Charles Alexander Eastman (February 19, 1858 - January 8, 1939) was a Native American writer, physician, and reformer. He was of Santee Sioux and Anglo-American ancestry. Active in politics and issues on American Indian rights, he also helped found the Boy Scouts of America.
He was named Hakadah at his birth on a reservation near Redwood Falls, Minnesota. In Dakota, Hakadah means the "pitiful last", as his mother Mary died at his birth. He was later named Ohiyesa (Dakota for "wins often") after winning a rough game of lacrosse.. He was the son of Wak-anhdi Ota (Many Lightnings) and his mixed-race wife, Wakantankanwin (Goddess), a.k.a. Winona (first-born daughter) and Mary Nancy Eastman.
Ohiyesa was the youngest of five children, with three older brothers (John, David, and James) and an older sister Mary. During the Minnesota Uprising of the Dakota in 1862-63, Ohiyesa was separated from his father. He was cared for by paternal relatives who took him into North Dakota and Manitoba, Canada. Later he was reunited with his father and older brother John in South Dakota. The father had by then taken the surname Eastman and called himself Jacob, after converting to Christianity. The Eastman family established a homestead in Dakota Territory. Like his father and brother, Ohiyesa accepted Christianity; he then took the name Charles Alexander Eastman.
His older brother became a minister. Rev. John (Marpiyawaku Kida) Eastman was a Presbyterian missionary at Flandreau, South Dakota.
Charles Eastman worked as agency physician for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Indian Health Service on the Pine Ridge Reservation and later at the Crow Creek Reservation, both in South Dakota. He cared for Indians after the Wounded Knee massacre. He also established a private medical practice.
Eastman was active in national politics, particularly in matters dealing with Indian rights. He served as a lobbyist for the Dakota between 1894 and 1897. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt assigned Eastman the responsibility to revise the allotment method of dividing tribal lands. From 1923-25, Eastman served under President Calvin Coolidge as an Indian inspector.
In 1902 Eastman published a memoir, Indian Boyhood, recounting his first fifteen years of life among the Sioux during the waning years of the nineteenth century. In the following years, he wrote a total of eleven books, most concerned with his Native American heritage. They enjoy regular reprints, and some books have been translated into French, German and other European languages. A selection of his writings was published recently as The Essential Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa) (2007).
In 1891, Eastman married the poet and Indian welfare activist Elaine Goodale, who served briefly as superintendent of Indian boarding schools in the Dakota Territory. They had six children together. The marriage prospered at first, but Eastman's many jobs, financial pressures, and absences on the lecture circuit, which left his wife to parent their children alone, put increasing strain on the marriage, they separated about 1920.
Life & Society > Ethnicity > The Americas > Indigenous > Native Americans > Native Americans > 
