Mary Crow Dog > Quotes

“The thing to keep in mind is that laws are framed by those who happen to be in power and for the purpose of keeping them in power.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“Moral power is always more dangerous to an oppressor than political force.”
― Mary Crow Dog , Lakota Woman

“Nixon sent some no-account underling to tell us that he had done more for the American Indian than any predecessor and that he saw no reason for our coming to Washington, that he had more important things to do than to talk with us—presumably surreptitiously taping his visitors and planning Watergate. We wondered what all these good things were that he had done for us.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“Don’t sell your land, don’t sell Grandmother Earth to the strip-mining outfits and the uranium companies. Don’t sell your water.” That kind of advice is a threat to the system and gets you into the penitentiary.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“The thing to keep in mind is that laws are framed by those who happen to be in power and for the purpose of keeping them in power. That goes for the U.S.A as well as for Russia or any other country in the world.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“Racism breeds racism in reverse.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“You got to look at things with the eye in your heart, not with the eye in your head. —Lame Deer”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“The men who had brought us whiskey and the smallpox had come with the cross in one hand and the gun in the other.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“I guess you hate the people most who make justifiable demands. Because they go to the heart of our psyche. We know they are right, and therefore, we have to destroy them if we can. I think a lot of people are really afraid of justifiable Indian claims to land and resources. They're most afraid of the fact that the claims are morally right, because when you are confronted with a moral imperative against an immoral imperative on your part, you've got to hate the people who assert that moral imperative...We hate them because their claims are totally justified--and we know it.”
― Mary Crow Dog

“Even now, in a good school, there is impersonality instead of close human contact; a sterile, cold atmosphere, an unfamiliar routine, language problems, and above all the maza-skan-skan, that damn clock—white man’s time as opposed to Indian time, which is natural time.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“The fight for our land is at the core of our existence, as it has been for the last two hundred years. Once the land is gone, then we are gone too.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“White men invented whiskey and brought it to America. They manufacture, advertise, and sell it to us. They make the profit on it and cause the conditions that make Indians drink in the first place.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“Between 1870 and 1880 all Sioux were driven into reservations, fenced in and forced to give up everything that had given meaning to their life—their horses, their hunting, their arms, everything.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“a drop of her moon blood fell to the earth. Rabbit saw it. He started to play with this tiny blood clot, kicking it around with his foot, and through the power of Tkuskanskan, the quickening, moving spirit, the blood clot firmed up and turned into We-Ota-Wichasha—Blood Clot Boy—the First Man.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“Look at the real reality beneath the sham realities of things and gadgets,” Leonard always tells me. “Look through the eye in your heart. That’s the meaning of Indian religion.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“Our language comes from the water, the flowers, the wild creatures, the”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“Ho! Sun, Moon, and Stars,
All you that move
In the Sky,
Listen to me!
Into your midst
New Life has come.
Make its path smooth. -Omaha prayer for a newborn child”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“You got to look at things with the eye in your heart, not with the eye in your head.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“Sound is important. Our sound is the sound of nature and animals, not the notes of a white man’s scale. Our”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“I still have a poster I found among my grandfather’s stuff, given to him by the missionaries to tack up on his wall. It reads:

Let Jesus save you.
Come out of your blanket, cut your hair, and dress like a white man.
Have a Christian family with one wife for life only.
Live in a house like your white brother. Work hard and wash often.
Learn the value of a hard-earned dollar. Do not waste your money on giveaways. Be punctual.
Believe that property and wealth are signs of divine approval.
Keep away from saloons and strong spirits.
Speak the language of your white brother. Send your children to school to do likewise.
Go to church often and regularly.
Do not go to Indian dances or to the medicine men.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“In the old days, nature was our people’s only school and they needed no other.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“You must kill the Indian in order to save the man! " That was part of trying to escape the hard life. The missions, going to church, dressing and behaving like a wasičun—that for her was the key which would magically unlock the door leading to the good life, the white life with a white-painted cottage, and a carpet on the floor, a shiny car in the garage, and an industrious, necktie-wearing husband who was not a wino.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“When I came out of Wounded Knee I was not even healed up, but they put me in jail at Pine Ridge and took my baby away. I could not nurse. My breasts swelled up and grew hard as rocks, hurting badly. In 1975 the feds put the muzzles of their M-16s against my head, threatening to blow me away. It's hard being an Indian woman.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“People talk about the "Indian drinking problem," but we say that it is a white problem. White men invented whiskey and brought it to America. They manufacture, advertise, and sell it to us. They make the profit on it and cause the conditions that make Indians drink in the first place.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“It is the government which made me into a militant. If you approach them hat in hand as a "responsible, respectable" apple, red outside, white inside, you get nowhere. If you approach them as a militant you get nowhere either, except giving them an excuse to waste you, but at least you don't feel so shitty.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“You got to look at things
with the eye in your heart,
not with the eye in your head. -Lame Deer”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“Even the most white-manized Sioux is still half horse.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“And so the government tore the tiyospaye apart and forced the Sioux into the kind of relationship now called the “nuclear family"—forced upon each couple their individually owned allotment of land, trying to teach them “the benefits of wholesome selfishness without which higher civilization is impossible.” At least that is how one secretary of the interior put it. So the great brainwashing began, those who did not like to have their brains washed being pushed farther and farther into the back country into isolation and starvation.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“Annie Mae grew into a Native American militant. She got into the same kind of fights that Barb and I had fought. She gave herself to the cause and that meant giving her children to her sister Mary to care for. That was hard and heart-wrenching. It was the sacrifice Annie Mae made to the movement-her motherhood.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman

“When I was a small girl at the St. Francis Boarding School, the Catholic sisters would take a buggy whip to us for what they called "disobedience." At age ten I could drink and hold a pint of whiskey. At age twelve the nuns beat me for "being too free with my body." All I had been doing was holding hands with a boy. At age fifteen I was raped. If you plan to be born, make sure you are born white and male.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman