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e p i l o g u e Return to Minnesota Eastman’sLegacy After reflecting on Eastman’s life and work for the past eight years,ever since I moved to Minneapolis in the summer of 2000 and culminating in the writing of this book, the real work of learning from Eastman’s legacy has only just begun. First, I had to get over my own inhibitions about embracing Eastman’s work, which entailed recognizing that I had more in common with him than I had realized.Then,I had to learn how to teach his work so that my students understood the extent to which, as Eastman claims at the conclusion of From the Deep Woods to Civilization, he is both an Indian and an American. Just as important, I had to come to terms with the way in which Eastman was an intellectual such that he did not turn into an ivory tower stereotype. Not only was Eastman never a college professor; he also never felt compelled to narrow his writing agenda into a particular specialization, thereby becoming an “expert” of any kind. Since the Dakota do not divide knowledge into the exclusive bodies of discourse that define western “disciplines,” Eastman’s epistemological paradigm reflects a diJerent worldview, in which knowledge is contained by people in social roles that were and are meaningful to the tribe: medicine, storytelling,ceremony , hunting, warfare, vision, and dream. Each may be further expanded into diJering subjects and experiences, which in turn may be combined in a variety of ways.What this means to the Indian intellectual writing about any aspect of the Indian experience, including the modern,is that specializing in the analytical sense of limiting one’s focus to a particular abstract topic is impossible,or at least does not make any sense. Eastman’s example is one of interweaving subject and context into a coherent whole. Just as the Indian individual does not have an identity without a tribe or relatives, so too what he or she writes about does not have any meaning without the appropriate context. What 153 Dakota Philosopher 154 results,similar to the oral tradition,is a nonlinear discourse in which a prism of ideas,values,phenomena,and concomitant discourses appear. At this point, I cannot help but look back to when this book first began to crystallize,which was while I taught a graduate seminar titled “Lessons in Assimilation:American Indian Intellectuals, 1890–1934.” At the time,I thought I was pursuing a much more ambitious project of composing an intellectual history of the prominent American Indian writers and activists of the Progressive Era. Consequently, for the spring seminar held at the Newberry Library in Chicago,under the auspices of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History, I assigned a range of works, not only by Eastman but also by Carlos Montezuma,Arthur C. Parker, and Zitkala-Sa. My students came from an equally diverse range of graduate programs from around the Upper Midwest. Naturally, among them were some students who were suspicious of anyone who did not maintain the same “radical” values they espoused, regardless of what “excuse” may have been mustered due to historical circumstances. Since not all that long ago I held a similarly skeptical position against any and all “progressive Indians,” I thought I knew where my own students had their misgivings. Anticipating the criticism, I set out to demonstrate the myriad ways in which Eastman,whose works inaugurated the course,was an authentically indigenous intellectual, complete with traditional knowledge that many today would envy. For starters, Eastman was fluent in the Dakota language;his acquaintance with Dakota traditions was obtained in a non-reservation life in Manitoba;and he learned of Dakota and family history from a Dakota elder,Smoky Day,who taught him in Dakota. Nonetheless,one student in particular—an Okanagan from British Columbia , who was attending Ohio State University—was adamant about forging a specific agenda against everyone he was reading in this seminar and would not take into consideration any of the often-excruciating ordeals that Eastman and his peers endured for the sake of promoting Indian rights.While I was not worried about maintaining control over my class,given that the other students were enthusiastic about examining the readings from a variety of angles,nevertheless the one student’s persistence led me to turn to the only person in the American Indian Studies community whose word always goes a long way at opening...

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