Lakota Woman

After Leonard returns, the family must readjust to being together and to living on the reservation—a difficult task, as the children have grown, and Crow Dog and Leonard have changed. Leonard builds his parents a small makeshift house to replace the house that had been destroyed. Crow Dog reflects on her time in New York City, during which she’d enjoyed her comfortable lifestyle. Though she’d found the women’s liberation movement she encountered “mainly a white, upper-middle-class affair of little use to a reservation Indian woman” (244), she emerges from New York more confident and more inclined to hold accountable Sioux men who beat their women and abandon their children.

Leonard feels bitterness toward his incarceration. Famous now, he receives countless requests for “help, money, spiritual comfort,” (245) and ceremonies, and he meets almost every request. He’s still on parole, and the looming threat of imprisonment is stressful on the family. He and Crow Dog are more tolerant of each other, and Leonard shows more appreciation for her contributions as a woman. However, he has trouble reconciling some of the “changes in thinking [that] had occurred during his absence” (249). To heal himself, he goes on a vision quest called “Crying for a Dream.