Matriarch Monday honoring Dr. Beatrice Medicine
Hinsha Waste Agli Win - Beatrice Medicine (August 1, 1923 - December 19, 2005) (Sihasapa and Minneconjou Lakota) was a scholar, anthropologist, and educator known for her work in the fields of Indigenous languages, cultures, and history. Medicine spent much of her life researching, teaching, and serving Native communities, primarily in the fields of bilingual education, addiction and recovery, mental health, tribal identity, and women's, children's, and LGBT community issues.
Medicine was born at Wakpala on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and grew up there. She graduated from South Dakota State University in 1945 and studied anthropology at several universities, earning a master's degree at Michigan State University and a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1983. Medicine taught at Indian schools and colleges and universities across the United States and Canada, including Stanford University, Dartmouth College, San Francisco State University, the University of Washington, the University of Montana and the University of South Dakota.
She was the author of two books on indigenous women. The University of Illinois Press published a collection of her writings entitled "Learning to be an Anthropologist and Remaining Native" in 2001. Medicine was an advocate for the rights of children, women, ethnic minorities - especially American Indians - and gay, lesbian and trans-gendered people, according to a news release.
She served as head of the Women's Branch of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples for the Canadian government, helping draft legislation to protect the legal rights of native families. She served as an expert witness in several trials pertaining to the rights of American Indians, including the 1974 federal case brought against the individuals involved in the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973.
Medicine received awards including several honorary doctorates, the Ohana Award from the American Counseling Association, the Outstanding Woman of Color Award from the National Institute of Women of Color, an Honoring Our Allies Award from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Bronislaw Malinowski Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the George and Louise Spindler Award for Education in Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.
Another less formal award of which she was perhaps more proud was having been the Sacred Pipe Woman at the Sun Dance at Sitting Bull's Camp in 1977.
After retiring from teaching, Medicine returned to the Wakpala area where she helped ensure construction of a new public school and served on the school board for the Wakpala-Smee School District.
For half a century, Dr. Medicine defied stereotypes, racism, and sexism in her life and work while combating the reductive, patronizing views of Native Americans perpetuated by mainstream anthropologists. Her work and writing reflects her unswerving commitment to furthering Native Americans' ability to speak for themselves and deal with the problems of contemporary life.
Her book, “Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining "Native"‘ includes clear-eyed views of assimilation, bilingual education, and the adaptive strategies by which Native Americans have conserved and preserved their ancestral languages. Her discussions of sex roles in contemporary Native American societies encompass homosexual orientation among males and females and the "warrior woman" role among Plains Indians as one of several culturally accepted positions according power and prestige to women. The volume also includes Medicine's thoughtful assessments of kinship and family structures, alcoholism and sobriety, the activism implicit in the religious ritual of the Lakota Sioux Sun Dance, and the ceremonial uses of Lakota star quilts.
"The Native American is possibly the least understood ethnic minority in contemporary American society," Medicine observes. Her decades of deliberate, generous, dedicated work have done much to reveal the workings of Native culture while illuminating the effects of racism and oppression on Indian families, kinship units, and social and cultural practices.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?152556-1/national-gay-lesbian-task-force-dinner