Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa)
As Eastman, himself a Christian, presents it, the religion of his people – generalised in his book to “the Indian” – was a way of life: worship in silence before the Great Mystery, generosity and kinship as sacred duties; a civilisation that preaches Christianity without practising it cannot look down on it.
Placement
Santee Dakota physician and writer, raised in the Dakota way until fifteen and later a Christian: “The Soul of the Indian” presents the religion of his people, drawn from Dakota memory but generalised to “the Indian”, as a way of life of silence, generosity and kinship.
Key ideas
- Religion as a way of life
- Silence and solitude
- Critique of civilisation
- Native self-representation
Works
Describes the religion of the Dakota as it was before Christian missions: worship in silence and solitude without dogma or priesthood, a duty of generosity and hospitality, and a moral life lived before the “Great Mystery”.
Autobiography from his schooling and medical training to Wounded Knee and his work for the government, closing with a sober account of a civilisation whose practice contradicted the Christianity it preached.
Position
Eastman is on the map as one of the first Native authors to present Indigenous thought to a wide readership in English, and as a central figure among the Native intellectuals of the Progressive Era. “The Soul of the Indian” (1911) describes the religion of his people before Christian missions: worship of the Great Mystery in silence and solitude, without creed, temple or priesthood; generosity, hospitality and the honouring of kin as religious duties; the land and its beings as relatives. Eastman wrote as a Christian, a physician and an advocate of education and citizenship, and he measured the civilisation he had entered by its own professed ideals: in “From the Deep Woods to Civilization” (1916) he concludes that the teaching of Jesus is admirable but hardly practised by the nation that preached it, and that he never lost his sense of right and justice as a Dakota. Historians discuss how far his books, written for white readers and edited by Elaine Goodale Eastman, idealise the Dakota past and accommodate the assimilation policy of their time; others read them as a deliberate strategy of self-representation by which a Native author claimed the authority to speak about his own people. No documented links yet connect him with others on the map.
Life & context
Charles Alexander Eastman was born on 19 February 1858 near Redwood Falls in Minnesota, the son of the Santee Dakota Many Lightnings and of a mother of Dakota and European descent, and was first named Hakadah; after a lacrosse victory of his band he received the name Ohiyesa, “the winner”. After the Dakota War of 1862 his grandmother and uncle took him to Manitoba, where he grew up in the Dakota way. In 1873 his father, believed dead, returned as a Christian and took him to Flandreau in Dakota Territory and to mission schools. Eastman studied at Beloit and Knox colleges, graduated from Dartmouth College in 1887 and took his medical degree at Boston University in 1890. As agency physician at Pine Ridge he treated the wounded after the massacre at Wounded Knee in December 1890. He then worked for the YMCA, as a government physician and on the registration of Dakota family names, lectured widely, co-founded the Society of American Indians in 1911 and later served as a federal Indian inspector. His wife, the writer Elaine Goodale Eastman, edited his early books. He died on 8 January 1939 in Detroit.
Further main works
- Indian Boyhood (1902)
- Old Indian Days (1907)
- The Indian To-day: The Past and Future of the First American (1915)
- Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (1918)
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