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.
Chapter 16-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “Ho Away Tinkte—My Voice You Shall Hear”
After Leonard returns, the family must readjust to being together and to living on the reservation—a difficult task, as the children have grown, and Crow Dog and Leonard have changed. Leonard builds his parents a small makeshift house to replace the house that had been destroyed. Crow Dog reflects on her time in New York City, during which she’d enjoyed her comfortable lifestyle. Though she’d found the women’s liberation movement she encountered “mainly a white, upper-middle-class affair of little use to a reservation Indian woman” (244), she emerges from New York more confident and more inclined to hold accountable Sioux men who beat their women and abandon their children.
Leonard feels bitterness toward his incarceration. Famous now, he receives countless requests for “help, money, spiritual comfort,” (245) and ceremonies, and he meets almost every request. He’s still on parole, and the looming threat of imprisonment is stressful on the family. He and Crow Dog are more tolerant of each other, and Leonard shows more appreciation for her contributions as a woman. However, he has trouble reconciling some of the “changes in thinking [that] had occurred during his absence” (249). To heal himself, he goes on a vision quest called “Crying for a Dream.” He travels into the hills, to the Crow Dogs’ vision pit, where he lays for four days and nights.
Crow Dog reflects on how she became knowledgeable about Sioux ceremonies and describes her first time in the Sun Dance, “the most awe-inspiring of our rituals” (252). Though outlawed in 1883 for “preventing the Indians from becoming civilized” (253), it was performed in secret for years. In 1971, Leonard and others attempt to perform the Sun Dance at Wounded Knee in response to the “commercialization” (254) of the ritual at Pine Ridge; driven from Wounded Knee by the police, they bring the dance to Rosebud, where they perform it every year. Those who are pierced for the Sun Dance perform “in a trance […] unaware of anything but the sun” (259), communicating with nature and with the dead. Crow Dog becomes “wholly Indian” when she finally pierces for the Sun Dance; she hears spirits and sees the faces of her dead friends as she looks into the sun, the “Eye of Life,” the “Soul of the Eye” (260).
Epilogue Summary
Crow Dog concludes her tale by explaining that she is now thirty-seven and Leonard fifty. They’ve both aged physically, and Leonard is a grandfather.
Leonard’s parents, in their last years, live in a house with modern conveniences, having jumped “from the nineteenth into the twentieth century” (261). Crow Dog’s mother earned her degree and is a teacher at Rosebud; Crow Dog has “more understanding of what she went through trying to raise a wild kid like me,” and they “are friends” (262). Pedro, nineteen years old, is a yuwipi man and a Sun Dancer.
The “once young kids” who fought at Wounded Knee “have calmed down considerably” (262). Crow Dog writes that many of them have passed away and that “the wear and tear of the long struggle just burned them up, ruined their health and took years off their lives” (262).
Years of being a mother and a medicine man’s wife have taken its toll on Crow Dog, and at one point, she “panicked, packed up the kids and simply ran away” (263) until she and Leonard reconciled.
Sun Dances take place yearly on Crow Dog’s land. Leonard performs ceremonies for Native Americans and white people alike; he also performs them for Native American prisoners. He goes wherever he is needed to help “Native Americans struggle for their rights” (263).
Chapter 16-Epilogue Analysis
The vision quest described in Chapter 16 seems to encapsulate the concept of transcending oneself to know oneself better. During the vision quest, a person is buried inside the earth, abstaining from food and drink and feeling nothing but the earth until he or she “lose[s] all sensations of having a body” (250)—as Crow Dog notes, “[i]n a way the vision seeker is dead” (249). When you embark on a vision question, Crow Dog writes, you are “entirely thrown upon yourself” (250). It’s a time of intense inner reflection and connection to the earth, when one completely surrenders oneself, figuratively dying to do so. Trust in the earth, and centering oneself to experience the grandeur of nature, is central to many Sioux rituals; for example, the first followers of the Ghost Religion died and walked on the stars before returning. Leaving one’s physical self enables one to see the power of the universe, to meet one’s ancestors and receive important messages. It’s little wonder Leonard goes on a vision quest upon his release from prison; after two years at the mercy of bureaucracy and government, he cleanses himself by quite literally burying himself in nature.
Similarly, the Sun Dance, in which people pierce themselves and endure “self-torture” (258), demonstrates sacrifice, the losing of oneself to find oneself. When Crow Dog makes a flesh offering, she thinks “of all the brothers and sisters who had died, who, I felt, had somehow died for me” (258). Just as people have died for the rights of their people, Crow Dog offers a piece of her physical self in return; during the dance itself, she sees the faces of those who died before her. It’s her participation in the Sun Dance that makes Crow Dog “wholly Indian” (260).
Interestingly, even as she grows older and finds herself “becoming a traditional Sioux woman” (251), Crow Dog allows the outside world to shape her, and even, in some cases, welcomes it. Though she finds the women’s liberation movement exclusive of Native American women, she emerges from her time in New York City more critical of the sexism she sometimes sees in her tribe. She also can’t help but enjoy the modern conveniences of the city. Similarly, Leonard becomes more appreciative of women’s work, though he struggles to adjust to the “changes in thinking [that] had occurred during his absence,” and he is still “opposed to women doing things which can traditionally be performed only by a man” (249). His parents’ modernizing their home at the end of their lives illustrates the struggle to find balance between traditional and modern ways. Crow Dog’s comment that she “was developing a split personality” (251) perhaps suggests that when modernizing, one also feels the urgency of hunkering back to one’s roots.
The message seems to be that who we become is a conglomeration of all we’ve experienced. Through all these changes, Leonard still fights for Native Americans’ rights and performs ceremonies for anyone who asks.
