From the Deep Woods to Civilization

Charles Alexander Eastman, also known by his Sioux name Ohiyesa, recounts in this memoir his transformation from a boy raised in the wilderness traditions of the Wahpeton Sioux to an educated physician, author, and advocate for Native Americans. The book, a sequel to his earlier memoir Indian Boyhood, traces his life from age 15 through decades of engagement with white American society.

Eastman opens by describing his upbringing among the Sioux, a life centered on becoming a warrior and hunter. He was trained to value self-control, endurance, sharing, and spiritual communion with the Great Mystery, the Sioux term for the supreme being. He explains that his people's hostility toward Americans originated in being forced from their lands in Minnesota and Iowa after the U.S. government failed to honor its purchase agreements, leading to the 1862 Minnesota uprising and the exile of surviving Sioux into Canada. Eastman's father, Many Lightnings, was captured and believed executed at Fort Snelling, near St. Paul.

In September of his 15th year, Eastman returned from a hunt to learn that his father was alive and had come to reclaim him. Many Lightnings, now a Christian convert who had taken the English name Jacob Eastman, urged his son to adopt the white man's way of life, praising literacy and the teachings of Jesus. Eastman felt torn between admiration and resistance but obeyed out of filial duty. The family undertook a dangerous journey from Canada to Flandreau, Dakota Territory, a small settlement of citizen Indians, encountering hostile Ojibways and other threats along the way.

At Flandreau, Eastman found his father living on a homestead, having renounced warfare and embraced farming after four years as a prisoner of war. Many Lightnings insisted his son attend the local mission school, explaining that literacy and arithmetic were the white man's equivalent of the bow and arrow. Eastman felt humiliated at school: his long hair marked him as different, he could not understand English, and older boys mocked him. His grandmother protested the new ways, arguing that abandoning customs given by the Great Mystery was sacrilege, but his father countered that education was essential for survival. Eastman retreated alone into the woods to seek guidance and returned with renewed resolve. After his attempt at plowing failed, his father recommended a higher school, and Eastman was sent to the mission school at Santee agency in Nebraska, run by Dr. Alfred L. Riggs.

In the fall of 1874, Eastman departed for Santee. When his traveling companion changed his mind, Eastman continued on foot alone, resisting his desire to turn back to Canada. Along the way, a white farm family fed him and refused payment, and their generosity strengthened his resolve to embrace civilization. At Santee, he struggled with the strangeness of chapel prayers offered aloud indoors, having been taught that communion with the Great Mystery required solitude in nature. Over two years, he made rapid academic progress, advancing to algebra and geometry. Dr. Riggs and the Rev. Dr. John P. Williamson, a Presbyterian missionary, became powerful mentors. Dr. Riggs arranged for Eastman to attend Beloit College in Wisconsin. On the eve of departure, Eastman learned his father had died. Grief-stricken but resolved to honor his father's wishes, he left for Beloit in September 1876 without returning home.

Eastman arrived at Beloit less than three months after the Battle of Little Bighorn, in which two of his own uncles had participated on the Sioux side. A local paper falsely identified him as Sitting Bull's nephew, and townspeople harassed him. He struggled with spoken English but excelled in mathematics. During a summer working on a farm, Eastman came to see Christian civilization as representing broad human brotherhood and formally renounced his old ways. After three years at Beloit, he transferred to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he decided to study medicine, reasoning it offered the best opportunity to serve his people. Dr. Riggs then directed him to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, which had been founded partly as a school for Indian youth. Eastman completed his preparation at Kimball Union Academy and entered Dartmouth's freshman class in the fall of 1883. After graduating in 1887, he entered Boston University to study medicine, supported by benefactors including Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wood. He graduated in 1890 and received an appointment as government physician at Pine Ridge agency in South Dakota.

Eastman arrived at Pine Ridge in a November dust storm in 1890. At 32, he was a novelty as an Indian with a medical degree. He insisted on examining every patient personally and speaking in plain Sioux. Captain Sword, the head of Indian police, warned him of the Ghost Dance, a religious movement originating from a prophet who claimed to be God's Son, sent to save the Indians after white men had failed to follow Christ's teachings. The prophet promised an earthquake to destroy white civilization if the Indians performed his rituals. The Indian agent, a political appointee, planned to call for troops. That same evening, Eastman met Miss Elaine Goodale, supervisor of Indian schools in the Dakotas and Nebraska, whose sincerity and fluency in Sioux deeply impressed him.

Eastman reflects that the Ghost Dance represented the last hope of a suffering people whose rations had been repeatedly cut and whose treaties had been broken. He argues the movement could have died naturally if not provoked by military force. Tensions escalated as the agent telegraphed for troops, the Ninth Cavalry arrived, and news came that Sitting Bull had been killed by Indian police while resisting arrest. On Christmas Day 1890, Eastman and Goodale announced their engagement. Four days later, the Seventh Cavalry was dispatched to Wounded Knee Creek to intercept Big Foot's band. Eastman heard distant Hotchkiss guns, rapid-fire artillery pieces. Word arrived that Big Foot's band had been massacred. Over 30 Indian wounded, mostly women and children, were brought to the mission chapel, where the Christmas tree still stood. Eastman worked through the night treating them; most died. Two days later, he led an expedition to the battlefield and found frozen bodies scattered for miles, including women and children who had been hunted down while fleeing. He counted 80 bodies of unarmed men in the council area. The experience severely tested his faith in white Christian ideals.

On June 18, 1891, Eastman married Elaine Goodale in New York City; their first daughter, Dora, was born during their time at Pine Ridge. Meanwhile, Eastman discovered that a congressional appropriation of $100,000 for depredation claims, meant to compensate Indians whose property was stolen during the upheaval, was being systematically skimmed by the disbursing agent. He refused to certify the payments and protested to Washington. An initial investigation confirmed the fraud, but the Secretary of the Interior rejected the findings and ordered a second inquiry that whitewashed the corruption. The local agent retaliated through harassment, and Eastman's wife published exposés in eastern papers. Offered a transfer, the Eastmans declined, disillusioned with government mismanagement. Eastman resigned and moved his family to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1893.

In St. Paul, with little money, Eastman passed the state medical examination and opened a practice. In his spare time, he began writing childhood recollections that his wife sent to St. Nicholas magazine, forming the basis of Indian Boyhood. A Y.M.C.A. field secretary invited him to organize Christian associations among Indians across the West and Canada, work that eventually encompassed 43 associations. This experience prompted critical reflection: among the Indians he met, elders offered pointed critiques of Christianity, with one concluding that Jesus must have been an Indian, since his values of peace and selflessness were not the principles on which white civilization was built. Speaking tours through eastern cities exposed Eastman to urban slums, further shaking his ideals of Christian civilization.

Leading Sioux men, including Eastman's brother Rev. John Eastman, later asked him to represent their interests in Washington, citing broken treaties and millions in outstanding claims. He spent more than two sessions lobbying Congress and the Indian Bureau, appearing before committees and dealing personally with four presidents, but found that officials politely received him only to shelve his requests. In the summer of 1910, he accepted a commission to locate ethnological specimens among remote Ojibway bands in northern Minnesota and Ontario, the last region where Indigenous people still lived beyond the reach of civilization. He visited Chief Majigabo's Bear Island band, witnessed sacred ceremonies, and felt the pull of his old wild life. His last government commission was the revision of Sioux allotment rolls, assigning permanent surnames to 30,000 Sioux over six years, work initiated by President Theodore Roosevelt to prevent complications in land inheritance. He published eight books in collaboration with his wife and built a career as a public speaker. In 1911, he represented North American Indians at the First Universal Races Congress in London, where he successfully proposed replacing the word "Christian" in the congress platform with language of universal brotherhood.

In his closing reflections, Eastman affirms his belief in the Christ ideal but observes that Christian nations have persistently failed to practice it. He concludes that civilization, reduced to its essence, is a system based on trade, where the dollar is the measure of value. Despite this disillusionment, he maintains his advocacy for civilization on two grounds: The old life is no longer possible, and religion itself is not responsible for its adherents' failures. He declares that while he has learned much from civilization, he has never lost his Indian sense of right and justice.