Mary Brave Bird
Mary Brave Bird
Mary Brave Bird, also known as Mary Brave Woman Olguin and Mary Crow Dog was a Sicangu Lakota writer and activist who was a member of the American Indian Movement during the 1970s and participated in some of their most publicized events, including the Wounded Knee Incident when she was 18 years old.
"I could not help noticing the great role women played in Pueblo society. Women owned the houses and actually built them. Children often got their mothers last name, not their fathers. Sons joined their mothers clans. It made me a little jealous."
"We did freak out the honkies. We were feared throughout the Dakotas. I could never figure out why this should have been so. We were always the victims. We never maimed or killed. It was we who died or got crippled."
"The blacks want what the whites have, which is understandable. They want in. We Indians want out! That is the main difference."
"To me, womens lib was mainly a white, upper-middle class affair of little use to a reservation Indian woman."
