The Soul of the Indian

By Charles A. Eastman

Eastman was a Native American physician, writer, national lecturer, and reformer. He was of Santee Sioux and Anglo-American ancestry. Active in politics and issues on American Indian rights, he worked to improve the lives of youths, and founded 32 Native American chapters of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). He also helped found the Boy Scouts of America. He is considered the first Native American author to write American history from the native point of view.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilder Publications, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781633840478

Charles A. Eastman

Charles Eastman (1858-1939) was a Santee Dakota physician, lecturer, activist, and writer. Born Hakadah in Minnesota, he was the last of five children of Mary Nancy Eastman, a woman of mixed racial heritage who died shortly after giving birth. Separated from his father and siblings during the Dakota War of 1862, Eastman—who later earned the name Ohíye S'a—was raised by his maternal grandmother in North Dakota and Manitoba. Fifteen years later, he was reunited with his father and oldest brother—who were presumed dead—in South Dakota. At his father’s encouragement, Ohíye S'a converted to Christianity and took the name Charles Alexander Eastman, which he would use for the rest of his life. Educated at Dartmouth College, Eastman enrolled in Boston University’s medical program after graduating in 1897. He completed his medical degree in 1890, making him one of the first Native Americans to do so. Eastman then moved back to South Dakota, where he worked as a physician for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the Pine Ridge and Crow Creek Reservations. During a period of economic hardship, he used his wife Elaine Goodale’s encouragement to write stories about his childhood, a few of which found publication in St. Nicholas Magazine. In 1902, he published Memories of an Indian Boyhood, a memoir about his life among the Dakota Sioux. In addition to his writing, Eastman maintained a private medical practice, helped establish the Boy Scouts of America, worked as a spokesman for the YMCA and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and acted as an advisor to several Presidential administrations.

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Foreword

We also have a religion which was given to our forefathers, and has been handed down to us their children. It teaches us to be thankful, to be united, and to love one another! We never quarrel about religion.

Thus spoke the great Seneca orator, Red Jacket, in his superb reply to Missionary Cram more than a century ago, and I have often heard the same thought expressed by my countrymen.

I have attempted to paint the religious life of the typical American Indian as it was before he knew the white man. I have long wished to do this, because I cannot find that it has ever been seriously, adequately, and sincerely done. The religion of the Indian is the last thing about him that the man of another race will ever understand.

First, the Indian does not speak of these deep matters so long as he believes in them, and when he has ceased to believe he speaks inaccurately and slightingly.

Second, even if he can be induced to speak, the racial and religious prejudice of the other stands in the way of his sympathetic comprehension.

Third, practically all existing studies on this subject have been made during the transition period, when the original beliefs and philosophy of the native American were already undergoing rapid disintegration.

There are to be found here and there superficial accounts of strange customs and ceremonies, of which the symbolism or inner meaning was largely hidden from the observer; and there has been a great deal of material collected in recent years which is without value because it is modern and hybrid, inextricably mixed with Biblical legend and Caucasian philosophy. Some of it has even been invented for commercial purposes. Give a reservation Indian a present, and he will possibly provide you with sacred songs, a mythology, and folk-lore to order!

My little book does not pretend to be a scientific treatise. It is as true as I can make it to my childhood teaching and ancestral ideals, but from the human, not the ethnological standpoint. I have not cared to pile up more dry bones, but to clothe them with flesh and blood. So much as has been written by strangers of our ancient faith and worship treats it chiefly as matter of curiosity. I should like to emphasize its universal quality, its personal appeal!

The first missionaries, good men imbued with the narrowness of their age, branded us as pagans and devil-worshipers, and demanded of us that we abjure our false gods before bowing the knee at their sacred altar. They even told us that we were eternally lost, unless we adopted a tangible symbol and professed a particular form of their hydra-headed faith.

We of the twentieth century know better! We know that all religious aspiration, all sincere worship, can have but one source and one goal. We know that the God of the lettered and the unlettered, of the Greek and the barbarian, is after all the same God; and, like Peter, we perceive that He is no respecter of persons, but that in every nation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is acceptable to Him.

CHARLES A. EASTMAN (OHIYESA)

The Great Mystery

Solitary Worship. The Savage Philosopher. The Dual Mind. Spiritual Gifts versus Material Progress. The Paradox of Christian Civilization.

The original attitude of the American Indian toward the Eternal, the Great Mystery that surrounds and embraces us, was as simple as it was exalted. To him it was the supreme conception, bringing with it the fullest measure of joy and satisfaction possible in this life.

The worship of the Great Mystery was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent, because all speech is of necessity feeble and imperfect; therefore the souls of my ancestors ascended to God in wordless adoration. It was solitary, because they believed that He is nearer to us in solitude, and there were no priests authorized to come between a man and his Maker. None might exhort or confess or in any way meddle with the religious experience of another. Among us all men were created sons of God and stood erect, as conscious of their divinity. Our faith might not be formulated in creeds, nor forced upon any who were unwilling to receive it; hence there was no preaching, proselyting, nor persecution, neither were there any scoffers or atheists.

There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature. Being a natural man, the Indian was intensely poetical. He would deem it sacrilege to build a house for Him who may be met face to face in the mysterious, shadowy aisles of the primeval forest, or on the sunlit bosom of virgin prairies, upon dizzy spires and pinnacles of naked rock, and yonder in the jeweled vault of the night sky! He who enrobes Himself in filmy veils of cloud, there on the rim of the visible world where our Great-Grandfather Sun kindles his evening camp-fire, He who rides upon the rigorous wind of the north, or breathes forth His spirit upon aromatic southern airs, whose

Reviews for The Soul of the Indian

[histreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is definitely an interesting book and an important accounting for traditions of the Sioux. Yet it is done from a perspective "after the white man's arrival." And this leads to my conclusion that Mr. Eastman's histrionics are putting an acceptable slant on this Native American's culture.Essentially The Soul of the Indian is a comparison of Sioux religiosity to Christianity. Self-admittedly, the author explains the basis of Indian culture and religion is the antithesis of Biblical religion. Yet he then proceeds to find similarities of varying proportion. He extolls the virtue of Indian religion and expresses disdain for the materialism or monetarism of Christianity.Mr. Eastman takes time to include a section on familiar hierarchy and societal culture. One aspect I found suspect was his play down of the warrior culture. Understanding this book was written after the segregation of Indians to reservations Mr. Eastman likely tempered this profile of his people, in an effort to "humanize" the Native Americans.Hence, I sensed that while the author was conveying his culture to white man, he was simultaneously trying to raise the Sioux religion to the level he perceives Christianity. Struggling to veil his contempt for Christianity but fully cognizant that his target audience was Americans, he paints the Sioux as simply a different strain of Christianity. Blaming some of the misconceptions and alterations of long-standing cultural modalities on arrival of the White, this book needs to be read with a grain of salt. Granted his interpretations may be truly a perspective free of my suspected distortion towards his audience, the same caution afforded to autobiographies applies to this first-person defense of culture and religion.

[benedict8-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Charles Eastman was a native American who was taught in white schools in the early part of the last century.

His purpose in life was to communicate just what the American Indian believed. In this book he showed the values of the Indian *before* he was essentially spiritually polluted by the white invasion of his world.

[cwflatt · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very quick read and an extremely simplified account of Sioux religious practices that the author a Sioux himself applied to all Native American cultures. All cultures are not a like and this painting with such a broad brush does not do justice to the other cultures who practiced religion different than the Sioux. It is still an enlightening book on the practice of having a very personal type of religion that does not rely on someone between you and your Lord

[revslick_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

simply marvelous! Short book outlining not just one man's integration between his experience with Sioux spirituality and his Christian faith. The way Baptism and the Eucharist were reimaged into the Native American culture was truly refreshing. It reminded me of the Christianity's current struggle to integrate and imagine within our current culture.

[lisalouhoo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I wanted a book which did not have a Christian theme, and found this little book in the Religious section at Project Gutenburg: The Soul of the Indian by Charles Alexander Eastman. It was published in 1911, and is an overview of some of the religious customs of the 'Indians' written by a Sioux who was raised in his native traditions, but later educated at Dartmouth and Boston University. This was an interesting book, as the author tried to separate the later traditions of his people from those they held before the white man came and corrupted them. The author is able, in the beginning of the book, to portray the beauty and peace of his people's silent and solitary communion with "the great mystery".