What Writer Would Not Be an Indian for a While? Charles Alexander Eastman, Critical Memory, and Audience

Wanton cruelties and the more barbarous customs of war were greatly intensified with the coming of the white man, who brought with him fiery liquor and deadly weapons, aroused the Indian's worst passions, provoking in him revenge and cupidity, and even offered bounties for the scalps of innocent men, women, and children. Charles Alexander Eastman, Soul of the Indian

In "American Indian Intellectual Traditions, 1890–1990," Robert Allen Warrior introduces Charles Alexander Eastman as a "troubling" writer. Eastman was a committed assimilationist who portrayed Natives as "needy for, worthy of, and ready for inclusion in mainstream civilization." Warrior places him among a group of Native intel-lectuals in the Society of American Indians (SAI), founded in 1911, who at the beginning of the twentieth century were bent on "civilizing" other Indians (8), and he asserts that the "coming together" of this group "marks the first time Native intellectuals had joined in a common organization" (6). He includes in his discussion an extraordinary statement—one of Eastman's contributions to the first conference of that society: "I wish to say that really no prejudice has existed so far as the American Indian is concerned." Warrior's critique of Eastman, along with other members of the SAI, poses the "scandalous treatment of American Indian people" alongside Eastman's "blinding progressivistic optimism" (6). Such a critique makes sense if Eastman's work in general is characterized by the seemingly naïve position that Indians had suffered no prejudice. Warrior first asks whether Eastman and other SAI members were "misguided, brainwashed, self-hating collaborators," and then he suggests a response: "their sincerity coupled with their often troubling politics call for a fair as well as critical reading." Such a reading is crucial to the work of recovery; if Eastman is worth recovering, it is not so that he can be reinscribed in another romantic story of the past but so that we can interrogate his position as a public intellectual engaged in a dynamic early-twentieth-century national discourse challenging the sociopolitical treatment of American Indians by the U.S. government.

In fact, it is both Eastman's sincerity and his troubling politics taken together that make this early-twentieth-century Native American public intellectual so interesting. A brief look at his background reveals someone of exceptional experiences. According to his own Indian Boyhood (1902), Eastman spent his childhood "within the traditional society of the Eastern Sioux," where he trained to become "a skillful hunter and brave warrior" (Wilson ix). However, he left tribal life at the age of fifteen and followed his father into Christianity, short hair, and white man's clothing, and he never really returned. After graduating from Dartmouth, he attended the Boston University School of Medicine, graduated in 1890, and was "elected unanimously" by his classmates "as the class orator" at graduation (Wilson 36). In 1890 Eastman was thirty-two years old, trained as a doctor, consulted by legislators, and already in demand as a lecturer (Wilson 36). Unlike his Native American intellectual precursors and contemporaries who were forced to attend oppressive government boarding schools and shed the artifacts of culture against their will, Eastman seems clearly to have chosen the path he took. He has no stories of family violence and abuse like those of William Apess before him (Apess, Son of the Forest 5). Nor did he share Zitkala-Ša's experience of hair shorn by "teachers" while tied to a chair (Zitkala-Ša 91)—a story typical of many of their contemporaries who passed through Gen. Richard Henry Pratt's Carlyle School for Indians. At the same time, he was not in a position to pay out of pocket for a cosmopolitan education at Oxford as John Joseph Mathews after him evidently was. Eastman's entire education was funded through...