In the book Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog writes of the many struggles that she faced in everyday life as an American Indian woman. The Lack of running water or electricity, the poverty and oppression found on and around the Indian reservation, are just a few examples of the problems that she had to deal with on a continuing basis. She describes in detail the violence and hopelessness that her people encountered at the hands of the white man as well as the “hang around the fort Indians”. Mary Crow Dog tells of horrors she had to endure while attending the missionary school and of facing the discrimination found outside the reservation. Growing up, one of the hardest trials faced by Mary Crow Dog was not only that of being a Native American but of being a female in a world predominately dominated by Caucasian men. Since the white man came to “America” he has done nothing but take and take and take. He has lied to the point where one cannot tell where one lie ends and another begins. The United States government signed more than four hundred treaties with Native Americans and managed to violate every single one. The white man systematically forced the American Indians unto reservations, where he/she was forced to live. Life on the reservation was not easy. Families lived in small cabins sometimes consisting of only one room, which served as a kitchen, living room, dining room and bedroom. Children run around with no shoes most of the time. Much of the money that came into the home went into the stomachs of most in the form of Alcohol.Alcohol was hemmed into the Native American culture by the white man sometime during the middle to late 1800’s. By the 1960’s, alcoholism had a firm grasp on the Native American. As a matter of fact, a family history of alcoholism in first and second-degree relatives is twice as common among American Indians and Alaska natives than any other ethnic background. In Lakot...
