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Overview
The dramatic, brutally honest, and ultimately triumphant sequel to the bestselling American Book Award winner Lakota Woman, this book continues Mary Brave Bird's courageous story of life as a Native American in a white-dominated society.Synopsis
“Ohitika Woman might be the nonfiction find of the year.” —Houston Chronicle
The beloved sequel to the now-classic Lakota Woman, Ohitika Woman follows Mary Brave Bird as she continues her powerful, dramatic tale of ancient glory and present anguish, of courage and despair, of magic and mystery, and, above all, of the survival of both body and mind. Coming home from Wounded Knee in 1973, married to American Indian movement leader Leonard Crow Dog, Mary was a mother with the hope of a better life. But, as she says, “Trouble always finds me.” With brutal frankness she bares her innermost thoughts, recounting the dark as well as the bright moments in her always eventful life. She not only talks about the stark truths of being a Native American living in a white-dominated society but also addresses the experience of being a mother, a woman, and, rarest of all, a Sioux feminist. Filled with contrasts, courage, and endurance, Ohitika Woman is a powerful testament to Mary’s will and spirit.
Publishers Weekly
Sequel to the bestseller Lakota Woman (Brave Bird was then known as Mary Crow Dog), this candid memoir by a forceful feminist Native American should please fans despite redundancies and meanderings. ``Ohitika'' means ``brave'' in Lakota, and Brave Bird, a 36-year-old grandmother, fulfills that appellation in recounting the peripatetic life she led after 1977, when her first book concluded. Writing with Erdoes ( The Pueblo Indians ), she devotes chapters to the peyote-using Native American Church, to the rituals of a Lakota sweat lodge and to the Sioux's fight for ancestral lands; but the book centers on her personal struggle against alcohol abuse. Though life with her former husband Leonard Crow Dog brought his ``half-breed'' wife to her roots and to political activism, the couple grew antagonistic, and she took refuge in drink. Even during her 1991 book tour she went on binges; a suicide by an alcoholic friend finally led her to abstinence. She got married in 1991 and returned with her husband to the ``res''--the reservation--in South Dakota. Photos not seen by PW . (Sept.)