Charles Alexander Eastman’s From the Deep Woods to Civilization and the Shaping of Native Manhood

Malea Powell has argued that Charles Alexander Eastman “imagined new possibilities for Native resistance and survival in the face of violent assimilation strategies” (404–5). To Eastman, Natives had little choice but to acculturate to white society if they were going to resist white domination and survive. But gaining full equality in U.S. society proved difficult in the Progressive Era, given continued white paternalistic regard for Native peoples, as well as enduring negative white stereotypes of Natives, particularly the notion that they were racially childlike, boyish savages incapable of measuring up to the standards of racially superior, “manly” civilized white men. Although scholars have noted the role of gendered discourse in Eastman’s writings, it deserves much more critical attention, for it is an essential site of his resistance to white domination. Eastman fully recognized that Natives had to overcome white racist ideologies that circumscribed their manhood if they were to gain full equality in U.S. society. In his From the Deep Woods to Civilization, Eastman challenges this racism by negotiating the values of white middle- and upper-middle-class manhood, as well as stereotypes of Native manhood. Drawing equivalences between Santee and middle- and upper-middle-class white manhood, Eastman illustrates that Santee—and by extension all Native males—are intrinsically equal to white males in their manly attributes and thus capable of full and equal U.S. citizenship.

Eastman was a firm advocate of the goals of the Dawes Act (1887), the purpose of which was to transform Native males as rapidly as possible from their supposed savage state into self-made, individual citizens by making them agrarian farmers. In his analysis of Eastman’s Indian Boyhood (1902), David Carlson writes:

Eastman’s primary intent [. . .] does not seem to have been to challenge the dominant Western paradigm of the individual self. Rather, he foregrounds the teleology of allotment law, rooted in Euro-American emphasis on growing out of boyish “savagery” into a more “mature,” civilized form of identity.

(608)

Eastman, in fact, often used Darwinist discourse to describe this process, but Drew Lopenzina argues that Eastman’s “unstudied usage of such idiomatic speech was more of a linguistic shortcoming than a hardened conviction that the Indian stood below the white man on some imaginary genetic ladder” (737), a claim that is underscored by Eastman’s desire to prove that Native men were, in fact, equally manly to white men. Eastman believed that the Dawes Act was generally unsuccessful because most whites could not shake the deeply held racist assumptions perpetuated by many anthropologists that Natives were somehow biologically behind whites on a progressive evolutionary paradigm, making the goals of the act incommensurate with biological reality (Carlson 613). Carlson argues that in Indian Boyhood Eastman challenges evolutionary anthropological assumptions by employing the legal discourse of allotment, which was predicated on the assumption that Natives could, in fact, assimilate into white society. According to Carlson, by adhering rhetorically to legal rather than evolutionary anthropological discourse, Eastman stood a better chance of arguing for Native equality because he was able to elide the racism of so-called biology (613–14). By the time Deep Woods was published, anthropology had begun to undergo a radical change under the influence of Franz Boas, who challenged the progressive evolutionary paradigm by advocating a culturally relativist anthropological model, a change that influenced Eastman’s own writing as reflected in Deep Woods (Allred 118–19). Certainly Eastman rejects the evolutionary model that created racial hierarchies, but he does so by confronting this evolutionary model directly, not by eliding it as he did in Indian Boyhood with legal discourse. In turn, Eastman works to find similarities between Santee and Euro-American culture in order to “envision himself as a member of [Euro-American] society” (Allred 120), which is reflected in the ways he draws equivalences between Santee and white manhood.

Eastman’s comparison of Santee manhood to white manhood poses theoretical challenges for scholars, however. The masculine values by which Eastman defines Santee manhood are eerily similar to those...