A01610 - Mary Brave Bird (Mary Ellen Moore-Richard), Author of "Lakota Woman"

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Mary Brave Bird, also known as Mary Brave Woman Olguin and Mary Crow Dog (b. September 26, 1954, Rosebud Indian Reservation, South Dakota – d. February 14, 2013, Crystal Lake, Nevada County, California) 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.

Brave Bird lived with her youngest children on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, South Dakota. Her 1990 memoir Lakota Woman won an American Book Award in 1991, became a national bestseller, and was adapted as a made-for-TV-movie in 1994.

Born Mary Ellen Moore-Richard in 1954 on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, South Dakota, she was a member of the Sicangu Oyate, also known as the Burnt Thighs Nation or Brulé Band of Lakota.^[3] She was raised primarily by her grandparents while her mother studied in nursing school and was working.^[4]

Brave Bird was influenced by several relatives who followed traditional practices, including her granduncle Dick Fool Bull, who introduced her to the Native American Church. During the 1960s, Brave Bird attended the St. Francis Indian School, in St. Francis, South Dakota, a Roman Catholic boarding school.^[4] While attending, she published a newspaper revealing the nature of how the school abused and stripped the students of their native culture. As punishment, she was beaten by the teachers.^[5]

In 1971 Brave Bird was inspired by a talk by Leonard Crow Dog and at age 18 joined the American Indian Movement (AIM).^[4] She participated in such historical events as the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties and subsequent occupation of the BIA headquarters in Washington, DC. She was also part of the 1973 Occupation of Wounded Knee.^[4]

Brave Bird married AIM spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog; the couple later divorced. ^[3] In 1991, she married Rudy Olguin, they had Summer Olguin in 1991 and later their second, Rudy Olguin.^[4][6] She had six children in total. She was a grandmother and remained active in the Native American Church.^[7]

Brave Bird was the author of two memoirs, Lakota Woman (1990) and Ohitika Woman (1993), and a shortlived newspaper when she was in a boarding school.Richard Erdoes, a long-time friend, helped edit the books. Lakota Woman was published under the name Mary Crow Dog and won the 1991 American Book Award. It describes her life until 1977.^[4] Ohitika Woman continues her life story.

Her books describe the conditions of the Lakota Indian and her experience growing up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, as well as conditions in the neighboring Pine Ridge Indian Reservation under the leadership of tribal chairman Richard Wilson. She also covers aspects of the role of the FBI, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and the treatment of the Native Americans and their children in the mid-1900s. Her work focuses on themes of gender, identity, and race.^[8]

Crow Dog and Brave Bird made cameo appearances in the 1991 Oliver Stone film The Doors.^[7]

Brave Bird's memoir was adapted as the 1994 movie Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee, produced by TNT and Jane Fonda. The film starred Irene Bedard as Mary Brave Bird. The movie depicted the events that occurred during the 1973 uprising of the AIM (American Indian Movement) organization and their stand-off at Wounded Knee. Brave Bird has a cameo appearance in the film.^[7]

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Mary Ellen Moore-Richard, American Indian Memoirist, Dies at 58

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: March 3, 2013

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Mary Ellen Moore-Richard, who was a member of the American Indian Movement during its militant actions of the 1970s and who, under the name Mary Crow Dog, later wrote a well-received memoir, “Lakota Woman,” died on Feb. 14 in Crystal Lake, Nev. She was 58.

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Mary Ellen Moore-Richard joined the American Indian Movement, a sometimes violent civil rights group that led well-publicized protests.

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Ms. Moore-Richard wrote the memoir "Lakota Woman" with Richard Erdoes.

Her death was announced by Rooks Funeral Chapel in Mission, S.D.

Ms. Moore-Richard grew up poor on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota in the late 1950s and ’60s. She was known throughout her life by several names, including Mary Brave Bird and Mary Crow Dog, a reflection of her complex family life and racial identity. Her father, Bill Moore, who was of mostly white descent, left when she was a baby, and she was sometimes mocked and called iyeska — half-breed — as a child.

“Always I waited for the summer, for the prairie sun, the Badlands sun, to tan me and make me into a real skin,” she wrote in “Lakota Woman,” which was written with the journalist and author Richard Erdoes and published in 1990. In 1994, Jane Fonda Films produced a television movie for TNT based on the book.

Ms. Moore-Richard wrote that her stepfather had taught her to drink when she was 10.

“The little settlements we lived in — He Dog, Upper Cut Meat, Parmelee, St. Francis, Belvidere — were places without hope where bodies and souls were being destroyed bit by bit,” she wrote. “Schools left many of us almost illiterate. We were not taught any skills. The land was leased to white ranchers. Jobs were almost nonexistent on the reservation, and outside the res, whites did not hire Indians if they could help it.”

She attended the St. Francis Boarding School on the reservation and, like generations of American Indians, was instructed to practice Christianity and not to speak her native Sioux language. As a teenager, she published a newspaper describing abuse and misconduct at the school, and the school, run by Roman Catholic priests and nuns, punished her for doing so, she said. Some of her school experiences are described in a chapter of her book called “Civilize Them With a Stick.”

By her late teens, Ms. Moore-Richard had joined the American Indian Movement, also known as AIM, a sometimes violent civil rights group that led well-publicized protests, including one in which demonstrators occupied the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington in 1972.

Ms. Moore-Richard, who married one of the group’s leaders, Leonard Crow Dog, gave birth to their first child during AIM’s violent two-month occupation of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which began in February 1973.

Violence on the reservation continued long after the occupation; her close friend and fellow AIM member Anna Mae Pictou Aquash was found dead in 1976.

“The police said that she had died of exposure, but there was a .38-caliber slug in her head,” Ms. Moore-Richard wrote in 1990.

In 2004, an AIM member, Arlo Looking Cloud, was convicted of killing Ms. Aquash. Prosecutors said AIM members believed that Ms. Aquash had been spying on AIM for the F.B.I.

In 1993, Ms. Moore-Richard and Mr. Erdoes wrote a sequel to their first book, called“Ohitika Woman.”

Mary Ellen Moore-Richard was born in Pine Ridge on Sept. 26, 1954. Survivors include four sons, Robert He Crow, Francisco Olguin, Henry Crow Dog and Leonard Crow Dog Jr.; two daughters, Jennifer Crow Dog and Summer Rose Olguin; her mother, Emily Smith; two brothers, Robert Joe Moore and Michael Smith; and two sisters, Kathleen Moore and Barbara Moore.

Ms. Moore-Richard was a regular presence on the set of the TNT film in 1994. In an interview at the time with The Los Angeles Times, she said AIM should be more appreciated by American Indians.

“Before AIM came, people didn’t have their long hair, people didn’t have their Indian pride,” she said. “Everybody was assimilated. These people still put AIM people down, but now they are having sun dances. Before, nobody did it because everybody was Catholic and nobody knew about the Indian ways until the AIM people came. Now they are a lot better off, but they still don’t recognize the movement.”