Lakota Woman

After quitting school, Crow Dog spends her time in poor towns on the reservation, where “lease money and ADC checks were drunk up” (43) and people cram into broken-down cars to joyride from town to town. Though she was a heavy drinker at an early age, Crow Dog herself doesn’t drink anymore; she stopped when she “felt there was a purpose to [her] life” (45).

Drinking is illegal on the reservation, but towns within the reservation are incorporated, or put “under white man’s law” (46); also, bootleggers are easy to find. Crow Dog’s older sister, Barb, sometimes catches Crow Dog drinking or smoking and angrily confiscates the alcohol or cigarette, insisting she is too young. Crow Dog retorts that Barb does those things, too.

Fighting and drunk driving are common, and people are often killed or injured. Crow Dog describes an incident in which she fights a woman who makes a racist comment in a bar, as well as a large drunken brawl between full-bloods (“whoever thinks, sings, and speaks Indian”) and half-bloods (“whoever acts and thinks like a white man” [49]). Drinking makes people remember “all the old hatreds, real and imagined” (48). Native Americans suffer racial attacks exacerbated by alcohol.