"Indian for a While": Charles Eastman's Indian Boyhood and the Discourse of Allotment

What boy would not be an Indian for a while when he thinks of the freest life in the world?

Charles Alexander Eastman, Indian Boyhood

In 1893 when Charles Eastman began working on the sketches that would eventually become his first autobiography, Indian Boyhood,he had just moved his family from the Pine Ridge Reservation (where he was employed as the agency physician) to St. Paul MN. ¹ The relocation was not wholly voluntary. Conflicts earlier that year with Pine Ridge's military agent over irregularities in remunerations paid to the Wounded Knee massacre survivors had precipitated Eastman's temporary resignation from the Indian Bureau. ² In his first entry into a dispute with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA, an agency whose goals he had heretofore supported), Eastman found himself marginalized by erstwhile supporters and frustrated by an inability to protect his brethren from graft and government corruption. At precisely such a moment, having come into direct conflict with the institutional apparatus of federal Indian law, he commenced writing a series of autobiographical sketches, addressed to a predominantly white audience. ³ In all, six articles were serialized in St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folksbetween December1893 and May1894. ⁴ These pieces later became incorporated into the text of Indian Boyhoodwhen it was published in 1902 (by which time Eastman was again working for the BIA as the agency physician at the Crow Creek Reservation).

Reflecting both his long-standing immersion in the bureaucracy of colonial domination and his desire to act as a cultural mediator between whites and Native Americans, Eastman's Indian Boyhoodis a complex and intriguing work. ⁵ Like a number of his contemporaries (writers such as Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Zitkala-Sa, and Francis LaFlesche), Eastman set out to interpret Indian culture and identity for the benefit of his (hopefully sympathetic) white readership. Consequently, Indian Boyhoodcontains a great deal of ethnographic material, seemingly intended to suggest the possibility and desirability of assimilating all Native Americans into the cultural and political mainstream of the United States. At the same time, Eastman also frames his work as an autobiography,a sincere attempt to record, organize, and make sense of his own individual memories of the process of becoming "civilized." ⁶ What is most interesting about Indian Boyhoodis the complex way in which these personal and collective narratives intertwine. In the end, I would suggest that this blending is notable not merely as evidence of Eastman's literary sophistication but also as an index of his embeddedness in the colonial institutions of his time.

My goal in this article is to show how both the ethnographic and the autobiographical aspects of Indian Boyhoodtake shape around a specific legal model of self: the paternalistic identity model of the Indian as child, which buttressed the federal government's allotment policy. The book's complexity derives from its author's specific engagement with the hegemonic legal discourse of allotment on the Western reservations during his adult life. ⁷ Looking back on his childhood, Eastman produced a text that established him as a national spokesman and authority on Indian affairs, naturalized the process of cultural assimilation, and legitimized the ideology of allotment. In doing so, though, he also provided subsequent generations of readers with a stark example of the extreme pressures felt by Native American mediator figures during the early decades of the twentieth century.

Contemporary readers hoping to understand both the genesis and significance of Indian Boyhoodshould first turn their attention to a seminal occurrence preceding its composition. In 1887, the same year that Eastman received his Bachelor of Science degree from Dartmouth College, Congress passed the General Allotment Act, or Dawes Act, which sought to "civilize" Native Americans by forcibly turning them into homesteaders. The allotment approach centered around the division of reservation lands into small individually owned plots...