Hi! This is Ada, I hope you‘re taking good care of yourself and doing well. So guys, I'm so proud to be taking you on this lit global journey with me and I can’t wait to go even more places with you. It’s only episode 4. And we’ve been to inner city US, northern Nigeria, South Africa, and today, we're returning to America. Native America that is. So, in this episode, I’ll be talking about Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog. You ready? Lets get into it. So, Lakota Woman is Mary Crow Dog’s memoir . And if you remember from episode zero, I mentioned that in the Misty Bloom Book club I would be reviewing mostly fiction and on rare occasions would consider nonfiction. So I guess today is the rare occasion. It came early. This book reminded me a tiny little bit of Born A Crime by Trevor Noah. Not at all in terms of style or substance. They are very dissimilar in those regards because Born A Crime is Trevor Noah’s account of growing up in apartheid South Africa while Lakota Woman follows Mary Crow Dog’s story as an activist fighting for the rights of Native Americans. But my comparison here is in terms of Mary Crow Dog and Trevor Noah being compelling storytellers, not professional writers. And so for that reason I'm not going to do a typical review of Lakota Woman. I feel like how do you qualitatively assess or critique somebody's lived experience. You really can't judge it, you know what I mean? And also these are people, Mary Crow Dog and Trevor Noah just trying to tell us an honest story of oppression, all that matters is that these are stories that we should all be paying attention to and be provoked into positive actions. They are not trying to be professional writers so it feels dishonorable to critique their style of writing. So, I'm just not gonna do it. Instead I'll take a different approach and just chat with you about the book, okay? I think a great place to start this conversation is to ask who is a Native American? Because that's a question that always seems to keep popping up in public discourse. And Mary Crow Dog answers this question. She says, "I should make clear that being a full blood or breed is not a matter of bloodline, or how Indian you look or how black your hair is. The general rule is that whoever thinks, sings, acts, and speaks Indian is a skin, a full blood and whoever acts and thinks like a white man is a half blood or breed, no matter how Indian he looks." This book covers Mary Crow Dog’s life in the seventies and it’s interesting how 30, 40 years later people still try to claim a Native American heritage even though they do not think, sing, act, or speak like a Native and do not have familiarity with native traditions. I wonder what Mary Crow Dog would have thought of today's world where people benefit from and will fully exercise not being seen in the world as Native but will claim being Native when it's convenient and profitable. So your classic case of eating your cake and having it too. I’ve seen that happen where the majority of their existence in society is as an oppressor because of course, of the privileges attached to whiteness and then they switch over to oppressed when they wanna benefit from a minor advantage of their native heritage. So basically wanting to participate in the scarce wins but participate in zero of the struggle, pain and bloodshed that has to occur for those tiny wins. I've seen people do this. I find it to be pretty dark and disturbing. But moving along, I also wanna say that it felt like a treasure and a privilege to read this book. I felt like Mary Crow Dog was like letting me or us, since y’all are listening to this, into a sacred people and tradition that we do not deserve to know about but she is generous enough to share her people’s customs with us. In this case, obviously Lakota which is part of the Sioux people. Each chapter in this book starts with a saying or a poem or the lyrics of songs by select Native American people. Chapter 8 for example starts with what appears to be the first verse of a poem by a young man from Eagle Butte. And it goes like this, "I knew when I brought my body here, it might become food for the worms and magpies. I threw my body away before I came here." This verse brought tears to my eyes, broke my heart and it feels like desecration to even attempt to dissect it because the verse has said all that needs to be said. And the verse lays bare that even though this book is Mary Crow Dog's story it is also a chronicle of Native American suffering. And that is the proper place to start the conversation. This book covers the systematic stealing of indigenous lands by white settlers, the forced sterilization of Native Women including the author’s sister. It recounts the organized erasure of the native customs, and traditions, the introduction of poverty, addiction, and hopelessness into Native life. So it's both a story of a people and a person. Lakota Woman starts out on the ...
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