A Taste Of Power By Elaine Brown Summary

Creating Revolutionaries
Autobiographies are very important pieces of literature because they give us a personal insight into events from an individual’s standpoint as a member of a certain social group. From Elaine Brown’s autobiography, A Taste of Power-A Black Woman’s Story, and Mary Crow Dog’s autobiography, Lakota Woman, we can understand that for these two African American and Native American women, motherhood had beyond a personal reason. These two women had children for the purpose of progressing their revolution and improving the lives of their people. To them, they were not giving birth to a child as simply a member of their family, they were giving birth to whom they hoped would become revolutionaries and warriors.

African Americans

Her people were being sterilized against their will because “whites” thought that Natives were filthy and dirty because of the way they dressed and their lifestyle. “Whites” thought that they did not deserve to live and so they were systematically killing them and overall attempting to eradicate Native culture. Andrea Smith states in her writing, “One doctor in his attempt to rationalize the mass sterilization of Native women in the 1970s stated, ‘People pollute, and too many people crowded too close together causes many of our social and economic problems…we have an obligation to the society of which we are part. The welfare mess, as it has been called, cries out for solutions, one of which is fertility control’ ” (281). Even Crowdog speaks about the forced sterilization of Native women. In her autobiography, Lakota Women, she states, “My sister Barbara went to the government hospital in Rosebud to have her baby and when she came out of anesthesia found that she had been sterilized against her will. The baby had only lived for two hours, and she had so much wanted to have children” (4). This incident was a strong motivation for Crow Dog wanting to have children. Her people were being killed off and her culture was on the brink of extinction. There were signs that read, as Andrea Smith states, “Save a fish; spear a pregnant squaw”

In Crow Dog’s autobiography we see her determination to have her child at Wounded Knee. Having her child there without any modern medication or “white” doctors was symbolic for her and her people. It showed that they had survived without the intervention of whites before and they could still survive. It was an important event for all of the people at Wounded Knee. Crow Dog states, “Denise Banks came in and hugged me, saying, ‘Right on, sister!’ and he was crying, and that made me cry, too. And then Carter Camp and Pedro Bissonette came in with tears steaming down their faces. All these tough guys were weeping”(163). Giving birth to a child did not simply mean bringing a child into the world, it meant bringing a new warrior to the battlefield. As a Native woman, Crow Dog, like Brown, felt that it was her responsibility and something that only she as a woman could do for her people. She had the power to bring new life into the world as another ray of hope for her people and hope that their culture and their native ways would live