Indian Boyhood & The Soul of the Indian
An Interpretation
Charles Alexander Eastman
• Three of American author Charles Eastman’s books about native life in the late 1800s and early 1900s are bound together in this Kindle edition: Indian Boyhood, (1902) The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation (1911) and Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, 1918. There is also a bonus book: Old Indian Days, legends (1907).
Indian Boyhood
In 1902, Eastman published a memoir, Indian Boyhood, recounting his first fifteen years of life among the Dakota Sioux during the later years of the nineteenth century. In the following two decades, he wrote ten more books, most concerned with his Native American culture.
The most popular of those are also contained in this Kindle book:
The Soul of the Indian—An Interpretation 1911.
Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, 1918
Old Indian Days – A book of legends, 1907.
About The Author
Dr. Charles Eastman (1848-1939), also named “Ohiyesa”, was born in Minnesota and helped found the Boy Scouts of America before his death at age 80. He is considered the first Native American author to write American history from the Native point of view.
He was a Native American physician, writer, national lecturer, and reformer. In the early 20th century, and prolific author on Sioux ethnohistory and American Indian affairs."
Eastman was of Santee Dakota, Anglo-American and French ancestry. Active in politics and issues on American Indian rights, he worked to improve the lives of youths, and founded thirty-two Native American chapters of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA).
Eastman was named Hakadah at his birth, meaning "pitiful last" in the Dakota, after his mother died in childbirth. Eastman's mother was the daughter of Seth Eastman, a U.S. Army officer and Wakháŋ Inážiŋ Wiŋ (Stands Sacred), who married in 1830.
When Ohiyesa accepted Christianity later in life he took the name Charles Alexander Eastman.
Eastman attended Beloit College and Knox colleges; he graduated from Dartmouth College in 1887. He went on to medical school at Boston University, where he graduated in 1889 and was among the first Native Americans to be certified as a European-style doctor.
Charles Eastman worked as an agency physician for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Indian Health Service on the Pine Ridge Reservation and later at the Crow Creek Reservation, both in South Dakota. He cared for Indians after the Wounded Knee massacre.
Between 1894–98, Eastman established thirty-two Indian groups of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), and established leadership programs and outdoor youth camps. In 1899, he helped recruit students for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, which had been established as the first Indian boarding school run by the federal government.
In the HBO film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007), Eastman was portrayed at different ages by the actors Adam Beach and Chevez Ezaneh.
Books By The Same Author
Red Hunters and Animal People, legends, 1904.
The Madness of Bald Eagle, legend; 1905.
Old Indian Days, legends, 1907.
Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales Retold (co-author with his wife Ellen Goodale Eastman), legends;, 1909.
Smoky Day's Wigwam Evenings (co-written with Ellen Goodale Eastman), 1910
The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation, 1911.
Indian Child Life, non-fiction, 1913.
Indian Scout Talks: A Guide for Scouts and Campfire Girls, nonfiction, 1914. (retitled Indian Scout Craft and Lore).
The Indian Today: The Past and Future of the Red American, 1915.
From the Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian, autobiography; 1916.
