Marital Difficulties
Back at Crow Dog’s Paradise, the name of the Crow Dog home complex, which included Henry Crow Dog’s main house as well as the small building in which Leonard and Mary Crow Dog lived, life continued to be a struggle for Mary. Leonard Crow Dog eked out a living by conducting religious rituals throughout the country. Because he did not charge for his services, he had to rely on support from foundation grants and friends.
There was much traveling for the growing family, with the children not able to receive much time in school. On one trip, they met the director Oliver Stone, who was working on the film The Doors about Jim Morrison. The Crow Dogs were invited to appear in the film and traveled to San Francisco, participating in a dance scene.
In addition to the traveling, there was little privacy back home. People were constantly appearing at the door to ask for money or some other sort of help. Mary describes her deteriorating relationship with Crow Dog in Ohitika Woman. The couple gradually grew apart, living together but no longer sharing the same bed. The small building in which they lived was actually stolen, and the family made do, at times camping outside, later sleeping in a U-Haul trailer.
The growing family came to include, in addition to Mary’s first child Pedro, three more children with Crow Dog. There were two boys—Anwah, born in 1979; and Leonard Eldon, called Junior, then June, and ultimately June Bug, who was born in 1981—and a girl, Jennifer. Life became no easier with the growing family, and Brave Bird reached the difficult decision to leave her husband. She moved several times, with Leonard in pursuit trying to persuade her to return. Her odyssey took her to Marshall, Minnesota; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Omaha, where she had an unsuccessful and very brief reunion with her father; Denver; Tucson; and Phoenix. At Phoenix, Crow Dog caught up with her, and they lived together there for about three years.
Descent into Alcohol
Brave Bird began drinking heavily. She vividly and frankly describes in her second book this period of her life. The drinking accelerated as she returned to Rosebud. During the stretch from summer of 1990 to spring 1991, she was consistently, in her own words, “in a haze.”11
The appearance of her first book did not deter Brave Bird from immersing herself in alcohol. Richard Erdoes, before meeting Brave Bird, had collaborated with a medicine man named John Fire Lame Deer on the book Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions. The book proved commercially successful, and Erdoes’ publisher approached him about doing another book. At the time, Brave Bird was staying with Erdoes and his wife to be near her incarcerated husband, and a book about her life seemed like a natural project.
Erdoes and Brave Bird worked together taping and transcribing the story of her life. After Leonard’s release and the couple’s return to Rosebud, Erdoes continued to work on the manuscript, pulling it together from the many tapes that had been recorded. The editor, however, had a change of heart regarding the finished manuscript, which he considered too politically controversial. For more than 10 years, the manuscript awaited a publisher. Finally, in 1989, an editor at Grove Press became interested and published the book in 1990. This account of Brave Bird’s life until 1977 became a best-seller, won the American Book Award, and was made into a film, Lakota Woman, Siege at Wounded Knee (1994) produced by Jane Fonda for Turner Network Television (TNT).
Publication of Lakota Woman led to a book tour for Brave Bird. In New York, she went out drinking before an interview; she was sober for interviews in Washington, D. C., and for an interview with talk-show host Larry King. Back in her hotel, however, she drank heavily from the liquor in her room’s
Mini-bar and was still feeling the effects of her drinking during interviews back in New York at the Grove offices.
Then came an automobile accident that almost resulted in Brave Bird’s death. On March 28, 1991, back on the Rosebud Reservation, she was driving drunk after an evening of partying. On a gravel road, she lost control of her car and hit a utility pole. She details her injuries as six broken ribs (including one that punctured a lung and another that cut into her aorta), a nearly severed ear, and multiple cuts on her face. Brave Bird was flown from the local hospital to one in Sioux Falls, where her mother had a priest administer the last rites. Surgery was performed to repair the aorta, and a series of operations included removal of one of her ovaries. Finally, after a month in the hospital, she was released.
Even after the accident, Brave Bird acknowledges, she continued drinking. That began to change, however, when a friend of hers, Pewee Leader Charge— a Vietnam veteran, poet, and artist—committed suicide, the victim of alcoholism and depression. His death brought home to Mary the realization that drinking simply made her more depressed.
A New Beginning
On August 24, 1991, Brave Bird married Rudi Olguin, a Chicano who had been engaged in working for Chicano rights. He also had become associated with the American Indian Movement. Because her marriage to Leonard Crow Dog had been in an Indian ceremony, one not recognized by civil authorities, she did not need to obtain a legal divorce from her first husband.
Olguin had become a close friend of Mary’s sister Barbara and Barbara’s husband, Jim. During his visits to them, he and his future wife had become acquainted. Mary and Rudi moved to Phoenix, but after a few months returned to Rosebud with her children. Although Brave Bird had been told after her accident that she could not become pregnant again, in fact she did just that after her marriage to Olguin. When the time came for the birth, there was no pediatrician at the Rosebud hospital, so she had to be flown to a hospital at Yankton to deliver her child. Brave Bird (who dropped the Crow Dog name after separating from Leonard) chose for their daughter a name recommended by Barbara—Summer Rose. A second child was eventually born to the couple and named after Rudi.
Brave Bird and Olguin later separated. Ohitika Woman makes it clear, however, that Brave Bird’s second marriage played an important role in her healing from her extended battle with alcohol.
World History
