"Good Indian": Charles Eastman and the Warrior as Civil Servant

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Charles Alexander Eastman remains an enigmatic figure in the early days of American Indian activism-a man whose contributions, while unimpeachable in terms of devotion and good will, are often complicated by the lingering shadow of assimilationist values evident in his writings and his career as one of the so-called red progressives.' Eastman can be located, by chance or design, on what would seem the wrong side of nearly every major issue he faced at the height of his prominence in the early part of the twentieth century. He was a supporter of the Dawes Act, an advocate and onetime employee of the (in)famous Carlisle School For Indians, and perhaps most vexingly, he found himself posted with U.S. forces at what remains the signature atrocity of Native American and U.S. relations, the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee.2 A product of Christian boarding schools himself, and further educated at Dartmouth and then Boston College, Eastman is generally considered to have been an active voice for full Native American immersion into white European culture. In Tribal Secrets, his study on American Indian intellectual traditions,