Ohitika Woman
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 .Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.