ONEOFMANYFEATHERS'
Short Biographies
Charles Alexander Eastman
Charles Alexander Eastman (1858-1939), or Ohiyesa ("victor"), was born to a Sioux father (Dakota Many Lightnings) and a mixed-blood mother (Mary Nancy Eastman, who died at his birth.) on a Santee Sioux reservation near Redwood Falls, Minnesota. According to the philosophy of the time, Eastman received his education among whites, attending preparatory school and then Dartmouth College, and later graduating from medical school. He became an agency physician for the Indian Health Service and worked on the Pine Ridge Reservation (and later at the Crow Creek Reservation.) in South Dakota, where he cared for the wounded after the US Army's 1890 attack on Lakota chief Big Foot's band at Wounded Knee. He also established a private medical practice.
Between 1894-97, Eastman established 32 Indian groups of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). In 1899, he helped recruit students for the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. In 1910, along with Ernest Thompson Seton of the Woodcraft Indians and Daniel Carter Beard of the Sons of Daniel Boone.
Eastman moved to Washington, DC, in the late 1890s and lobbied the government on behalf of the Santee Sioux. He then held a succession of government positions; President Roosevelt assigned him in 1903 to revise the allotment of tribal lands and to assign the Sioux family names to protect their land titles. Author of the autobiographical Indian Boyhood (1902), Eastman helped to found the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.
