Charles Alexander Eastman: Sioux Storyteller and Historian

Abstract

Charles Alexander Eastman, the Sioux, Ohiyesa, is unique among Indian writers. No other writer moved so far culturally in a lifetime, from the tribal life of the Santee Sioux, who were in exile following the Minnesota Uprising, the white society of Dartmouth College and Boston University Medical School, a world in which he met Matthew Arnold, Theodore Roosevelt, Longfellow, Emerson and Francis Parkman. As a result, Eastman's autobiographies, biographies, and stories are told by him he experienced and perceived them. His Indian contemporaries, on the other hand, have provided mainly as told to biographies, with all of the possible misunderstandings and misinterpretations which occur when there is a recorder or editor and often a translator well. Consider, for example, Black Elk, who told his story in Sioux his son Ben, who then translated it into English for John Neihardt, who then reworked it into his own style.1 But because Eastman lived so successfully in two such diverse cultures, a number of problems appear in his recording of history and of the Santee Sioux tribal stories. The first problem arises because he was an Indian-thinking author writing for white readers. He is often quoted an authority for historical fact. Yet it is not clear that in his own mind he separated historical fact from legend. A second and related problem is a failure at times separate the historical incidents and stories told in the tribe from his own created short stories. A third problem is his conversion a conservative Protestantism, which, a result of strong influence upon him from the age of fifteen until his marriage at the age of thirty-three, probably led certain interpretations of Sioux legends and customs. George E. Hyde, American historian, in Red Cloud's Folk speaks of