Charles Eastman
1858–1939 1 entry
Biography
Charles Eastman, in Dakota Ohiyesa, “The Winner”, was a Santee Dakota physician, writer and reformer. Born in 1858 in Minnesota, he was taken to Canada as a small child after the Dakota War of 1862 and raised in the traditional way by his grandmother and his uncle, until his father, whom the family had believed dead, came to fetch him at fifteen and sent him to school.
He graduated from Dartmouth College and earned his medical degree in Boston in 1890, one of the first Native Americans to practise Western medicine. As a doctor on the Pine Ridge Reservation he cared for the wounded after the massacre at Wounded Knee in December 1890. He went on to write books in English about Native life and thought, among them Indian Boyhood, The Soul of the Indian and From the Deep Woods to Civilization, and worked for the rights of Native Americans. He died in Detroit in 1939.
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