ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Lakota Woman, the first-person account of Mary Crow Dog’s life as an activist during the American Indian Movement of the 1970s. While other activist self-narratives depict relationships and even use gender roles to define and redefine the activist woman leader identity, Mary Crow Dog’s identity is always communal, beginning with her origins on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, and always in opposition to white American oppressors. One of the particularly valuable insights it offers, though, is its rhetorical strategy of embodied gender. Of all of the self-narratives explored in this volume, Lakota Woman is the most insistent upon the physicality of “woman” and uses the body of the mother as a central rhetorical strategy and as literal resistance.
