Indian Boyhood

A Santee Sioux boyhood before the reservations: the games, the hunts, the grandmother's teaching, the winter camps, and the flight into Canada after 1862. Charles Eastman was raised as Ohiyesa until fifteen, then educated at Dartmouth and Boston, and wrote this as a physician who had served at Wounded Knee. He is describing a childhood that had already ended for everyone, in the language of the people who ended it. Fifty-five plates by painters including George Catlin and Frederic Remington follow the Great Plains and the rivers of the Eastern woodlands across the nineteenth century, the ground Eastman walked as a boy.