Ohiyesa: Charles Eastman, Santee Sioux

Front Cover
University of Illinois Press, 1999 - History - 219 pages
Charles Eastman, or "Ohiyesa"
in Santee, came of age during a period of increasing tension and violence between
Native and "new" Americans. Raised to become a hunter-warrior, he
was nevertheless persuaded by his Christianized father to enter the alien world
of white society. A remarkably bright student, Eastman graduated from Dartmouth
College and the Boston University School of Medicine. Later on he served as
government physician at the Pine Ridge Agency (and tended casualties at Wounded
Knee), as Indian Inspector for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and as Indian secretary
for the YMCA, and helped found the Boy Scouts of America.
Concurrently, however, he also worked
on special congressional legislation to settle Sioux claims and was a charter
member and later president of the Society of American Indians. It was his writing,
though, which most clearly established Eastman's determination to hold on to
his roots. In works such as Indian Boyhood, The Soul of the Indian, and
Indian Heroes and Chieftains he reconfirmed his native heritage and tried
to make white society aware of the Indians' contribution to American civilization.
 

Selected pages

Contents

From the Deep Woods
1
To Civilization
20
Service at Pine Ridge during the Ghost Dance
40
Physician versus Agent
67
Indian Secretary for the YMCA
82
Eastman and the Santee Claims
92
Government Physician at Crow Creek 190003
105
Renaming the Sioux
120
Writing and Lecturing
131
Promoting the American Indian
150
US Indian Inspector 192325
170
The Final Years
184
Bibliography
195
Index
207
Copyright

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