"Playing Indian" in Print: Charles A. Eastman's Autobiographical Writing for Children

Abstract

Charles Alexander holds curious position in Native American literary studies, his work more often the object of an obligatory nod than the subject of sustained critical analysis. What critical attention has received has focused largely on the second of his two explicitly autobiographical works, From the Deep Woods Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian (1916), while scholars generally have little say about the earlier memoir, Indian Boyhood (1902). This curious scholarly neglect of what is perhaps Eastman's best-known work seems attributable in part the fact that Indian Boyhood is, in the words of one reader, expressly children's (O'Brien 34), book limited both in its subject matter and its intended audience. Hertha Dawn Wong, for instance, devotes few pages Indian Boyhood in her study of Native American autobiography but concludes that the book is significant primarily as background reading for understanding the more mature found in From the Deep Woods Civilization (145). Bernd Peyer voices another common sentiment when he maintains that depicts a somewhat idealized, nostalgic in his writing, made correspond values adopted in the course of his later Christian upbringing (233). This notion that mined his memories of childhood in service set of ideas or values foreign that childhood is much more forcefully argued by H. David Brumble III, who outlines (in one of the few sustained analyses of Indian Boyhood) thoroughgoing critique of Eastman's Romantic Racialist and Social Darwinist assumptions in his first autobiography (148). What these diverse critical appraisals share is sense that Eastman's early attempt at autobiography lends itself easy summary, particularly when set next his later volume of autobiography, composed by a more mature Eastman and addressed, as Peyer notes, to mature reader (235). In this light, Indian Boyhood appears uncomplicated, unsophisticated--in short, children's book. As such, the text does not seem invite (or require) the sort of inquiry into questions of identity and politics that From the Deep Woods Civilization, even in its title, encourages. Particularly readers interested in just such critical questions, Eastman's Indian Boyhood reads as something of disappointment, and raises questions of different sort: how could one who knew the trials and tragedies of Native American life so intimately, who had personally searched for survivors among the dead at Wounded Knee, have so thoroughly glossed over those ugly realities in recalling his life as an Indian boy? And, perhaps more the point: what did hope gain by writing story of Indian childhood primarily for readers? The question becomes more complicated in light of the widely held perception at the turn of the century that Native Americans were, in the evolutionary scheme of things, child race. Viewed through the racial ideologies of the time, Native Americans appeared be frozen in an early stage of human development, no more sophisticated than the children of the advanced races, and thus in need of vigilant supervision as wards of the superior white civilization. In the context of such racist assumptions, one might expect Native American writers such as depict Indian adulthood, in all its complexity and particularity and self-sufficiency--the sort of self-portrait Frederick Douglass presented in his Narrative, half-century earlier, as direct challenge similar stereotypes regarding the child-like dependency of African-American slaves. To be sure, one might argue, as Brumble does, that Eastman's choice of subject matter and audience in Indian Boyhood is quite consciously appropriate in light of his apparent acceptance, even affirmation, of the prevailing notions of the evolutionary immaturity of Native Americans (162). …