As you read, try to consider the two distinct “sides” of Ohiyesa as essential parts of understanding him as a full, complex individual. Reaching this understanding is important because historical narratives so often one-dimensionalize Indigenous people, and hopefully this project can be a small step in undoing that harmful legacy.
Ohiyesa was born in Minnesota in 1858; his mother was white and his father was Wahpeton Dakota. After the 1862 Dakota War, his father was imprisoned, and Ohiyesa and the rest of his family escaped to Ontario. When they returned, Ohiyesa’s father had converted to Christianity. He renamed Ohiyesa to Charles Eastman, sending Ohiyesa to boarding school with a mission to succeed and integrate into mainstream society, calling this Ohiyesa’s “first warpath.” At school, Ohiyesa worked hard, graduating from Dartmouth and then getting a medical degree from Boston College (Calloway 2019).
Ohiyesa went to the Pine Ridge reservation in 1890 to serve as the agency physician there, where he witnessed the devastation of Wounded Knee when he treated the victims of the massacre. After this horrific experience, he went on to co-found the Society of American Indians (SAI), a pan-Indian reform group. However, he also supported the 1887 Dawes Allotment Act, legislation whose stated goal was to “pulverize” tribal communities by forcible assimilation. This contrast illustrates the fundamental duality of Ohiyesa as a human: he stayed rooted in and advocated for Indigenous nations while also working within and supporting the colonial American system that oppressed those same nations (Calloway 2019, Hoxie 2001).
As an Indigenous reformer in the Progressive Era, Ohiyesa worked with his peers to encourage the assimilation of Indigenous people into mainstream American society. Unlike white assimilationists of the late 19th century like Richard Henry Pratt (the founder of the first boarding school for Indigenous children), Ohiyesa did not aim to “kill the Indian and save the man.” Instead, he wrote books like Indian Boyhood and The Soul of the Indian that were intended to educate white audiences about Indigenous lifeways and traditions (Hoxie 2001). He also was involved with the Boy Scouts, attending meetings in traditional regalia and teaching them how to engage with the land and “think like an Indian” (Vision Maker Media 2018). His work in these spheres is very similar to that of Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, an Ojibwe reformer who worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the SAI and who publicly modeled how an Indigenous woman could participate in mostly white Washington DC society (Cahill 2013). Thus Ohiyesa and his fellow reformers were “talking back” to mainstream America: they had made their way into its power structures and sought to secure respect and security for their people from within (Hoxie 2001).
Wells Moses Sawyer, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Although this “talking back” was a less radical form of resistance, it brought results. By the end of the Progressive Era, Indigenous populations were rebounding from their historical lows near the turn of the century, and Ohiyesa and his peers had inspired a new generation of reformers. Also, just a year after Ohiyesa’s death in 1933, the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), also known as the “Indian New Deal”, was signed into law. In a departure from previous “kill the Indian save the man” policies like the Dawes Act, the IRA sought to promote tribal sovereignty by encouraging the formation of tribal governments, and made small steps to encourage the revitalization and maintenance of tribal culture by giving education funding to tribes. This reflects a shift in how mainstream America viewed Indigenous cultures, and Ohiyesa’s work within the mainstream probably helped contribute to this shift (Hoxie 2001).
Finally, the conflicting desires to assimilate into mainstream America while also retaining their traditional heritage and sensibilities is key to understanding these reformers as whole, complex people. Instead of portraying their assimilationist attitudes as the last resort of an oppressed people, and thus defining these reformers and the communities they advocated for by the struggles they faced, we can instead accept them for the nuanced and sometimes contradictory individuals they were. Eve Tuck calls such a focus on complexity and self-determination a “desire-based framework” (Tuck 2009). Looking at Ohiyesa’s life through this framework, we see that he wanted to both celebrate his Dakota culture and also ensure by any means that his people could survive, even if that meant encouraging assimilation. Recognizing this duality gives him agency and honors him.
Sources
Cahill, Cathleen D. “Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin: Indigenizing the Federal Indian Service.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 25, no. 2 (2013): 65–86. https://doi.org/10.5250/studamerindilite.25.2.0065.
Calloway, Colin. “‘Kill the Indian and Save the Man.’” Chapter. In First Peoples A Documentary Survey of American Indian History. Bedford/St. Martin’s, Macmillan Learning, 2019.
Hoxie, Frederick E. “American Indian Activism in the Progressive Era.” Introduction. In Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era, 1–28. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001.
Ohiyesa: the Soul of an Indian. Vision Maker Media, 2018. https://visionmakermedia.org/ohiyesa/.
Tuck, Eve. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (2009): 409–28. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15.
