The author and narrator, Mary Brave Bird, later Mary Crow Dog, grows up poor on a reservation in South Dakota. She is the daughter of a white father and a Sioux mother who, along with her grandmother, tries to raise Crow Dog as a Catholic to give her the greatest chance at living a good life. Crow Dog and her mother fight frequently as Crow Dog grows up; Crow Dog runs away, following a group of young Sioux as they steal, use drugs, and wander aimlessly, trying to find direction. Though she doesn’t immediately understand it, Crow Dog experiences discrimination and racism from an early age, both in the town surrounding her reservation and at St. Francis boarding school, where the girls are beaten, isolated, and forced to become “caricatures of white people” (30). Throughout her life, Crow Dog struggles with her identity, feeling she fits in neither with white people nor with Sioux “full-bloods,” who tease her for being an iyeska(mixed-blood).

Like many Sioux, Crow Dog, in her quest for meaning, turns to drugs and alcohol, finally finding her purpose when she joins AIM, or the American Indian Movement, a civil rights group dedicated to fighting for Native American rights.