[In the following excerpt, Tracy comments on Eastman's portrayal of Native American morality and spirituality in Indian Boyhood and The Soul of the Indian.]

[When he was fifteen, Ohiyesa] was removed entirely from the loved wild life of the west and placed in school among white boys of his own age. With them he learned to express and to shape his thoughts in words that fitted a culture not his own. But with that achievement, and with such discipline as an American college can give, he remained a believer in the integrity of the Indian spirit and the poetry of the Indian mind. His own books are proof of it, and through them is diffused the convincing loyalty of his soul to its own upbringing, and a good forest life.

I do not feel that picture he has given us in AN Indian Boyhood is idealized. A selection has been made, doubtless, of those episodes and experiences that served to shape him and which impressed him most, as well as of those tales and teachings which he was expected to remember. Perhaps there were things which he wisely forgot. Certainly there are included in the picture accounts of savage warfare and of beliefs and practices based on superstition. No Indian is presented as a saint. Many, however, are seen as brave—not merely with an animal courage—and noble according to a consistent code.…

The Soul of the Indian is an important document. Written in grave, restrained English, without bitterness or unfairness, it strips away the veil of self-complacency that so often obscures a white man's view of his own culture in relation to the life he displaces. Necessarily a defense of the red man's code of morals, it is also an interpretation of forest man, of the spirit of man in nature. That spirit it finds ingenuous, yet profound in its intuitions, and therefore worthy. A fair reader concedes that worth because he feels it in the author. Cradled in the woods, familiar from birth with its sounds and lights and shadows, but no less with its struggle for life, its hungers and perils, Ohiyesa emerged in youth to take a white man's education. It schooled his mind but did not change his spirit. Indelibly impressed upon his inmost being was the red man's feeling for the communal good in nature and of responsibility toward the "Great Mystery" which controls all living creatures. What Ishi [the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe and the subject of Theodora Kroeber's Ishi: Last of His Tribe (1964)] could not have said, wanting words, Ohiyesa made clearly articulate, in a book of nature faith, any page of which is quotable. Two passages will suffice, and those who wish to know the fuller detail may go to the original.

The worship of the "Great Mystery" was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent, because all speech is necessarily feeble and imperfect.… 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 on any who were unwilling to receive it; hence there was no preaching, proselytizing or persecution, neither were there any scoffers or atheists.

Long before I ever heard of Christ, or saw a white man, I had learned from an untutored woman the essence of morality. With the help of dear Nature herself she taught me things simple but of mighty import. I knew God. I perceived what goodness is. I saw and loved what is really beautiful. Civilization has not taught me anything better.

Henry Chester Tracy, "Forest Man as Naturist," in his American Naturists, K P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1930, pp. 264-82.