American Indian Culture and Research Journal

When From the Deep Woods to Civilization appeared in 1916, the Dakota writer and activist Charles Alexander Eastman (also known by his Dakota name, Ohiyesa) told of a rather unusual journey across northern Minnesota and Ontario, Canada. The purpose of the venture, which took place during the summer of 1910, was to “purchase rare curios and ethnological specimens for one of the most important collections in the country.” In typical Eastman fashion, he is elusive with respect to naming the collection, let alone his benefactor. What was really going on here? It may at first appear to be inconsequential to ask for whom Eastman worked or the whereabouts of the items procured; however, viewed from an Ojibwe perspective, the answers become immediately more important. What Eastman “purchased,” as he put it, were pieces of Ojibwe culture and history, which, even in an age of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, may be forever lost to them. Only by recounting this story and filling in the details that Eastman omitted will there be an adequate accounting of what was subsumed into the American museum system, not to mention what stands to be regained if the items are ever returned. Just as important, we must consider what the story of the 1910 expedition does to Eastman’s legacy as a prominent American Indian intellectual. By 1910, Eastman had already become a renowned author, having published three books: Indian Boyhood (1902), Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), and Wigwam Evenings (1909). Contemporary critics, however, have long criticized Eastman in particular for promoting assimilation as an option for Indian people fed up with the reservation system and for being enamored with the 1887 Dawes Act (albeit, as it was written, not as it was implemented). At the same time, he was a strong advocate for preserving the ethical and spiritual values of American Indians, as exemplified by The Soul of the Indian (1911), in which he gave a systematic and eloquent demonstration of “the Indian’s” way of thinking on a variety of philosophical topics, from the ultimate nature of reality to the practical ethics formed through kinship relations, as well as a vision of community founded on an indigenous concept of making peace.