Dakota Philosopher: Charles Eastman and American Indian Thought

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The Greatest Sioux of the Century

Eastman and the Pursuit of an Indigenous Philosophy

Do not drop your head because you are an Indian. Be proud!

Charles Eastman, opening address, Annual Meeting of the Society of American Indians, Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 2, 1919

In 1917, the American Indian Magazine, edited by Seneca intellectual Arthur C. Parker, said of Charles Alexander Eastman: Dr. Eastman through all his books gives us a brand of philosophy that while critical is yet refreshing because it is so evidently true. As a great Sioux, history will write him down as a great American and a true philosopher. What follows is a long overdue appreciation of Eastman as a true philosopher—or, more specifically, as a true Dakota philosopher. While Eastman’s collected works are not typically spoken of in the same breath as those of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, or John Dewey, if only for the reason that he was an Indian who wrote for a wide audience as opposed to an Anglo-American philosopher writing by and large for other philosophers, they nonetheless hold the distinction of influencing the way countless readers in several languages perceived and thought about American Indians. Among the people Eastman influenced are other American Indians, including many of us in American Indian Studies today.¹

This is not to say that, nearly a century after Parker’s accolades, Eastman is now beyond criticism, like Shakespeare or the Bible. Certainly, Eastman’s biographer, Raymond Wilson, observed that he was never a very systematic thinker when it came to pressing issues pertaining to the application of federal Indian policy. By systematic, Wilson means taking a more clearly social scientific approach to his analysis, as did the sociologist Fayette Avery McKenzie, who used all the tools of his discipline to analyze the the Indian problem. In Eastman’s hands, however, in Wilson’s opinion, problems always proved to be much more complex than his narratives on Indian life might lead one to expect.²

Perhaps because of the growing sophistication of American Indian Studies since its inception in the late 1960s, there has been much scholarship on Eastman as a man caught in two worlds, which simultaneously lifts Eastman’s work high in the American Indian literary canon yet focuses on the shadows and skeletons that exist behind the dignified image that Eastman effortlessly projected, whether he wore a suit and tie or buckskin and a feathered headdress. As Wilson opines: [Eastman’s] personal experiences in both worlds no doubt contributed to his facile conclusions and the conclusions of others, that since he had achieved fame (if not fortune) in an alien culture, other Indians could also progress and learn to survive and prosper in the modern world. This is to suggest that Eastman, not to mention his peers, were naïve about the role institutional racism played in holding back most American Indians from achieving their objectives in education, business, and politics. However, when one looks at the corpus of Eastman’s written work within the broader context of what educated Indians were writing at the time, the picture becomes much more interesting and complex, as one can quickly see that Eastman, along with his contemporaries, was quite vigilant in his quest for Indian rights, comprehending the issues and problems as part of a complex process of government machinery and indigenous resistance. Consequently, Eastman was much more than living proof of the reformers’ faith in progress. And while much has been done recently to complicate Eastman’s relation to his identity as an Indian and an American—such that he is not merely a victim of assimilationist policies—there is still more to be done at appreciating his work as products of the Dakota/Lakota/Nakota intellectual tradition, which includes Nicholas Black Elk, George Sword, Chauncey Yellow Robe, Zitkala-Sa, and Luther Standing Bear and extends today to include Vine Deloria, Jr., Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Beatrice Medicine, Susan Power, Delphine Red Shirt, Philip J. Deloria, and Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, to name but a few.³

Despite Eastman’s prominent position in the Dakota intellectual tradition, his ideas and the example he made with his personal and professional life have not always been revered, even by other Indians. I can remember a time during my own college career when simply knowing that someone was from the assimilation period was enough to write him or her off as a sellout and wannabe. In fact, while teaching a graduate seminar at the Newberry Library in Chicago on behalf of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History during the 2004 spring semester, I ran into this dismissive mind-set from one of my Indian students. Perhaps because of this predominant attitude that we in the American Indian community do not need Eastman—not to mention other luminaries of the post-1890 generation, such as Zitkala-Sa and Arthur C. Parker—much of the existing scholarship has largely been conducted by non-Indians. The exceptions to this situation are few and fleeting: Eastman appears here and there in the work of Gerald Vizenor, Robert Allen Warrior, Donald L. Fixico, Philip J. Deloria, and Tom Holm.

With respect to Vine Deloria, Jr., his attitude toward Eastman is twofold, revealing an interesting insight into Eastman’s status in the contemporary American Indian intellectual community. First, in Deloria’s publications, namely his various books, Eastman warrants only a very brief reference in God Is Red and then is perfectly absent from everything else. However, influence is not always marked with citations, a reality I encountered firsthand during the fall semester of 2000. Vine partook in American Indian Studies’ thirtieth anniversary celebration at the University of Minnesota, at which he gave both a public talk and an informal afternoon seminar. During the seminar, a graduate student asked Vine to name his five favorite books. Without hesitation, Vine named From the Deep Woods to Civilization and The Soul of the Indian to his list, which also included two books by Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle and My People the Sioux. Needless to say, as an American Indian Studies scholar myself I was completely fascinated by this unexpected list of post-1890-generation writers. In fact, I can say that this book is the result of following this fascination to its root, which is a sustained analysis of Eastman’s intellectual output as a Dakota writer.⁴

However, with regard to the other Indian scholars named above, Warrior has had the most significant impact on the current analyses and interpretations of Eastman’s literary output. Many (non-Indian) scholars, more specifically, seem to have picked up on the ambiguous feelings that Warrior expressed for Eastman and the post-1890 generation in his 1994 book Tribal Secrets, in which he opines: However troubling we might find the [post-1890] generation’s support for and advancement of the policies of the U.S. government, we can not fault their sincerity or their commitment to and love for American Indian people. The influence of the latter evaluation may be seen in such articles as ‘Good Indian’: Charles Eastman and the Warrior as Civil Servant, which appeared in a 2003 issue of American Indian Quarterly and began an analysis of Eastman’s intellectual agenda with the observation, Charles Alexander Eastman remains an enigmatic figure in the early days of American Indian activism—a man whose contributions, while unimpeachable in terms of devotion and good will, are often complicated by the lingering shadow of assimilationist values evident in his writings and his career as one of the so-called ‘red progressives.’ Eastman can be located, by chance or design, on what would seem the ‘wrong side’ of nearly every major issue he faced at the height of his prominence in the early part of the twentieth century. The article goes on to list the supposedly condemning evidence from Eastman’s career, namely support for the 1887 Dawes Act, working as the government physician at Pine Ridge during the Wounded Knee Massacre, as well as obtaining a non-Indian education and becoming a Christian.⁵

Without further consideration, it would be easy under the circumstances to dismiss Eastman as a misguided shill for Anglo-American civilization. However, when one looks at the details of Eastman’s work, a different picture begins to emerge, a complicated hybrid of both Dakota and American values but with priority placed on the Dakota tradition. From the vantage point of his Indian Boyhood, if you will, Eastman demonstrates that the decision to embrace mainstream American life was not a simple choice between two evils—assimilation or extinction—but rather an arduous effort at maintaining core Dakota beliefs and principles in a radically different environment than the one in which Eastman’s Dakota ancestors dwelled prior to westward expansion. Thus, what makes Eastman a visionary or a true philosopher is his capacity to see through to the essence of things, whether it is being a Dakota or a Christian or the nature of modern life. Similar to many premodern philosophers and sages, such as Socrates, one cannot truly appreciate the wisdom without appreciating the life story that generated the insights in the first place. In Eastman’s case, not only did he write two volumes of autobiography, but also there are recurring references to his personal experience in his other seven books and assorted articles. It is fair to say that Eastman lived what he spoke and wrote. What is important to remember, though, is that the story begins at and ultimately—at least in spirit—returns to the heart of the Dakota homeland in southern Minnesota. In this sense, Eastman joins the ranks of Samson Occom, William Apess, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins as an American Indian intellectual whose personal story has driven how we interpret his political, historical, and religious agenda, all of which are connected to indigenous homelands whose balance has been violently disrupted by Euro-American expansionism.

His lofty reputation for promoting pan-Indian causes notwithstanding, Charles Alexander Eastman (or Ohiyesa, as he was known in his native Dakota) was first and foremost a Minnesota writer and activist. What supposedly undermines this claim is the fact that Eastman spent very little of his life in Minnesota. After his birth around 1858, Eastman, who was then known only as Hakadah, left his home near Redwood Falls in late 1862 as a refugee of the U.S.–Dakota War, an event that virtually emptied the territory of its indigenous Dakota population. Eastman would not return to Minnesota until 1893, when he moved his family from Pine Ridge, South Dakota, where he worked as an Indian Service physician, to St. Paul in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Eastman’s return to Minnesota was relatively short lived due to diffculties he encountered while pursuing a private medical practice. Because of financial needs, Eastman took up work as an agent for the YMCA in 1894, which required him to travel extensively throughout the western United States, promoting the founding of YMCA chapters at various reservations. Then, in 1897, the Santee Dakota at Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota asked him to serve as their lobbyist in Washington, DC, for the purpose of recovering lost treaty annuities that were incurred during their post-1862 exile. The latter was followed by a brief stint in 1899 as an outing agent for the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. At the turn of the twentieth century, Eastman once again became an Indian Service physician, assigned between 1900 and 1903 at the Crow Creek Reservation. During his time at Crow Creek, Eastman took the job of revising the tribal rolls, a task he did not complete until 1909. However, because his tenure as physician ended before he could complete the rolls, he was compelled to move back to Minnesota, this time to White Bear, from which he soon moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, where he stayed until 1919. In addition to everything else—including running summer camps for boys and girls in Granite Lake, New Hampshire—Eastman started a career as a popular speaker at colleges and philanthropic societies in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Finally, after separating from his wife, Elaine, in 1921, Eastman continued to lead the itinerant life of an Indian Service employee and public speaker, never really settling down anywhere and always dogged by lingering financial woes. During this time he began visiting his son, Ohiyesa II, in Detroit, Michigan, over the winter months; Eastman passed away in that city on January 8, 1939.⁶

Yet, in spite of the peripatetic lifestyle that Eastman followed throughout his years of writing, speaking, and activism, I make my claim that Eastman is an indigenous Minnesota figure on the basis that he was a Mdewakanton Dakota who not only was born in Dakota Country but also maintained a healthy relationship with his Dakota relatives and a living memory of the indigenous culture as an integral part of his identity as both an intellectual and an American Indian. Even after his father, Jacob Eastman (formerly Many Lightnings), reclaimed him in Manitoba, Canada, and moved them to Flandreau, South Dakota, Eastman was nonetheless conditioned by the customs and values indigenous to southern Minnesota and in which he grounds himself from the beginning of his writing career—namely in the 1902 autobiography Indian Boyhood, which he began after his 1893 move to St. Paul. As a struggling physician in his mid-thirties, Eastman began writing, not knowing where it would lead. In fact, Eastman did not even have publication in mind when he began his sketches. As he recounts in his classic 1916 From the Deep Woods to Civilization, the second volume of his autobiography: "While I had plenty of leisure, I began to put upon paper some of my earliest recollections, with the thought that our children might some day like to read of that wilderness life. When my wife discovered what I had written, she insisted upon sending it to St. Nicholas. Much to my surprise, the sketches were immediately accepted and appeared during the following year. This was the beginning of my first book, ‘Indian Boyhood,’ which was not completed until several years later."⁷

Thus began a legacy that is still being felt across the American Indian intellectual community today. However, before we delve into Eastman’s contemporary influence, we must take into account the pivotal role he played in defining the literary and political agenda of the post-1890 generation, members of which were attempting to capitalize on the education they were receiving from the American school system at the same time they endured great suffering and insuffcient resources. That year is a turning point, not only for the Lakota who suffered through the Wounded Knee Massacre but also for all of Indian Country, which mourned the death of what once was before the reservations. Philip J. Deloria observes the significance of 1890 in Indians in Unexpected Places. While other tribes may indeed mark similar watersheds in the course of their own history, Wounded Knee stands as a marker for pan-tribal and even Anglo-American history: Wounded Knee...organizes the big break between the possibility and the impossibility of military struggle, and it does so as a cross-tribal and cross-cultural milepost. For non-Indian Americans, the possibility of nineteenth-century Indian violence existed before Wounded Knee; afterward, it became a thing of representation, perfect for twentieth-century movies and books. In other words, Wounded Knee signaled the abrupt transformation of Indian nations from geopolitical powers (e.g., the Great Sioux Nation) to symbols of conquest (e.g., the University of North Dakota "Fighting