[In the following excerpt, Holm discusses Eastman's presentation of Sioux philosophy in his writings.]

During the early part of this century there was a nationwide interest in American Indian life. As a result, Charles A. Eastman, a Sioux graduate of Boston Medical School, published a number of books about tribal life and culture. His style was genteel and not really upsetting to non-Indians, yet he professed many tribal values and ideals that ran counter to Anglo-American economic, political and social thinking.

Eastman was initially concerned with providing proof to whites that American Indians were intellectually capable of American citizenship and should, therefore, be treated with equality. In his first book, an autobiography entitled Indian Boyhood, he emphasized the idea that Indian people learned and had the capacity to be taught even while in transition from "savagery" to "civilization." Indian cultures, however, were different and the Indian child was taught according to the dictates of his own society. In many ways Eastman anticipated the acceptance of cultural pluralism as a social ideal.

In terms of technological knowledge, Eastman most often gave the edge to Western European civilization. He lived in an era when people were convinced that industrialization held the answer to the problems of mankind. But when the conservation movement began to show a wide-spread popular base during the early years of the twentieth century, Eastman proudly wrote about, and to his mind demonstrated, the equality, if not the superiority of American Indian knowledge. In Indian Boyhood he attempted to prove that the tribal life he had lived as a boy was much healthier and more peaceful than life in the city. Indians, according to Eastman, lived in harmony with nature and because of the demands of the environment were physically as well as mentally capable of meeting any demand placed upon them.

It was easy for Eastman to move from being a philosopher on racial capabilities to becoming a teacher of "Indian lore." In addition to the widely read and admittedly instructional Indian Boyhood, Eastman continued his autobiography in From the Deep Woods to Civilization. His most popular tracts were youth books. Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), Indian Scout Talks (1914) and Indian Heroes and Great Chieftans (1918) were among his best received monographs for young people. For a more mature audience, Eastman expounded on American Indian religious ideas in The Soul of the Indian (1911), and reported on conditions within American Indian groups and listed Indian contributions to American society in The Indian Today.

As a physician in touch with the trends in his own profession, Eastman was convinced that a back to nature movement was necessary to the life of the nation. He believed that his ancestors owed their strong physical characteristics to their "natural" life styles. In his mind, detriments to Indian health were measles, smallpox, tuberculosis and alcohol—all European introductions. He once expressed the opinion that these introductions would have annihilated the Indian race had it not been for the already strong physical conditioning acquired during a tribal upbringing.

He was consistent in reminding his readers of the tribal concept of balance. Eastman was against excess in all human endeavor, and if extremes had already been made he believed that measures should be taken to counterpose them. To him a back to nature movement would counter the deleterious effects of industrialization. Wise Americans, both Indian and non-Indian, should offset life in the cities with vacations in the wild. The wilderness was a healthful and spiritually stimulating environment designed to balance out human avarice. He fully supported every movement that advocated the preservation of nature, and was most active in promoting groups like the Camp Fire Girls and the Boy Scouts.

Although considered a romantic, Eastman was convinced that further destruction of the natural order would lead to chaos. Resources would be depleted as once game had been. Human survival actually depended on a rapid change of attitudes regarding the environment. He stressed that mankind should adopt Indian knowledge and admit that all forms of life were interdependent and akin to each other.

Far from being removed intellectually from tribal thought, Eastman was part of its continuous existence. He, like tribal spiritual leaders, adopted a holistic approach to knowledge and was acutely aware of the idea of universal order. His personal mission, he believed, was to extend this outlook so that all of mankind could learn and benefit from it. In that way the earth was to be saved from ultimate destruction. In the final analysis, despite his outward idealism, Eastman was not overly convinced that human beings were, on the whole, intelligent enough to learn the responsibilities of continued existence. This underlying pessimism was perhaps one of the reasons why he particularly aimed his books toward the young and why he decided to leave, in his later years, civilization for the peace of the wilderness. Perhaps, as his biographer Raymond Wilson once suggested, his return to nature symbolized a completion of the life cycle.

Tom Holm, "American Indian Intellectuals and the Continuity of Tribal Ideals," in Book Forum, Vol. V, No. 3, 1981, pp. 349-56.