Work · Indigenous Philosophies
From the Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian
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.
Introduction
The autobiography continues “Indian Boyhood” (1902) and appeared in 1916. It tells of Eastman’s first encounter with mission schools, his studies at Beloit, Knox, Dartmouth and Boston, his work as a physician at Pine Ridge, where he treated the wounded of Wounded Knee, and his later years as YMCA secretary, government physician and lecturer. Eastman reports the injustice and corruption of the reservation system soberly and in detail. In the last chapter he weighs what he has gained and lost: he remains a Christian and an advocate of education and citizenship, but writes that he has found the practice of civilisation far from its professed Christianity, and that he has never lost his “Indian sense of right and justice”. The book is a key document of the Native intellectuals of the Progressive Era and of the tensions in which they worked.
More works by Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa)
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