"Good Indian": Charles Eastman and the Warrior as Civil Servant

My father added: "I am glad that my son is strong and brave. Your brothers have adopted the white man's way; I came for you to learn this new way, too; and I want you to grow up a good man."

Charles Eastman, Indian Boyhood

The only good Indian is a dead Indian.

Old White Man's Saying

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."¹ 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. He was a supporter of the Dawes Act, an advocate and onetime employee of the (in)famous Carlisle School For Indians, and perhaps most vexingly, he found himself posted with U.S. forces at what remains the signature atrocity of Native American and U.S. relations, the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee.² A product of Christian boarding schools himself, and further educated at Dartmouth and then Boston College, Eastman is generally considered to have been an active voice for full Native American immersion into white European culture.

In Tribal Secrets, his study on American Indian intellectual traditions, Robert Allen Warrior refers to Eastman's memoirs as "highly sentimental accounts of his childhood in which he portrays Natives as needy for, worthy of, and ready for inclusion in mainstream civilization."³ While Warrior praises the level of sincerity and commitment that Eastman and a number of his contemporaries brought to American Indian causes, he warns that we must not let this "blind us to the perturbing implications of their work."⁴ David Brumble goes so far as to assert that "Romantic Racialist and Social Darwinist assumptions [are] fundamental to Eastman's thinking" at least in his early years.⁵ At best Eastman is considered misguided in his beliefs, at worst he is labeled a racist. But rarely does his life or work lend itself to an unqualified endorsement of his contributions to the movement of Native American advocacy.

In engaging with his writings, one can readily grasp how Eastman provokes such responses from his readers. He is bound to challenge the sensibilities of any who set out with a strong inclination to want to defend his life and work. Nevertheless, I believe such a defense is justified by a close examination of the guiding principles to which he adhered throughout his career. While acknowledging the problematic nature inherent in some of Eastman's stances, I would like to bring into greater relief his overall philosophy of a life of service—a philosophy he attributes to his "wild" Sioux upbringing—and illustrate how that philosophy is articulated in his works.

Eastman was one of a very small number of Native Americans at the turn of the twentieth century to have authored book-length autobiographies in the modern Western tradition.⁶ As a founding member of the Society of American Indians (sai), he belonged to the first official pan-Indian organization, served for a time as its president, and became a nationally recognized figure in support of Native causes.⁷ While he also worked for Anglo organizations such as the ymca, the Boy Scouts of America, and the Carlisle School, his work always had strong Native American associations. Service of one kind or another was always central to his motivations. Despite these remarkable achievements, however, it remains in question which cultural ideology Eastman actually served.

Perhaps as a result of the narrow borderland between histories and literatures that Eastman's works seem to inhabit, he could just as easily prove a caricature as a model of assimilation...