There are many who would argue that the life and work of Mary Crow Dog, author of the as-told-to autobiography Lakota Woman, speaks to the heart of a woman’s life as an activist and agent for social change. Others would take the opposite position, that Crow Dog/Lakota Woman speaks only to her own life, and that her most famous acts—giving birth at Wounded Knee and collaborating with Richard Erdoes to write her autobiography in two volumes—produced no social change. Her autobiography for some scholars and activists has in fact been more harmful than helpful in representing Lakota cultural practices and the conditions of American Indians nationally. Whatever position you take in reading Mary Crow Dog’s life, her self-identified work as an