Feisty and funny, angry and passionate, a truly triumphant story of female valor in the face of overwhelming odds. The long-awaited sequel to the bestselling and award-winning Lakota Woman continues Bird's powerful, dramatic tale. Filled with contrasts between the philosophies and lifestyles of whites and Native Americans.
Sequel to the bestseller Lakota Woman (Brave Bird was then known as Mary Crow Dog), this candid memoir by a forceful feminist Native American should please fans despite redundancies and meanderings. "Ohitika" means "brave" in Lakota, and Brave Bird, a 36-year-old grandmother, fulfills that appellation in recounting the peripatetic life she led after 1977, when her first book concluded. Writing with Erdoes ( The Pueblo Indians ), she devotes chapters to the peyote-using Native American Church, to the rituals of a Lakota sweat lodge and to the Sioux's fight for ancestral lands; but the book centers on her personal struggle against alcohol abuse. Though life with her former husband Leonard Crow Dog brought his "half-breed" wife to her roots and to political activism, the couple grew antagonistic, and she took refuge in drink. Even during her 1991 book tour she went on binges; a suicide by an alcoholic friend finally led her to abstinence. She got married in 1991 and returned with her husband to the "res"--the reservation--in South Dakota.
