(1858-1939)
Wahpeton and Mdewakanton Dakota (Sioux) medical doctor, government employee (agency physician, surnames translator, U.S. Indian inspector), writer, lecturer, and reformer
Charles Alexander Eastman's mother died several months after his birth, which resulted in his childhood name, Hakadah, "Pitiful Last" (child); at age four he was given the name Ohiyesa, meaning "the Winner," in honor of his village's having won a lacrosse game with a neighboring village. He was raised by his paternal grandmother, and during the Minnesota Dakota conflict of 1862, she fled with him and others along with the headman Standing Buffalo onto the prairies of the Dakota Territory and eventually into Canada. Ten years later his father, Jacob Many Lightings Eastman, who had been presumed killed in the conflict, sought out his son in southeastern Manitoba, brought him to his homestead at Flandreau, South Dakota, and started him on the road to Euro-American learning by sending him to Santee Normal School. It was there that Ohiyesa adopted the name Charles Alexander Eastman, the Eastman coming from his father, who had taken the surname of his deceased wife's father, the military officer and artist Seth Eastman. Eastman went on to the preparatory school of Knox College, then to Kimball Union Academy and to Dartmouth College, from which he graduated in 1886; he graduated from the medical school of Boston College in 1889.
Eastman's educational achievements attracted the attention of the reformers who favored an Indian policy dedicated to the incorporation of Indians into American society. Eastman sought a position as an agency physician with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and was assigned to the Pine Ridge Agency in the fall of 1889. He arrived amid the Ghost Dance revitalization movement that authorities were calling an "uprising" and that ended tragically in the Wounded Knee massacre the following year. Eastman was the first physician to reach the killing field, and the experience affected him deeply. During these first weeks he also met and subsequently married the young reformer Elaine Goodale, who at the time they met was the Superintendent of Indian Education for the reservations within the Dakota Territory.
Eastman began his literary career when his wife urged him to write stories of his childhood for his own children. He later sent the stories to St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks. His writings became popular with adults as well, and this success convinced him to write a range of books and to become a lecturer on the Chautauqua circuits. Indian Boyhood (1902) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916) make up his autobiographical works. His stories for children include Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), Old Indian Days (1907), Wigwam Evenings (1909), Indian Child Life (1913), Indian Scout Talks (1914), and Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (1918). His philosophical works include The Soul of the Indian (1911) and The Indian Today (1915).
Having become increasingly disillusioned with the U.S. Indian Service, Eastman left Pine Ridge in 1893. Later, after several years of private medical practice in St. Paul, Minnesota, he became an organizer of YMCA chapters on reservations and reserves in the United States and Canada. By 1898 he had joined his brother, the Reverend John Eastman, as a lobbyist for the restoration of Santee Sioux treaty rights; he also became briefly associated with Carlisle Indian Industrial School. In 1900 he was appointed a physician at the Crow Creek Agency in South Dakota. Three years later he left that position and was engaged on a contract basis to translate surnames for the Dakota and Lakota Sioux agencies. He carried out this task while continuing his literary pursuits and public presentations. By 1910 he was seeking to renew himself and reconnect with his childhood by arranging to spend a summer traveling among Indian peoples in northern Minnesota and southern Ontario. He returned from this journey to write The Soul of the Indian. At this time, Charles and his wife acquired property in southern New Hampshire and began a summer camp for girls. In the off-seasons, when he was not on lecture tours, Eastman spent time at the camp. In 1923 he accepted a three-year appointment as a U.S. Indian inspector. He was by that time considered one of the foremost educated Indians; he was active in the Society of American Indians, was an appointee to the Committee of One Hundred to advise the Coolidge administration on Indian policy, and was a national spokesperson for Indian concerns and aspirations. From that point until his death in 1939 Eastman lived in Detroit, advising hobbyist groups and telling his stories to interested audiences.
Eastman's life was remarkable because of the transformation he made from one way of life to another. He translated significant Indian ideas and values for the larger population. After having written first for children, the weight of his many frustrating life experiences pressed him into explaining the contributions Indians had made. In the process, he became a public figure and educator. By the 1930s Eastman, who had been considered by many early reformers to be a testament to acculturation, had become a romantic and was considered completely out of step with the New Deal reform program of Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier. Late in his life, some felt Eastman had become a folksy caricature playing to popular stereotypes. His writings remain his most important contributions, however, while the contextual details of his life demonstrate that non-Indian reformers' programs were never easy for Indians to live.
David Reed Miller, American Indian Intellectuals "Charles Alexander Eastman, the 'Winner': From Deep Woods to Civilization," ed. Margot Liberty (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Company, 1978); LaVonne Brown Ruoff, Old Indian Days by Charles Alexander Eastman (reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books, 1991); Raymond Wilson, Ohiyesa: Charles Eastman, Santee Sioux (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983).
David Reed Miller
Saskatchewan Indian Federated College
University of Regina
