I recently read    Being Lakota, a collaboration between Melda Redbear Trejo, her late husband Lupe Trejo and a Euro-Canadian academic, Larissa Petrillo.  I actually met Lupe and Melda (Which is how they asked to be addressed) a year before Petrillo, so the book held a special place for me.  In the course of the book, Lupe and Melda recount their life stories, how they met and how they came to sponsor a Sun Dance on Red Bear land on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation.  
    Melda is Lakota, born on Pine Ridge. Lupe was a Texas-born Aztec. Both of their families of origin worked as migrant farm laborers in various western states, and they continued the practice after their marriage and while raising ten children. In the late 1980s, they returned to the house and land where Melda had been born and raised, and started holding a Sun Dance.  Much of   Being Lakota   is transcribed conversations of the couple's descriptions of their upbringing and subsequent life as active participants in various expressions of Lakota spirtuality. Interspersed are Larissa Petrillo's comments from an academic perspective. (Her jacket bio identifies her as an instructor of interdisciplinary studies at the University of British Columbia.)

    Reading the Trejos' own accounts is like getting another chance to sit under a tree and just hear them tell their stories, a way to still absorb their wisdom, all the more poignant because I never got the chance to return to them and Lupe has since walked on, along with other members of their family who befriended me that summer. It was a powerful experience, a spiritual experience that still affects me.  I won't even call it mystical, because Lupe and Melda talked to me in the same plain down-home language that  Petrillo records in   Being Lakota.    It is entirely accessible to one with an open mind and open heart. I am a better person for having experienced their hospitality.

    Which brings me to the effect the Trejos had on Larissa Petrillo, who admits that she originally intended the project to record the life of a Lakota woman, and from her perspective, that meant Melda's life should be recounted and assessed in isolation from that of her husband of forty-plus years. Petrillo regarded Lupe as an intruder onto her first conversations, in part because he was male, and in part because he was not "really" Lakota.   Later she realizes that Melda's life can not be understood as separate from that of her husband.  This may seem obvious for anyone who met Melda and Lupe, or any other reasonably happy couple of many decades duration, but it seemed clear that Petrillo ( whose surname seems Italian, but like many Western academics chooses not to identify her own ethnicity.) is burdened with a hard feminist ideology that insists "woman" must be understood separately from "man."
    Several times Petrillo mentions how she has to cast off this academic feminism if she is to truly understand Melda at all.  Petrillo also learns that to truly understand what it means to be Lakota, she must appreciate that the Lakota have always adopted outsiders, married non-Lakota, and made them into allies.  "Allies pray together," is how its described.   Far from being a dilution of her Lakota identity, Melda's marriage to Mexican Lupe is an enhancement of it.  They are a hard-working team who raise ten children ( and some number of their 29 grandchildren) in Lakota tradition. 
    Perhaps I missed it, but Petrillo does not fully critique her acceptance of Euro-Western feminist ideology, by connecting it to her white-skin privilege in Canada.  She clearly rejects her prior particular feminist view, but does not acknowledge how even supposedly liberating feminist ideology, like any other ideology, can be used as a weapon when wielded by white (and powerful) women. 
    Nonetheless, I credit Petrillo for her many references to Indigenous academics. She cites Lakota scholars Vine Deloria, Jr., Delphine Red Shirt, Black Elk,  Severt Young Bear, and many others.  She has rejected the old model of an anthropologist who studies "informants," and instead seeks a more equal collaboration with the Indigenous people she is describing.  She has clearly learned from Native writers, and she has learned from Melda, too that Indigenous people have our own understanding of ourselves, even despite the well-meaning categorization of outsiders. 
    Being Lakota is truly a great book, a real gem, a quick read and re-read, and worth every second spent reading it. 

P.S.    I can not criticize Petrillo's scant mention of her own origins without mentioning mine.  I am a mixture of African, Creek Indian and a little Southern White.  The Trejo sons recognized my blackness as both obvious and irrelevant, and one of them even knicknamed me "Mandinka Warrior," (coming from a tribal person, referencing  the 1977 TV series  Roots   I took this as a compliment) for my hard work in helping build the arbor.  I was encouraged to participate in the life of the community without hesitation.  
    What really separated me from the Trejo-Red Bears, and from most other Pine Ridge residents, was my relative material privilege.  I was on break from grad school,  had been raised middle-class by college-educated parents, and had little fear of ever experiencing the material deprivation I saw around me at Pine Ridge.  To remain, or return to, Pine Ridge, was to give up even many modest economic opportunities available off the reservation. To stay there requires a special kind of courage.
    Surprisingly, one aspect of the  Trejo-Red Bear family's experience overlapped that of my family: they picked cotton.  Lupe told me at one early point in their marriage, he and Melda had picked cotton in Arizona.  One of my Creek uncles had also picked cotton (as an old man, no less) in Arizona, and my grandmother and numerous other relatives (many of them still living in the early 1990s) had picked cotton as part of sharecropping families in Mississippi. Though cotton-picking is seen as a the quintessential Negro experience, the last branch of my family to leave the cotton fields was the branch with the most White and Native ancestry. How's that for confounding stereotypes?

SOURCE:
Petrillo, Larissa;in collaboration with Melda Red Bear Trejo and Lupe Trejo,  Being Lakota: identity and tradition on Pine Ridge Reservation, Universtiy of Nebraska Press, 2007.