Charles A. Eastman

This book contain collection of 33 Short Stories

The Great Mystery
The Family Altar
Ceremonial and Symbolic Worship
Barbarism and the Moral Code
The Unwritten Scriptures
On the Border-land of Spirits
Earliest Recollections
An Indian Boy's Training
My Plays and Playmates
Hakadah's First Offering
Family Traditions
Evening in the Lodge
The End of the Bear Dance
The Maiden's Feast
More Legends
Indian Life and Adventure
The Laughing Philospher
First Impressions of Civilization
Red Cloud
Spotted Tail
Little Crow
Tamahay
Gall
Crazy Horse
Sitting Bull
Rain-in-the-Face
Two Strike
American Horse
Dull Knife
Roman Nose
Chief Joseph
Little Wolf
Hole-in-the-Day



About the Author


Charles A. 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.


Eastman was named Hakadah at his birth, the translations from Dakota to English being "pitiful last". Eastman was so named because his mother died following his birth. He was the last of five children of Wakantakawin, a mixed-race woman also known as Mary Nancy Eastman. Eastman's father, a Santee Sioux named Wak-anhdi Ota (Many Lightnings), lived on a Dakota (Santee Sioux) reservation near Redwood Falls, Minnesota.


Fifteen years later Ohíyesa was reunited with his father and oldest brother John in South Dakota. The father had by then converted to Christianity, after which he took the surname Eastman and called himself Jacob. John also converted and took the surname Eastman. The Eastman family established a homestead in Dakota Territory. When Ohiyesa accepted Christianity, he took the name Charles Alexander Eastman.


Charles Eastman worked as 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. He later established a private medical practice after being forced out of his position, but was not able to make it succeed.


As they were struggling financially, his European-American wife Elaine Goodale Eastman encouraged him to write some of the stories of his childhood. At her suggestion (and with her editing help), he published the first two in 1893 and 1894 in St. Nicholas Magazine. It had earlier published poetry of hers. These stories were collected in his first book.


In 1902 Eastman published a memoir, Indian Boyhood, recounting his first fifteen years of life among the 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. Ruth Ann Alexander, a scholar of his wife Elaine Goodale Eastman, noted that she worked more intensively on Eastman's stories about Indian life than she was given credit .This was a way to share his life and use her literary talents; he published nothing after they separated. Carol Lea Clark viewed their collaboration this way: "together they produced works of a public popularity that neither could produce separately."