Anthropology, Allotment Policy, and the Autobiography of Charles Eastman

Abstract

This article demonstrates how Dakota writer Charles Eastman’s autobiography From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916) draws on and questions ethnographic discourses that shaped federal policy and public opinion toward Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using his own “ethnographic” aesthetic, Eastman challenges the way evolutionary ethnographers cast tribes as societies “from the deep woods” and far outside of “civilization.” Upending this suspect developmental narrative, one that undergirded assimilative Allotment Policy, he asserts the value of Dakota and indigenous cultural practices. In so doing Eastman plants the seed for a “third space of sovereignty” for Native communities.