Changed Forever

American Indian Boarding-School Literature

Arnold Krupat

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438480060, 9781438480077
• eBook ISBN: 9781438480084
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

The second volume of the first in-depth study of a range of literature written by Native Americans who attended government-run boarding schools.

After a theoretical and historical introduction to American Indian boarding-school literature, Changed Forever, Volume II examines the autobiographical writings of a number of Native Americans who attended the federal Indian boarding schools. Considering a wide range of tribal writers, some of them well known-like Charles Eastman, Luther Standing Bear, and Zitkala-Sa-but most of them little known-like Walter Littlemoon, Adam Fortunate Eagle, Reuben Snake, and Edna Manitowabi, among others-the book offers the first wide-ranging assessment of their texts and their thoughts about their experiences at the schools.

PART I

DAKOTA BOARDING-SCHOOL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

1

Charles Eastman’s From the Deep Woods to Civilization

CHARLES ALEXANDER EASTMAN WAS BORN IN 1858 TO MANY LIGHTNINGS, a Santee Sioux, and Wakantewin, or Mary Nancy Eastman, daughter of the artist and army officer Seth Eastman and his Native wife. As their fifth and last child, he was given the birth-order name Hakadah, and because his mother died soon after he was born, that name has frequently been translated as “the pitiful last.”¹ At about the age of four he received an honor name, Ohiyesa, “winner” (Indian Boyhood 32), for success at lacrosse (37). After many years of schooling he received his medical degree from Boston University Medical School in 1890, at the age of thirty-two, becoming one of the first Native American doctors.²

Eastman’s first medical posting was to the Pine Ridge Agency, where he arrived in November 1890. In the last days of December that year he found himself ministering to his fellow Dakotas shot by federal troops at Wounded Knee Creek.³ For the most part, however, Eastman’s professional career did not involve medical work. Upon leaving Pine Ridge he served as physician at the Crow Creek Agency and for a time attempted to establish a private practice in Saint Paul, Minnesota. For most of his life, however, he worked in administrative and bureaucratic capacities. He spoke at the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893, and was “outing agent”—not school doctor—for Richard Pratt at the Carlisle School for a year in 1899. In formal attire, Eastman attended Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday party in New York City in 1905. Between 1903 and 1909 he served the Bureau of Indian Affairs in a project to provide new names for the Sioux, and he was a founding member of both the American Indian Association (1892) and the Society of American Indians (1911), having played a part in the establishment of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910. He addressed the First Universal Races Conference in London in 1911 and, in 1923, was a member of Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work’s Advisory Council on Indian Affairs, known as the Committee of One Hundred. Eastman was the first recipient of the award for distinguished achievement given by the Indian Council Fire at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. He frequently appeared as a paid lecturer and also published nine books and a considerable number of essays.⁴ Eastman died in 1939.

For a time critics examining Eastman’s life and work disparaged him as an accommodator of federal assimilationist policies, one who had largely abandoned his identity as an American Indian in order to become a successful, if hyphenated, Indian-American. Thus in an early study Marion Copeland concluded that Eastman “fell into the role of functionary to one faction after another whose primary concern was to control and convert the Indian” (1978 8). Later Robert Warrior cited Eastman’s response to John Oskison in 1911 at the first meeting of the Society of American Indians—Eastman said to those who thought “a great deal of injustice” had been “done to our tribes,” that “really no prejudice has existed so far as the American Indian is concerned” (in Warrior 1999 6)—as indicative of his “blinding progressivistic optimism” (7). A recent reevaluation of Eastman, however, is represented by Kiara Vigil’s estimate that Eastman’s “work as a political activist required negotiating civilizationist thinking and rhetoric while recognizing indigenous sovereignty” (2015 48). I would qualify this only by observing that a full recognition of what is understood today by the term “indigenous sovereignty” was hardly possible historically until perhaps the last ten years or so of Eastman’s life, if then.

But Vigil’s recognition of Eastman’s engagement in complex negotiations of rhetoric and praxis in this difficult period of sustained assault on Native American cultures, languages, and sovereignty is important. It builds upon Hertha Wong’s earlier assertion of the “uneasy alliance” (142) between “assimilationist and traditional Sioux values” in Eastman’s work (148). Philip Deloria offered a useful summary of these “uneasy alliances” or “negotiations” on Eastman’s part, writing that “Eastman’s Indian mimicry [he often performed in headdress and regalia] invariably transformed his construction of his own identity—both as a Dakota and as an American. He lived out a hybrid life, distinct in its Indianness but also cross-cultural and assimilatory” (1998 123). Like other prominent “progressives,” he “worked actively to preserve elements of Native cultures and societies from destruction” (Deloria 2013 26).

At the elite private institutions Eastman attended, he was either the sole Indian student or one of only a few. He would certainly have known—to take a phrase from W. E. B. Du Bois to which I will return—how it feels to be a problem. Before turning to Eastman’s writing about his education, I want to engage briefly a matter that has occupied Eastman’s critics: whether and to what degree ideas and values expressed in his books derive from the participation of his wife, Elaine Goodale Eastman, in their composition.

Goodale (1863–1953), a graduate of Smith College, was first employed as a teacher to the Indians at the Hampton Institute, during which time she met Richard Pratt. Although she strongly favored reservation day schools over the off-reservation boarding schools championed by Pratt, she was nonetheless sufficiently impressed by his efforts to write the first (and thus far the only) biography of him, tellingly entitled, Pratt: The Red Man’s Moses (1935). Goodale served as supervisor of Indian schools in the Dakotas, based at the Pine Ridge Agency, and it was there that she met Charles Eastman upon his arrival from the east in November 1890. The two became engaged on Christmas day of that year, and less than a week later Goodale assisted as her fiancé tended to the Lakota survivors of the Wounded Knee massacre. The two were married in New York in June 1891 and would work together and raise a large family before separating in 1921.⁵

In an autobiographical text, Goodale wrote that “in an hour of comparative leisure,” she had “urged” her husband “to write down his recollections of the wild life, which [she] carefully edited” (E. Eastman 2004 173). He did so, and his first texts appeared in several of the periodicals of the day, some of which her husband included in his first autobiography, Indian Boyhood (1902). In the last chapter of his 1916 autobiography, From the Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian, Eastman noted that the book was “the eighth that [he had] done, always with the devoted cooperation of [his] wife” (185), adding that although “but one book, ‘Wigwam Evenings’, bears both our names, we have worked together” (185–86). It is the nature of that work that remains in dispute.

David Reed Miller believed that “Elaine was indispensable to her husband’s writing,” noting—as others have—that “after his separation from her in 1921, he published nothing new” (66).⁶ Margaret Jacobs, on the basis of a careful reading of some of Goodale’s letters and a late autobiographical sketch, concluded that Goodale herself believed she had “cowritten every book attributed to Charles alone” (39). A contrary view was expressed by H. David Brumble (1988). To dwell on this matter no longer,⁷ I share Theodore Sargent’s assessment that Goodale was, on occasion, “critically important in putting Charles’s words into acceptable [!] English” (2005 87), but that she altered few of his meanings. Eastman never shared his royalties with Goodale, and among other possible reasons, this may be because of his strong sense that whatever her aid, the books were indeed his work alone. It is also worth noting that he may have been particularly sensitive to the issue of what constituted an author’s original composition as the consequence of an incident in his schooling when he was accused of plagiarism (considered later). In what follows I take Eastman’s meanings and almost all of his words to be his own, noting the rare occasion when I suspect a trace of Goodale’s hand.

Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman had more years of formal education than any Native writer before him, and this fact is worth more attention than it has received. As Bernd Peyer long ago compiled the details, Eastman “attended Santee Normal Training School (1874–76), Beloit College (1876–79), Kimball Union Academy (1882–83), Dartmouth College (1883–87), and Boston University” (232). Even this substantial listing does not include his first year of schooling at the day school in Flandreau, South Dakota (1873–74), his two years at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois (1879–81), and the three summers (1887–90) he attended Northfield Mount Hermon School while studying at the Boston University medical school. Not one of these was a government boarding school; as Eastman would write in Deep Woods, during his first years in school “the Government policy of education for the Indian had not then been developed” (49). Only Flandreau and Santee were Indian schools, and all the others were elite mainstream institutions, but I have thought it worthwhile in the context of this study to look at Eastman’s educational experiences nonetheless.

It is near the conclusion of his first autobiography, Indian Boyhood, that Eastman details the event that changed his life, ushering in his many years of schooling.⁸ He writes that when he was fifteen, he had felt an “unusual excitement” one day upon returning to camp and seeing “a man wearing the Big Knives’ clothing … coming toward [him] with [his] uncle” (246).⁹ His uncle—he had adopted the boy when the family believed his father had been hanged for his part in the 1862 Sioux uprising in Minnesota—informs him that the man is his father, that he has “adopted the white man’s way,” and come “for [him] to learn this new way, too” (246). His father, Many Lightnings, now calls himself Jacob Eastman, and, Eastman notes, he “had brought [his son] some civilized clothing,” the adjective offering a description, not an evaluation of the attire provided. “At first,” Eastman recalls, he “disliked very much to wear garments made by the people [he] had hated so bitterly,” but “the thought that … they had not killed [his] father and brothers, reconciled [him], and [he] put on the clothes” (246). Under these circumstances, he does not, of course undergo a cleanup and certainly no hair cutting before donning the “civilized clothing.”

It is on the way to Flandreau, after Ohiyesa has heard and seen for himself “the fire-boat-walks-on-mountains” (247)—a train—that he first encounters Christian practice engaged in by an Indian. The young man is about to go out to hunt when his father “stopped [him] … and bade him wait.” His father “was accustomed every morning to read from his Bible, and sing a stanza of a hymn.” To this, Eastman writes, he “listened with much astonishment. The hymn contained the word Jesus. [He] did not comprehend what this meant.” His father explains “that Jesus was the Son of God who came on earth to save sinners, and that it was because of [Jesus] that he had sought [Ohiyesa].” Looking back, Eastman notes that “This conversation made a deep impression on [his] mind” (246), although he could not at the time have understood concepts like the son of God or the salvation of sinners. The final paragraph of Indian Boyhood describes Ohiyesa’s arrival at his father’s home in 1873 and his coming school days: “Late in the fall we reached the citizen settlement at Flandreau, South Dakota, where my father and some others dwelt among the whites. Here my wild life came to an end, and my school days began” (247).

Jacob Eastman had settled at Flandreau in 1869, after being released from four years’ imprisonment in Davenport, Iowa, where along with his older son, John, he had been converted to Christianity by Stephen Return Riggs and Thomas Williamson. Riggs not only spoke Dakota but had served as interpreter for the Dakotas on trial by the government, and he had also translated the Bible into the language. He and Williamson would both have worked hard to make such concepts as “the Son of God,” “sinners,” and “salvation” comprehensible to their potential converts. But none of this is treated in Indian Boyhood, which was written for what we would now call a young adult audience.¹⁰

From the Deep Woods to Civilization,¹¹ Eastman’s second autobiographical volume, opens by revisiting the conclusion of Indian Boyhood.¹² The last chapter of that book was titled, “First Impressions of Civilization”; the first chapter of this one is called “The Way Opens,” and in it Eastman provides details he had not given in Indian Boyhood while omitting others included in the earlier book.¹³ In just three paragraphs Eastman summarizes his Indian boyhood from the perspective of a man who has attained a number of mature and critical “impressions of civilization.” He notes having been trained as a boy “to be a warrior and a hunter,” and “not to care for money or possessions;” that is, to become, “in the broadest sense a public servant” (1), a responsible member of his tribal nation. Indian warfare he describes as akin to college athletics (2), very different, he observes, from “civilized war” because in it, there “was no thought of destroying a nation, taking away their country or reducing the people to servitude.” At least there was not, Eastman writes, until his people “had adopted the usages of the white man’s warfare for spoliation and conquest” (2). Ironies of this sort are frequent.

An exception to tribal warfare as intercollegiate competition, he writes, involved conflict with the Americans. He “was taught,” Eastman explains, “never to spare a citizen of the United States” (3). Although his people “were on friendly terms with the Canadian white men,” this was not the case with the Americans. This was because they had “pretended to buy [Dakota] land at ten cents an acre, but never paid the price,” and “the debt stands unpaid to this day.”¹⁴ The Sioux protested, and when they received no redress, there “finally came the outbreak of 1862 in Minnesota, when many settlers were killed, and forthwith our people, such as were left alive, were driven by the troops into exile” (3). His father was among those who fled and was later captured. Eastman says “we were informed that all were hanged.”¹⁵ “This was why,” he explains, his uncle “had taught [him] never to spare a white man from the United States” (3).

Eastman describes his traditional upbringing “in the upper Missouri region, and along the Yellowstone River” (4), until, in “the winter and summer of 1872,” his people “drifted toward the southern part of what is now Manitoba” (5). It is there that his father comes to find him a year later, and Eastman retells the story of the day on which his father arrived. In this telling Eastman has his father immediately proceed to an “eloquent exposition of the so-called civilized life, or the way of the white man” (7). Although he “could not doubt” his father, he nonetheless acknowledges “a voice within saying to [him], ‘A false life! a treacherous life!’ ” Both his father’s voice and that inner voice would speak to him throughout his life.

Jacob Eastman, his son writes, “had been converted by Christian missionaries” who gave him “a totally new vision of the white man, as a religious man and a kindly” (7). Although the father continues to believe that the traditional life of the Dakota “is the best in a world of our own, such as we have enjoyed for ages” (8), he knows there is no resisting the power of the whites. “Above all,” he says, “they have their Great Teacher … Jesus” (8). Thus, Jacob Eastman has concluded that “the sooner we accept their mode of life and follow their teaching, the better it will be for all of us” (8). Whatever doubts the boy may yet have, he nonetheless agrees to return to the United States with his father.

Eastman describes the eventful trip, which now does reference his father’s Bible reading and hymn singing—all in Dakota—and mentions an encounter with the loud “monster with one fiery eye” (13), a Northern Pacific train. They arrive at “Flandreau, in Dakota Territory,” on a “peaceful Indian summer day,” as it happens, one when “the whole community gathered together to congratulate and welcome us home” (13). Soon Jacob Eastman says, “ ‘It is time for you to go to school my son,’ … with his usual air of decision” (16). Ohiyesa asks what he is to do at school, and his father’s response specifies learning “the language of the white man … how to count your money and tell the prices of your horses and furs.” These will involve learning “A, B, C, and so forth”; his father has learned only a few of these letters himself (17). Ohiyesa is soon off “to the little mission school, two miles distant over the prairie” (17).

Once at the school, Eastman is met by “thirty or forty Indian children” (21) observing the newcomer as curiously as he observes them. He finds the children dressed in “some apology for white man’s clothing,” the “pantaloons” and coats they wear all oddly sized. “Some of their hats were brimless, and others without crowns, while most were fantastically painted” (21). He does not describe his own attire. The schoolboys have short hair, and Eastman notes something that had not been described for Indian students elsewhere: that their hair “stood erect like porcupine quills” (21). Eastman observes that the “boys played ball an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I Dakota Boarding-School Autobiographies
• Part II Ojibwe Boarding-School Autobiographies
• Part III. A Range of Boarding-School Autobiographies
• Appendix A A Letter from Thomas Wildcat Alford, a Returned Student Formerly at Hampton Institute
• Appendix B Indian Boarding-School Students Mentioned in This Study, Vols. 1 and 2
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover