[In the following excerpt, Copeland asserts that Eastman's fictional works Red Hunters and the Animal People, Old Indian Days, and Wigwam Evenings together form a traditional Sioux "vision quest" autobiography.]

Because Charles Eastman's best known book is his earliest, Indian Boyhood (1902), and because that autobiography and its sequel, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), have been most often used as sources for studies of the cultural transition of the Sioux, the literary value of those and of Eastman's later books has gone largely unexamined. Eastman subtitled the 1916 volume The Autobiography of an Indian, but one cannot therefore assume that the conventions of European-American autobiography control Eastman's work.

In Plains Indian Autobiographies, Lynne Woods O'Brien explains that Indian autobiography does not "limit itself to 'real' or historical events in the autobiographer's present or past life." In fact, the forms of Plains Indian autobiography suggest that the Indian's reality is quite distinct from the historical perspective of the European tradition. "Vision," for instance, "allows the autobiographer to explore his future life by spiritual means," while the war or coup story recounts what white culture would call a historical event. Chronological tracing of a life was not traditional among the Plains tribes because, in their days of solidarity, the life of one member of a tribe differed very little from that of any other member. Only great achievements and visions were recorded, and they were significant only in their effect upon the tribe.

Ohiyesa 's (Eastman's) vision quest, he tells us in both Indian Boyhood and From the Deep Woods, began among his uncle's exiled band in the wilderness of Ontario's Turtle Mountains when he was fifteen.

I had already begun to invoke the blessing of the Great Mystery. Scarcely a day passed that I did not offer up some of my game, so that he might not be displeased with me. My people saw very little of me during the day, for in solitude I found the strength I needed. I groped about in the wilderness, and determined to assume my position as a man. My boyish ways were departing, and a sullen dignity and composure was taking their place.

The youth's father, Many Lightnings, who was believed dead for over ten years, appeared at the apex of the boy's quest for vision. Determined to take his son back with him, Many Lightnings—whose story is a part of Eastman's autobiography rather than of his vision quest—seemed to the boy to be a ghost, a being from the Spirit Land, who snatched him away from a lifestyle appropriate for a Sioux warrior. In a state of shock, Ohiyesa, his grandmother, and young cousin left the band of Mysterious Medicine. "I felt," he would write later, "as if I were dead and travelling to the Spirit Land."

Eastman, feeling that he had been ripped untimely from the "womb of our mother, the Earth," came in time to understand the events recorded in From the Deep Woods to Civilization not as "real" but as a period of trial (Seeing with a Native Eye: Essays on Native American Religion, Walter Holden Capps, ed., is a helpful aid to the reader's vision). The intervening events, Eastman's autobiography, are a clear history up to the point where Eastman breaks off in From the Deep Woods. The vision quest takes place in the volumes not easily recognized as autobiography.…

The vision quest is recorded, as Sioux tradition demands, in the tales of the tribal story teller: Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), Old Indian Days (1906), and Wigwam Evenings (1909). The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation (1911) and The Indian Today: The Past and Future of the First American (1915) serve as interpretive guides, making clear that Eastman saw himself and his audience—red and white alike—as late-comers, to whom the story-tellers' wisdom was alien. Nonetheless, Eastman strives to tell each story "as true as I can make it to my childhood teaching and ancestral ideals, but from the human, not the ethnological standpoint." It is an effort to share "flesh and blood," rather than "more dry bones."

Eastman himself tells us in Soul of the Indian that he knows that much of the "symbolism or inner meaning" of his journey will be "largely hidden from the observer." His audience must learn to look with a Sioux eye, to see that reality may be what the mind envisions rather than what the eye observes. To understand that the seven chapters of Soul imitate the sevenfold structure of nature and, in turn, the seven divisions of the Sioux nation, is a beginning. Even when historical vicissitudes and political convenience after 1850 created varying "actual" divisions among the Sioux, they saw themselves as comprised of the Seven Council Fires, meeting annually to reaffirm and reassert the "cohesiveness of the nation" through the ritual of the Sun Dance (Royal B. Hassrick, The Sioux). In other words, Eastman tries to point out that what the reader perceives largely as myth or theory—what is in the mind—defines the reality which the Sioux perceives.

The first of the seven chapters of Soul provides a glimpse of the reality, The Great Mystery, that possessed Eastman as Christianity never could. His grandmother's teaching had been that

The worship of the "Great Mystery" was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent, because all speech is of necessity feeble and imperfect; therefore the souls of my ancestors ascended to God in wordless adoration. 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.… Our faith might not be formulated in creeds, nor forced upon any who were unwilling to receive it; hence there was no preaching, proselytizing, nor persecution, neither were there any scoffers or atheists.

In white culture, silence is thought of as a void to be filled and feared. In Sioux culture, silence is a positive expression of openness to the harmony of the natural order. Eastman tells us in Soul of the Indian that

The religion of the Indian is the last thing about him that the man of another race will ever understand.

First, the Indian does not speak of these deep matters so long as he believes in them, and when he has ceased to believe he speaks inaccurately and slightingly.

Second, even if he can be induced to speak the racial and religious prejudice of the other stands in the way of sympathetic comprehension.

Third, practically all existing studies on this subject have been made during the transition period, when the original beliefs and philosophy of the native American were already undergoing rapid disintegration.

He goes on to describe the problems inherent in white studies of native religions, but the relevant point is that he suggests his own incapacity at the time of the writing to discuss or to participate in the silence of the true believer.

In the foreword to Four Indian Masterpieces of American Indian Literature, John Bierhorst suggests that all American Indian narrative is revivalistic, "a focused progression away from the old and into the new, building to a climax in which the awaited transition is at last made possible through the mechanism of a sacred 'mystery'." Elaine Goodale Eastman and other Friends of the Indian, in all goodwill, understood the "new" to mean the transition into "civilization," into the ways of the white man; hence for them Indian Boyhood and From the Deep Woods represent progress. For the Sioux, progress is distinct from evolutionary progress. The looked-for transition is renewal of health and cleanliness, restoration of what was. The worshipper (or patient) reaches wholeness through a journey which returns him, renewed, to his point of departure.

The symbolic structure of Soul of the Indian prepares us for the symbolic progression of Eastman's volumes of Indian tales. Eastman assumed the role of the story-teller, and his narrative impetus was the shattering of the Sioux nation. Because he had been chosen as a "medicine man," his personal quest was for the sacred mystery that would return the Sioux to their original health and power. In Red Hunters and the Animal People, Eastman characterizes the narrator of these silent lives as a "biographer and interpreter." …

Ohiyesa [Eastman] had become a warrior when, at fifteen, he had been presented with his first gun, a flintlock. The "mysterious iron" filled him with echoes of the war songs he had heard as a child. The rite of passage, amply prepared for by his grandmother and uncles, was swift and silent: "It seemed as if I were an entirely new being—the boy had become a man!" and the man was eager and able "to avenge the blood of my father and my brothers!" To that end, as we have seen, he "had already begun to invoke the blessing of the Great Mystery" and had begun to seek the "sullen dignity and composure" necessary to his task. Then Jacob Eastman appeared. His son's comment is brief: "They were Indians but clad in the white man's garments. It was as well that I was absent with my gun."

The metaphor of Indians clad in white man's garments haunts From the Deep Woods to Civiliztion and Soul of the Indian. One has the sense that Eastman's view of himself is encompassed by this figure and that it is symbolic of his feeling that first his father and brothers and then he himself inhabited a foreign land, wore foreign garb, and participated in an alien mode of life Contrastingly, the figure is absent—or nearly so—in his books of tales: Indian Boyhood, Old Indian Days, Red Hunters and the Animal People, and Wigwam Evenings. It is in these recollections of Sioux myth and folklore that Ohiyesa best reveals the indelible education of his childhood, his true sense of self and of reality.…

In the eyes of his public, the years between the publication of Red Hunters (1903) and 1923 were successful ones. He was hailed by J. T. Faris in 1922 as one of the Men Who Conquered. Despite Eastman's efforts in his books and lectures, Faris still saw Eastman's story as an example of how a savage "Out of an Indian Tepee" could become a model of civilized living. It is no wonder that once Eastman had officially resigned as physician at the Crow Creek Agency (March 1903) his faith in finding a place in either white or red society dwindled.… He devoted himself to writing and lecturing, but the spirit of the story-teller/medicine-man was faint. Perhaps he created old Smokey Day in Wigwam Evenings (1909) to replace his own voice. Old Indian Days (1907), written only two years earlier, seemed to cast Eastman himself in the story-teller's rôle. It is a particularly interesting volume in that it outlines the education and role of both "The Warrior" (Part I) and "The Woman" (Part II).

The hero of Part I, Young Antelope, is first seen perched "spirit-like among the upper clouds" of Eagle Scout Butte, "fasting and seeking a sign from the 'Great Mystery'.…" His career opens where Eastman's autobiography ends in Indian Boyhood, and this narrative represents the spirit autobiography which Eastman needed. Chosen to protect the peace of his people, Antelope faces the encroachment of hostile tribes into the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. The enemy is the Utes, traditional foe of the Sioux, and Antelope—like the wolf-hero, Manitoo, of Red Hunters—is capable of impeding their attack, proving himself a warrior and claiming a mate.

The tale shows that the traditional ways allow Antelope to deal even with the spirit-world. Returning from a raiding party, he finds that his band is gone and that only a single teepee—his own—remains. Taluta, his wife, lies in it, dead. Intense mourning, accompanied by ritual cleansing, allows him to "obtain a sign from her spirit," and rejoining the band, Antelope returns to his duties. In the course of a peace mission, he discovers Taluta's "twin" in Stasu, the daughter of a Ree chief. The allegory is thinly disguised. As long as the lovers remain isolated from relatives, their union is as Edenic as the first years of Eastman's had been: "man and wife, in their first home of living green." Quite literally arranged by a spirit, the marriage is kept holy in "a silent place."

It is fruitful, but in time their thoughts turn to their own people, and they envision their son taking his rightful place among them. Each "entertained the hope that he would some day be waken, a mysterious or spiritual man, for he was getting power from his wild companions and from the silent forces of nature." At length the wife proposes that they sacrifice pride and even life in order to return the child to one tribe or another. Being a typical Sioux warrior, Antelope prefers to sacrifice life to pride: "If I am to die at the hands of the ancient enemy of the Sioux, I shall die because of my love for you, and for our child. But I cannot go back to my own people to be ridiculed by unworthy young men for yielding to the love of a Ree maid." However, because the Rees admire Antelope's bravery, they accept the young family and receive Stasu as one returning from the dead. Such a return had been impossible for Eastman. But even here, the momentary peace is broken when, in the next tale, two young Yankton Sioux warriors shoot a Ree chief totally on impulse.

"The Madness of Bald Eagle" is a strange tale which questions the values of White Ghost, a Sioux patriarch who has not kept the old ways holy. Power passes from him to a young warrior who, like Antelope, reinforces the ritual ways. A strange wood spirit, Oglugechana (or Chanotedah), a hairy little man who lives in the hollow stump of a tree that has been downed by lightning, draws travellers to him, robs them of their senses, and makes of them great war-prophets or medicine men. To retain lucidity and to come upon the spright is to risk one's own death or that of a close relative. But Eastman's hero, Anookasan, is willing to take the risk, and he follows the Oglugechana's music. It leads him to a hairy white man in a log cabin playing what we recognize as a fiddle. Outraged, he attacks the musician—and the action of the tale freezes, to be held static until the end of Part II of the tales. The unusual narrative technique calls attention to itself.

In Part II, the mixed-blood Antoine Michaud—like Anookasan—finds himself alone in the woods. By winding the story back to the end of Part I, we slowly realize that Michaud is the bearded fiddler who was attacked by Anookasan and that the full-blood does not recognize the musician as being of his own kind. But the Yankton responds to Michaud's passivity, accepts him, and becomes destined to the fate of the Oglugechana's victims, for the Yankton Sioux will all die soon, as the fourth tale of Part I, "Famine," suggests.

Alienation, loss, starvation, and death are clearly the themes of Old Indian Days, just as they are the themes of Red Hunters. But the time in this volume is closer to the time of the Sioux's real loss. The setting is in Manitoba on the Assiniboine sometime after the Minnesota Massacre of 1862. Little Crow, the last of the strong Sioux chiefs, is dead, and White Lodge, his son, controls only a small band of renegades. The medicine men prophesy famine and ascribe its cause to the people's desertion of the old ways. "The Famine" juxtaposes the spiritual battle of Face-the-Wind and Eyah, the god of famine, with the white man's interpretation of that battle. To McLeod, trader at Fort Ellis, where Face-the-Wind has come for help, the brave's dying request is simply "delirium," yet McLeod defeats Eyah by ringing the fort's bells as Face-the-Wind has requested. McLeod assumes that he has found the starving band because Magaskawee, one of White Lodge's twin daughters who had lived with missionaries for a time, had sent a written message with the runner to McLeod's son Angus. But the Sioux know that Eyah fears the jingling of metal and that the bell had saved them. It would be easy to miss the juxtaposition of realities at the end of the tale as Angus and Three Stars, the other twin's lover, arrive just in time—accompanied by "the jingle of dog-bells."

The fifth story, too, juxtaposes realities. It is the history of the 1862 massacre. Tawasuota, "The Chief Warrior," having proved his bravery, has been made Little Crow's ta akich-itah (chief soldier). Details of treaties signed and broken are accurately recorded in the tale, but the Sioux code of honor is the real subject of the story. Obligated by his position, Tawasuota joins the attack on the agency and shoots a man who puts up no defense. At first he is so conscience-stricken by his act that he drops from the fight and rejoins his fellow warriors only when the United States cavalry appears. His uneasiness is accompanied by a strong sense of loss, and he finds his people possessed of a "strange stillness" that is distinct from silence. Some of them have retreated to the protection of the whites in Faribault, his wife and sons among them, and have thereby broken up the band irreparably.

In theme and tone, the tales of Part I of Old Indian Days move relentlessly away, from "The Love of Antelope" to "The Grave of the Dog," from the days of Sioux glory to their days of agony. Although there are seven tales, no one remains who remembers that seven is a sacred number or what the number represents. The unity of the Sioux is for-gotten. Passing wagons of fugitives, Tawasuota goes to Faribault and determines that his sons can survive only if they stay with his wife among "the lovers of the whites." Although she protests, "he disappeared in the shadows, and they never saw him again." Eastman's postscript to the tale summarizes: "The chief soldier lived and died a warrior and an enemy to the white man; but one of his two sons became in after years a minister of the Christian gospel, under the 'Long-Haired Praying Man,' Bishop Whipple, of Minnesota." There is no overlapping of the lives of the white lovers and haters, or of the agriculturalists and the hunters who are traditionalists. In historical terms, the agriculturalists had been led by Eastman's own maternal grandfather, Cloudman. To survive, they sold what was not theirs—the earth—and committed sacrilege by cutting into it with plows. The question which the story raises is whether survival is of itself worthwhile. Tawasuota becomes emblematic of the Sioux's dilemma.

The sixth story in Old Indian Days is also history. It opens by focusing upon the ritual arrangement of a Sioux camp: a circle or hoop with the council lodge at its center. In that center, "the minds of all were alike upon the days of their youth and freedom," days obviously past. The group recounts stories "of brave deeds and dangerous exploits… with as much spirit and zest as if they were still living in those days." The Sioux have slipped into the white man's historical time. Their stories have become history rather than reality. Zuyamani's tale of the winter that follows the Minnesota massacre is the autobiography of a man "upon the white man's errand" rather than a quest tale. Even as he wrote the words, Eastman knew himself to be upon the white man's errand.

The faithful dog, Shanka, becomes the narrator of the concluding tale, "The Warrior." While his master sleeps, the dog sets out "to discover the truth." The next day he leads the band to what remains of the buffalo, and when the hunters are overtaken by a blizzard, Shanka's barking leads rescuers to where his master lies beneath two frozen buffalo carcasses in a womb of hay and buffalo hair. His sense of loyalty, mission, and dedication to the truth serves as a contrast to the loss of loyalty, mission, and sense of truth in Tawasuota and Zuyamani, the heroes of Eastman's "historical fiction." It becomes clear, then, that the real values which Eastman understands as Sioux values remain only in the silent peoples. "The Grave of the Dog" commemorates a way of life whose loss we have watched through the seven tales that would have marked a ritual way in Old Indian Days. One suspects that Shanka is the spiritual heir of the dog Ohitika, whose sacrificial death had marked the beginning of Eastman's initiation into the life of a Sioux warrior.

Part II of Old Indian Days, "The Woman," develops "Winona" as the counterpart to Antelope. "Winona" is the name of Eastman's mother, who on her death-bed remained loyal to the Sioux. Her tale begins with a lullaby. The singer is her grandmother, who, like Eastman's own, takes her "among the father and mother trees" to learn their language. To be "nature-born" is to become a part of the Sioux reality. Essentially Part I of Winona's story is another tract on Sioux child-rearing. She learns much—as Eastman's reader must—from the four-footed peoples.

For Eastman a significant fact is that for

the Sioux of the old days, the great natural crises of human life, marriage and birth, were considered sacred and hedged about with great privacy. Therefore the union is publicly celebrated after and not before its consummation.

Winona and her mate's silent time alone in the wilderness is a decided contrast to the highly public union of Charles Eastman and Elaine Goodale at the Church of the the Ascension in New York City and to the high society reception provided by the Frank Woods, in Dorchester. The reception and the honeymoon at "Sky-Farm in the Berkshires" received much attention from the press. In later years, headlines such as "She Will Wed a Sioux Indian" (New York Times, June 7, 1891) and "The Bride of An Indian" (New York Times, June 19, 1891) must have pained both of the Eastmans.

Winona concludes her tale with an example of "womanly nobility of nature." An orphan who was reared by her grandmother, Her-Singing-Heard used herself to form "a blood brotherhood" between the Sioux and the Sacs and Foxes, ending what she saw as "cruel and useless enmity." The fifth tale, "The Peace Maker," shows how Eyatonkawee (She-Whose-Voice-is-Heard-Afar) brings together the disparate bands of Sioux into a nation. She herself, a member of Eastman's band, the Leaf Dweller Sioux, is a historical figure. The tale of her exploits served to retain peace among the bands of Sioux on several occasions. Her tale culminates with her chanting of how she countered the Sac and Fox attacks in which her young husband was killed. It ends with the young mother—"victorious over three!"—making her infant son "count with his tiny hands the first 'coup' on each dead hero." With the same ax that she used to kill the enemy, she puts a dramatic end to her chant by smashing the keg of whiskey from which her listeners drink—"So trickles under the ax of Eyatonkawee the blood of an enemy to the Sioux."

The seventh tale, which is symbolic of the harmony of nature and of the Sioux nation, recalls a more recent occasion, the celebration by the Uncpapa Sioux of their Sun Dance. Forty years before Eastman wrote Old Indian Days, the way had been remembered, and man and animal had joined to keep the nation whole.

But Eastman's last tale shatters the harmony of the seventh. It introduces a new voice, that of Smokey Day, "for many years the best-known story-teller and historian of the tribe," but long dead at the time of the book's writing. The ghost voice continues as Eastman's narrator in Wigwam Evenings, suggesting that the living no longer remember the words of the traditional way. Smokey Day makes clear—as perhaps Eastman can not in his own "educated" voice—that the Sioux do not make the white man's distinction between fiction and history. In fact, he makes it clear that Old Indian Days and Smokey Day's own tales in Wigwam Evenings are perhaps a more accurate reflection of events than are Eastman's later herotales in Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (1918).

In the eighth tale, Tamakoche's three sons are killed in battle; so he urges his daughter, Makatah, to think and act as a warrior. She rejects many suitors and instead of marriage chooses to accompany her three cousins on an attack upon the Crows.

When, in the retreat, her pony tires, the threat becomes a test of her suitors. The braggart, Red Horn, chooses to save his own life while the humble orphan, Little Eagle, sacrifices his life to save Makatah's. Returning to camp, she declares herself "the widow of the brave Little Eagle" and remains true to his spirit for the rest of her life. Although the Sioux woman's usual role was as "a link in the genealogy of her race," Eastman shows here that in the face of unworthy life, loyalty to the dead is preferable. Since no warrior was worthy, the woman must choose—as do so many of the silent people in Red Hunters and the Animal People—to break the genetic link. Thus subtly but undeniably, this eighth tale marks the conclusion of Old Indian Days.

In Wigwam Evenings Smokey Day is younger and less despairing than he is in the earlier books. But despite the efforts of Elaine Goodale, who co-authored the volume, Eastman's increasing despair surfaces. What should be parables for red children have become fables for white children, Ohiyesa's fable among them. The tales of Wigwam Evenings seem to use nature as Aesop might. Their morals are accented as though the teller has no faith in his audience's ability to respond to "every accent, every gesture" of the teller, as Smokey Day's original listeners had been trained to do. Despite this difference, the tales retain ritual emphasis and traditional values. We meet in them the balancers of nature which the whites hear only as voices of discord.

We learn that the Sioux emerged originally from a splinter in the toe of He-who-was-First-Created. This is a decidedly more modest vision of man's significance than the view which gives western man his sense of superiority over nature. We learn that originally all things spoke a single language and possessed a single spirit. Not until Man is destroyed by Unk-tay-keep does He-who-was-First-Created take on a Prometheus-like role, reviving man and giving him fire and weapons to help him survive in a world now unbalanced. When he uses fire and weapons instead of ritual, the animals and plants see Man as enemy. Reinforcing the lesson of Red Hunters, therefore, Eastman shows that man himself creates discord in nature. Only the coming of the Star Boy, son of Star and the Earth maiden, will return balance to the earth. The reality that the Star Boy represents is the interpenetration of the physical by the spiritual world which white logic has destroyed.

The two concluding tales of Wigwam Evenings are tales of magic and of the supernatural in which the Sioux spirit world penetrates white reality. But the penetration is possible only as long as the Sioux believe in and retain the conditions necessary to that coexistence. The old people in "The Magic Arrows" retain this belief, even though the young husband in "The Ghost Wife" forgets. His moment of carelessness loses him his family and his world. The loss is irretrievable, for the Sioux world is as dangerous and remorseless as the world of the animals in Red Hunters.

Ohiyesa (Eastman) is in the tales no longer an apologist or an apocalyptic prophet, but the revealer of an irreversible reality. Like the young warrior's, the Sioux's family and world are "gone from him forever." His people will produce no more heroes, chiefs, or warriors to replace those who are recalled in Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains. In Soul of the Indian, Eastman writes of the Sioux way as dead. Yet I think that each of the volumes is part of a ritual way that Eastman began later in life than was usual. In the narrative which is a substitute for the ritual he returns to that penultimate day when, at sixteen, he stepped into the Spirit Land. Considering his works as a ritual, one can see a strength in the developing character of Ohiyesa that he himself seems not to have seen until the late 1920's.

In a chapter called "Back to the Woods," in From the Deep Woods to Civilization, he details the first steps of his journey back from civilization to the deep woods. On Bear Island in Leech Lake, he came upon a group who "still sustained themselves after the old fashion by hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild rice and berries." Their hunting trails are "deeply grooved in the virgin soil," and they hold the Grand Medicine Dance annually. The voice of the narrator becomes poetic as it speaks of the "clear Black waters" which have "washed, ground, and polished these rocky islets into every imaginable fantastic shape." Leech Lake bestows a sense of the sacred, and from this point on, Eastman and his readers know that "the out-of-doors was the essential vehicle" for Eastman's spiritual quest.

Marion W Copeland, in her Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), Boise State University, 1978, 43 p.