[In the following excerpt, Wong examines the ways in which Eastman's personal bicultural tension is revealed through the tone, syntax, and content of his autobiographies, Indian Boyhood and From the Deep Woods to Civilization.]

When his mother died shortly after his birth (1858) in the woodlands of southwest Minnesota, Hadakah (The Pitiful Last) was raised in the traditional Santee Sioux ways by his paternal grandmother (Uncheedah) and his uncle. A few years later, as an honor for his band's triumph in a lacrosse game, he was awarded the name Ohiyesa (The Winner). In 1862, when Ohiyesa was four years old, the first of three life-changing events occurred. Having been denied their rightful government annuities, factions of the starving Minnesota Sioux killed several hundred white settlers in what is now called the Minnesota Sioux Conflict. Believing Ohiyesa's father, Many Lightnings, had been arrested and executed by Euro-Americans, the rest of the family fled to Ontario, Canada. There Ohiyesa spent the next eleven years in the woods of the Turtle Mountains learning to be a hunter and a warrior in the pre-contact ways of his people.

At the age of fifteen, when Ohiyesa was just about ready to go on his vision quest, Many Lightnings appeared, as if returned from the dead, to take his son back to the United States to learn the ways of the whites. From this time on, Ohiyesa, soon to become Charles Eastman, had to contend with this second major disruption of his life. After attending Beloit College, Knox College, and Dartmouth College and graduating from Boston University Medical School in 1890, he arrived at Pine Ridge Reservation in time to care for the victims of the Wounded Knee Massacre, the third life-altering event of his life. Every idealistic notion he entertained about "the Christian love and lofty ideals of the white man" was strained severely as he tended to the wounded and dying members of Big Foot's band.

At Pine Ridge he met Elaine Goodale, a white New Englander teaching in Indian Territory. They were married in New England in 1891. To support his family of six children over the years, Eastman worked at a series of jobs in various locations: as a physician on and off reservations, as a YMCA representative to Indians, as a Bureau of Indian Affairs employee in numerous capacities, as an attorney for the Sioux in Washington, D.C., and as a writer and lecturer. In 1921, after thirty years of marriage, Elaine and Charles were separated. In the same year, his growing disillusionment with Euro-American Christian values led him to leave New England for a quieter life in Minnesota. In the 1930s, he retreated to a cabin in the semiseclusion of the Ontario forest, retracing his steps back from "civilization" to the deep woods.

During the years of his marriage, Eastman, "always with the devoted cooperation" of his wife, wrote numerous books and articles about native life and Indian concerns. In the epilogue to her autobiography, Sister to the Sioux, Elaine Goodale Eastman, an author in her own right, wrote:

In an hour of comparative leisure I had urged him to write down his recollections of the wild life, which I carefully edited and placed with St. Nicholas. From this small beginning grew Indian Boyhood and eight other books of Indian lore, upon all of which I collaborated more or less.

Goodale, then, provided the initiative and the editing for nine of Eastman's eleven books. After their separation in 1921, Eastman continued to write, but he never again published. Eastman's biographers tend to agree that Eastman was responsible for the ideas, while his wife was responsible for the editing. She seems to have been the force guiding his work into print as well.…

Filled with nineteenth-century "Friends of the Indian" notions of helping native people assimilate into the mainstream of American life (through education and Christianity), Elaine Goodale spent five and a half years teaching in small villages on what was then the Great Sioux Reservation. She was no idle curiosity seeker. She knew the Lakota language, went on at least one hunting trip with native friends, and was known as "Little Sister" to the Sioux. During this time, she wrote articles about the Lakota for newspapers and magazines in the East. In 1930, she admitted that her "songs of Indian life exhibit a pardonable coloring of romance." But, she added, she wrote "mainly in prose and with serious educational purpose." Some of this "coloring of romance" and "educational purpose" is evident in her husband's two autobiographies: Indian Boyhood (1902) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916). This may not be due entirely to his wife's editing, however. Eastman himself believed in the Christian humanism he had been schooled in for eighteen years.

While most Native American autobiographers of this period speak their tribal stories to Euro-American editors, Eastman writes his personal history himself, relying on such Western autobiographical forms as education and conversion experiences. Although Eastman collaborated with his wife-editor, this may be less important than the extent to which he incorporated the collaborative process into himself, combining the functions of both white editor and Indian informant. In addition, Eastman was raised in the traditional ways of the Santee Sioux, but he received a Euro-American education. He worked closely with white Indian reformers who believed that assimilation was the answer to "the Indian problem," but at the same time, he was fiercely attached to traditional Sioux values. This uneasy alliance induced Eastman to attempt to consolidate Christian and Sioux values. Ohiyesa, as the young Eastman was called, whose childhood had been spent in the Ontario woods, became Charles Alexander Eastman, the transformed Sioux who was trained as a physician. One problem for him, then, was how to write about his Indian life for a white audience, how to reconcile truth and romance, how to balance his Sioux upbringing with his Anglo education.

Published in 1902, Indian Boyhood covers the first fifteen years of Ohiyesa's life. The narrative is not strictly chronological. Instead, it jumps ahead and back, moving from anecdote to dialogue to ethnological description. Eastman incorporates multiple voices into his life history. We hear dialogues with and stories from his grandmother Uncheedah, the "preserver of history and legend" Smoky Day, his uncle White Footprint, and the storyteller Weyuha. It is as though Eastman were re-creating for his children, for whom he wrote the book, the family and tribal storytellers of his youth.

Eastman relies on the oral and performance aspects of native personal narrative, but he does not include pictographs or drawings of any sort. Eastman includes stories from two of the three traditional Lakota narrative forms: Ehani Woyakapi (legend) and Woyakapi (true stories). Smoky Day tells the legend "The Stone Boy" and true accounts of the battle exploits of Jingling Thunder and Morning Star. Weyuah relates the legend of his people, while Uncheedah recites the true stories of an Ojibway raid and of the first battle of her son, Mysterious Medicine. After much coaxing by the young Ohiyesa, White Footprint tells him numerous hunting stories, including one about the beautiful female huntress, Manitoshaw. Humorous stories of real misadventures are told by the comic Matogee, and by his friends Chankpayuhah and Bobdoo.

In contrast to the numerous mythological and historical stories, songs are a minor part of the oral component of Eastman's autobiography. He includes three lyrics from three types of songs: a Strong Heart song to be sung in battle, a serenade from a wooer to a maiden, and a lullaby his grandmother sang to him. Together, these few songs give the reader a sense of the variety of songs and their importance to the Sioux; they provide ethnological details rather than insights into Ohiyesa's childhood.

Just as songs are scarce in Indian Boyhood, performance cues are few. Eastman does not elaborate on the storytelling styles of the speakers. Although he includes descriptions of the Bear Dance and the Maidens' Feast, he does so to explain them to a Euro-American readership rather than to dramatize the events or to illuminate their effect on his personal life. In so doing, he sounds more like an "objective" ethnographer than an autobiographer. In fact, like an outsider and one acutely cognizant of his Euro-American readers, he criticizes the belief in the Bear Dance as "one of the superstitions of the Santee Sioux."

Use of his Indian name, lack of rigid chronology, incorporation of multiple voices that emphasize tribal identity, and inclusion of Lakota narrative forms, all indicate a Native American perspective. There is much, however, that is distinctly Euro-American. Indian Boyhood is, in part, the "Indian Education of Charles Eastman" in which Eastman attempts to rectify the Euro-American misconception that "there is no systematic education of their children among the aborigines of this country." "Nothing," he insists, "could be further from the truth." Certainly, he is trying to correct mistaken notions about indigenous people and life by describing the elaborate education every Indian child receives. Bo Schóler states that "by writing about his boyhood he wishes to illustrate the way things used to be in order to break down the stereotype of the Sioux.…" While this is true to a certain degree, Eastman's purpose and message are not that simple.

Brumble suggests Eastman's complexity when he notes that Indian Boyhood is based on "Romantic Racialist and Social Darwinist assumptions fundamental to Eastman's thinking during these years." Like other indigenous people trying to live biculturally, Eastman faced the difficult task of trying to translate Indian life for non-Indians. To counter the stereotypes of bloodthirsty savages killing wantonly, many Indian writers perpetuated the more positive stereotype of the noble savage. Eastman wished to illustrate how it was possible for a "child of the forest" to live with personal integrity and, through education and conversion to Christianity (believed to be a kind of evolutionary development), to live successfully among Euro-Americans. As a part of this impulse, Eastman describes his mother as "the Demi-Goddess of the Sioux," and to substantiate this claim he explains that tradition says she "had every feature of a Caucasian descent with the exception of her luxuriant black hair and deep black eyes." His mother's beauty, then, is due to her Caucasian physiognomy rather than to her Indian attributes. Perhaps Eastman intends to contradict demeaning popular images of Indians with oversized noses and ungainly bodies. One reviewer of this book aptly points out a parallel issue in African-American literature of the second half of the nineteenth century. At that time, African-American novelists created "tragic mulatto" heroines with white features in order to gain the sympathy of their Euro-American readers. In a similar fashion, Eastman describes his uncle who served as his adviser and teacher: "He is a typical Indian—not handsome, but truthful and brave." In this instance, Eastman may wish to emphasize the interior beauty of his uncle, again contradicting popular stereotypes of Indians as treacherous and untrustworthy. At the very least, his descriptions reflect a tenuous double vision. Eastman reconstructs native people who will gain the attention, sympathy, and respect of their oppressors/white readers.

As well as emphasizing Sioux internal and external beauty, Eastman presents romantic images of the Indian to counteract other predominantly negative stereotypes. He writes that "[t]he Indian boy was a prince of the wilderness," "a born hunter." Uncheedah, he says, helped her sons develop "to the height of savage nobility." Elsewhere he talks about "savage wealth" and "savage entertainments." When Ohiyesa has to offer his beloved dog to the Great Mystery, he describes himself from an outsider's perspective: "To a civilized eye he would have appeared at that moment like a little copper statue." Similarly, he talks of his "rude home" and his "untutored mind," and refers to himself as "the little redskin." In addition, he notes "the Indian's dusky bosom" and their "tawny bodies."

Even more evident than his Eurocentric descriptions of the Sioux is his ambivalence about which perspective is his. His double vision is part anthropological observer (he describes many Sioux customs and "superstitions") and part Santee Sioux participant:

Such was the Indian's wild life! When game was to be had and the sun shone, they easily forgot the bitter experiences of the winter before. Little preparation was made for the future. They are children of Nature, and occasionally she whips them with the lashes of experience, yet they are forgetful and careless. Much of their suffering might have been prevented by a little calculation, (emphases mine)

Speaking of his people in the third person is, in part, a linguistic device to distance himself from them, to enhance his position as an "objective" observer and reporter of Sioux people. He describes them as though he were not one of them himself. At the same time, he perpetuates the stereotypes of Indians as innocent and incompetent "children of Nature" who do not know enough to plan for the future, and who consequently need the Great White Father to admonish and teach them.

Eastman, however, does not consistently use the third person to describe his people. A few pages later, for instance, he discusses "our native women" and "our food" (emphases mine). There seems to be no pattern to when Eastman talks about the Sioux in the first-person plural (we) and when he uses the third-person plural (they). What is striking are his abrupt shifts from a Santee Sioux to a Euro-American perspective and back again, a reflection, perhaps, of his own uncertain identity or perhaps his wife's editorial pen. Andrew Wiget comments on Eastman's "ambivalence toward both cultures": "His support of the Boy Scout Indian programs and his public appearance in tribal dress, though they did reinforce the 'noble savage' stereotype, were Eastman's attempts to assert the dignity of native culture in terms compatible with the best elements of Christianity in his emerging universalist perspective." The seeming contradictions and the evident tensions in Eastman's pronoun use, behavior, and dress reveal his struggle to reconcile two opposing cultures.

Part anthropological document, part personal narrative, Indian Boyhood [1902] is important background reading for understanding the more mature Eastman found in From the Deep Woods to Civilization. At the end of Indian Boyhood, Ohiyesa follows his father to Flandreau, South Dakota. "Here my wild life came to an end," he concludes, "and my schooldays began."

From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916) continues Eastman's education from the time he entered the white world. In the Foreword, Elaine Goodale Eastman explains:

We are now to hear of a single-hearted quest throughout eighteen years of adolescence and early maturity, for the attainment of the modern ideal of Christian culture: and again of a quarter of a century devoted to testing that hard-won standard in various fields of endeavor, partly by holding it up before his own race, and partly by interpreting their racial ideals to the white man, leading in the end to a partial reaction in favor of the earlier, the simpler, perhaps the more spiritual philosophy.

Eastman's 1916 autobiography, then, combines several Euro-American autobiographical forms. It is part secular conversion narrative (from "savagery" to "civilization"), part "the Anglo education of Charles A. Eastman," and part quest.

When his father, Many Lightnings (now Jacob Eastman), explains the importance of Euro-American education, he uses images of Eastman's former life. The ability "to think strongly and well," he tells his son, "will be a quiver full of arrows for you." He compares the whites' "way of knowledge" with the Indians' "old way in hunting." In both you start with a dim footprint, which, if pursued faithfully, "may lead you to a clearer trail." To encourage his reticent son, Many Lightnings says: "Remember, my boy, it is the same as if I sent you on your first war-path. I shall expect you to conquer." Prepared as he was to be a hunter and warrior, Ohiyesa sets out to hunt the white man's wisdom and to conquer his knowledge.

The young Santee Sioux is out of place in this new world, and in the beginning pages of From the Deep Woods to CiLvization, he underscores this by referring to himself in metaphors of wild nature. He describes the dramatic change in his life "as if a little mountain brook should pause and turn upon itself to gather strength for the long journey toward an unknown ocean." Later, he compares himself to wild ponies roaming free on the prairie "who loved their freedom too well and would not come in." He is a "wild cub caught"; "a young blue heron just leaving the nest," balancing precariously on a flimsy branch; "a turtle" pulling himself into the safety of his shell; "a wild goose with its wings clipped"; and, to certain whites at Dartmouth, "a wild fox" in the midst of their chicken coop. Such metaphors emphasize his Sioux identity, and contrast his former free and natural life in the woods with his current restricted and uncertain life in "civilization."

Just as he did in Indian Boyhood, Eastman often describes his people using the positive stereotypes of Indians commonly used by those sympathetic to native people. He refers to Indians as the "children of nature"—the "sons of nature" and the "daughter[s] of the woods." When he seeks "rare curios and ethnological specimens" from the "wilder and more scattered bands" in Minnesota, he describes the area as "the true virgin wilderness, the final refuge … of American big game and primitive man." His collecting ethnological artifacts and considering "big game and primitive man" as dual aspects of the wilderness reveal his Euro-American education or at least his awareness of this Euro-American perspective. Similarly, he exults over his "wonderful opportunity to come into contact with the racial mind."

Eastman does not always write from such a seemingly Eurocentric point of view. He often vacillates between allegiance to the Indians and loyalty to the whites. Although he is critical of Euro-American society, aware of his audience, he is careful to temper his admonitions. Just after describing how he overheard a Beloit classmate call him "Sitting Bull's nephew," who might score a "scalplock before morning," he explains: "It must be remembered that this was September, 1876, less than three months after Custer's gallant command was annihilated by the hostile Sioux." Eastman's choice of adjectives reveals his awareness of his rhetorical predicament. Describing Custer's cavalry as "gallant" and the Sioux as "hostile" and using the highly charged verb "annihilated" echo newspaper accounts of the event and suggest that Eastman was sensitive to his classmates' perceptions of the battle and their consequent judgment of Indian people. Certainly, this is not the story that Eastman's two uncles who took part in the Custer battle would tell. Although this might be read ironically, in context this description seems to be a straightforward explanation. In addition, it reveals Eastman's and his wife-editor's clear awareness of his Euro-American readers.

Eastman tries to strike a balance between Native American and Euro-American concerns in order to mediate Indian perspectives to policymakers in the East. During the trouble at Pine Ridge in South Dakota in the winter of 1890, the moderate chief, American Horse, asks Eastman for advice about how to deal with his torn loyalties between the "ghost dancers, men of their own blood, and the Government to which they had pledged their loyalty." Eastman advises that they "reason with the wilder element" "for a peaceful settlement," but remember their "solemn duty to serve the United States Government." Certainly, such a precarious political position, part of Eastman's bicultural predicament, was difficult, and often dangerous, to sustain.

Nowhere is this bicultural tension more apparent than in his pronoun shifts. As in his earlier autobiography, he shifts his perspective between first-person plural (we) and third-person plural (they). As an attorney for the Sioux, Eastman learns about the treacherous history of treaties between the Sioux nation and the United States. In his description, he refers to himself as one of the Sioux. His pronouns are "we" and "us" until "the frightful 'Minnesota massacre' in 1862." After this episode, Eastman shifts to talking about the Sioux as "them." On the next page, he says he went to Washington with "great respect for our public men and institutions" (emphasis mine). Here "our" refers to the whites. Later in the same paragraph, "they" refers to the white "political henchmen on the reservations," who abuse the Sioux, and "our" alludes to the Sioux, who have been wronged. Eastman's transitions from first person to third person are rhetorical devices to remove himself from whichever group he is criticizing at the moment. He wishes to identify himself with only the best of both worlds. But later he describes Native Americans in the third person not to excoriate them as "hostiles," but to analyze them from an Anglo ethnological perspective:

The philosophy of the original American was demonstrably on a high plane, his gift of eloquence, wit, humor and poetry is well established; his democracy and community life was much nearer the ideal than ours today; his standard of honor and friendship unsurpassed, and all his faults are the faults of generous youth, (emphases mine)

The "original American," then, is a noble savage superior in many ways to the "civilized" white. But Eastman (perhaps with the influence of his wife) clearly aligns himself linguistically with white society. "Our" (i.e., EuroAmerican) philosophy is not so ideal, he insists. As well as the perspective of ethnographer, he adopts the typically Euro-American pose of generous and tolerant father when he excuses Indian faults as "the faults of generous youth."

At times Eastman is ironic. For instance, when he hears about the graft of Pine Ridge officials, he writes: "I held that a great government such as ours would never condone or permit any such practices" (emphasis mine). Similarly, he subverts the language usually limited to describing Native Americans and applies it to Euro-Americans. Disillusioned with the failure of white Christians to live their ideals, he describes the "savagery of civilization" and the "warfare of civilized life." Even Jesus, the embodiment of the Christian ideal, is described ironically. As a YMCA practitioner, Eastman travels among various tribes preaching about "the life and character of the Man Jesus." At one point, an elderly Indian man responds:

I have come to the conclusion that this Jesus was an Indian. He was opposed to material acquirement and to great possessions. He was inclined to peace. He was as unpractical as any Indian and set no price upon his labor of love. These are not the principles upon which the white man has founded his civilization. It is strange that he could not rise to these simple principles which were commonly observed among our people.

With these words, spoken safely by an anonymous unreconstructed Indian elder, Eastman undercuts the fancied superiority of Euro-American ideals. His very next anecdote is about an Indian who converts a white man to Christianity, overturning expectations that it is the white man who "saves" the Indian. Still later, in another role reversal, he has a white guide lead him into the wilderness to seek Ojibway artifacts. By subverting Euro-American assumptions about the language, ideas, and activities of Indians, Eastman overturns Indian stereotypes (just as he seems to perpetuate them elsewhere). In the process, he educates whites and restores humanity to native peoples. Eastman's stance, though, is never absolute, as reflected in his linguistic ambivalence.

In From the Deep Woods to Civilization, Eastman includes few traditional Sioux modes of personal narrative. He mentions several Woyakapi and paraphrases a few stories, but elaborates on none. Through reconstructed speeches and dialogue, we hear numerous voices and gain a vague sense of performance. In part, the recurring dialogue between his father and grandmother serves to introduce and clarify his argument about the ideals of civilization versus the values of the deep woods. He continues this dialogic device throughout the autobiography, furthering his argument in the voices of others.

Instead of pictographs, Eastman includes sixteen photographs. Six are of individuals important in his life (a white influence: Reverend Alfred L. Riggs; his family: Many Lightnings, Mrs. Frank Wood [his "white mother"], Elaine, and his son Ohiyesa; and one historical figure: Kicking Bear). Five are of buildings (an Indian cabin, tipis, Santee Normal Training School, Chapel of the Holy Cross, and Pine Ridge Agency). He includes three pictures of himself, one of his Dartmouth class, and one of him and his wilderness guide. Like the written narrative, his photographs highlight education, religion, and the difference between Indian and white ways. Unlike narrative pictographs, these photographs do not tell his story themselves. Rather, they enhance his written account, illustrating personal and cultural details.

From the Deep Woods to Civilization as a whole can be seen as a reenactment of the tedious and painful process of Ohiyesa's assimilation into Euro-American culture, his transformation from Ohiyesa into Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, whom Pine Ridge residents called "the 'white doctor' who was also an Indian." This is not the traditional, formalized enactment of tribal ceremony, but the new, undetermined drama of Native American acculturation.

Eastman ends his autobiography with a catalogue of his "civilized" pursuits. Just as if he were recounting brave battle deeds in a coup tale, he recalls his major accomplishments as an author, a public speaker, a representative of North American Indians at the First Universal Races Congress in England, an acquaintance of famous personages, a traveler, a correspondent and editor, and a Boy Scout proponent. Dropping the names of the famous as he proceeds through his list of achievements, Eastman means for the reader to marvel at his wondrous adaptation to the Euro-American world. Yet after this lengthy list, he criticizes the very basis of the culture he has adopted. He reflects on "the Christ ideal"—its potential good, but more important, the "modern divergence from that ideal." He condemns those who "are anxious to pass on their religion to all races of men, but keep very little of it for themselves." "Behind the material and intellectual splendor of our civilization," he declares, "primitive savagery and cruelty and lust hold sway, undiminished, and it seems, unheeded." It is Euro-American civilization, then, not Native American culture, that is primitive, that is savage, cruel, and lustful. Still, Eastman advocates "civilization" for two reasons: it is impossible to go back to the simpler life of pre-contact times, and Christianity is not to blame for the wrongdoings of whites.

In the carefully balanced final paragraph of his autobiography, Eastman's initial tension between Native American and Euro-American cultures remains unresolved:

I am an Indian; and while I have learned much from civilization, for which I am grateful, I have never lost my Indian sense of right and justice. I am for development and progress along social and spiritual lines, rather than those of commerce, nationalism, or material efficiency. Nevertheless, so long as I live, I am an American.

With several qualifications, Eastman insists that he can be both Indian and American. It is important to keep in mind that this book was published in 1916, just one year before the United States entered World War I (in which many Indian men enlisted) and eight years before Indians were granted citizenship. This prismatic paragraph begins and ends with mirror images asserting his bicultural identity: "I am an Indian"; "I am an American." These are the two opposites he has tried to reconcile in himself, in the United States of the early twentieth century, and in his autobiography that deals with both.

Hertha Dawn Wong, "Oral and Written Collaborative Autobiography: Nicholas Black Elk and Charles Alexander Eastman," in her Sending My Heart Back across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography, Oxford University Press, Inc., 1992, pp. 117-52.