The Indian To-day

Charles Eastman, the Santee Dakota physician known in his own language as Ohiyesa, set out in 1915 to answer a plain question: where did Native America actually stand? He grants that in one sense his people were a vanishing race, then argues that in another they were thoroughly progressive, growing in numbers and vitality. His chapters work through the causes of the Indian wars, the agency system and its abuses, the new federal policy, schooling, home life, citizenship, health, and Native arts and industries, closing with an accounting of what Indigenous peoples had given the nation that displaced them. Eastman had fled the Dakota War of 1862 as a small child and treated survivors of Wounded Knee as an agency physician, and that first-hand authority steadies the argument. A bibliography and a table of reservations follow.