Ohitika Woman

June 28, 1993
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. Photos not seen by PW .

September 1, 1993
More than a decade ago and hard upon the success of "Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions," the autobiography of a Lakota shaman that he coauthored, Erdoes completed another manuscript. As he relates in his introduction to this volume, that manuscript was rejected by his publisher. "This book is much too radical," the wise editor said. "Mysticism is in. Make her into a witch." Erdoes and Brave Bird (then Crow Dog) refused. That manuscript became the best-selling "Lakota Woman" (1990), which related Brave Bird's life as a rebellious, hard-drinking reservation girl who gave birth to her first child while a teenager on the embattled Wounded Knee reservation. "Lakota Woman" closed when Brave Bird was a partner to radical shaman Leonard Crow Dog. "Ohitika Woman" picks up Brave Bird's life from then to the present. Far from rising above all the problems of poverty and alienation on the reservation, Brave Bird eventually found herself overwhelmed by them. The book opens with Brave Bird crashing, drunk, into a power pole and ends with her "enduring," as she says. In between, we learn of the difficulties facing Native American women today: the domestic brutality, the abandonments, the assaults. But we learn as well of the medicine and rituals that strengthen women of Native American heritage. Despite the pain that courses through it, the book is ultimately hopeful, even if the hope is just that Native American women can continue to endure. ((Reviewed Sept. 1, 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)