Teaching Resources
Despina Kakoudaki
Study Questions for Mary Crow Dog's Lakota Woman
Comparative Literature 60AC, Fall 1996
1. The text often moves really fast between past, present and future. For example, in relation to the Catholic priest, we learn about his early conflicts, his later friendship with Mary, and then about his death. (p. 41-42) Select a few instances of this kind of temporal movement. What is the effect on the text? Does the text become a summary? a chronicle? an overview? a survey of events?
2. Mary's position on feminism and gender roles is complicated. Reread her descriptions of cultural expectations about the role of women and how they are changing. Think about these changes in relation to mainstream (mostly white) feminism (for example in relation to abortion), and Lakota gender roles at home, and in rituals.
3. There are throughout the text a number of "jokes" that are either created by different tribes against each other, or by Native Americans against whites, or by whites against Native Americans (eg 6, 54). How do these jokes function in the text? Do they all function in the same way?
4. Throughout the text there are stories of Mary's friends, relatives and members of different tribes. A lot of them include the narrative of how these people died, or got in trouble, or got involved with the government, or were killed. Often Mary does not give us any sense of her own emotions in these stories, or her comments are very brief. What is the effect of these accumulated deaths in the narrative? What are Mary's reactions? What are the effects of her reactions for the reader?
5. How are history and the past represented in the text? Choose one more text from what we read in the class, and discuss the issues of memory, haunting, and official vs unofficial history.
6. In Lakota Woman how does Mary Crow Dog represent the relation of the private realm to public affairs? Does this relation lead to a different kind of history? a different kind of public activism? a different kind of relation of the individual to the group?
7. Think about kinds of autobiographies. Some focus on achievements, others on the role of an individual in a group, others on a historical situation, others on personal growth and knowledge. What kind of autobiography is Lakota Woman? Who do you think it is written for? How does that complicate Mary's role as a narrator ? Does she have to explain things? For whom?
8. On page 199 Mary describes herself as an emotional spectator. Look at other passages where Mary describes her feelings towards her tribe, the rituals, what she is transmitting to us. (202, 205, 207, 251). What is the difference described in the book, between different kinds of seeing: ie. seeing from the outside, from the inside, with an understanding, or without an understanding?
9. A lot of the text describes the AIM activism during the 60's and 70's. But the text continues until long after all that is done. What is Mary's attitude towards this recent past? Does it haunt the text or not, and why?