do a report on it or put it on the news because of the utter filth that humans are doing to other humans. I feel like some white men don’t see the severity of eliminating a culture solely based on traditions and customs and way of life, the Holocaust happened merely a few years prior to these boarding schools nonsense , and apparently no lesson was learned what so ever in the eyes of the white man. In our every day lives, in order to make even the tiniest impact, the idea of one race being superior of the other is an idea that must be squashed. The epitome of all problems, all issues, all misunderstanding is due to the human inability to appreciate other race,
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