Charles Alexander Eastman was a renowned physician, author, lecturer and Native American rights advocate. His life has b | dG1fb3FSV3pCblJTRXM
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:04 He was the first American Indian writer
00:07 of international renown.
00:09 He presented Indians to whites to explain what
00:13 it was like to be an Indian.
00:16 [SPEAKING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE]
00:19 My family and I have spent the last 10 years
00:22 searching for the story of my grandfather, Charles Eastman,
00:25 and bringing it back to our Dakota homeland.
00:27 Everyone always uses the suit or the headdress
00:30 to show the two sides of the family.
00:32 It was a rarity for any member of an Indian community
00:35 to become a writer.
00:37 I was sitting in the library at Dartmouth,
00:40 and the librarian had pulled out the Charles Eastman
00:42 papers to show me.
00:44 And I felt his presence there.
00:46 He was trying to tell me something.
00:49 It was about my family all the way back to that time.
00:54 What boy would not be an Indian for a while
00:57 when he thinks of the freest life in the world?
01:00 This life was mine.
01:01 Every day there was a real hunt.
01:03 There was real game.
01:05 We studied the habits of animals,
01:07 just as you study your books.
01:09 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:12 Basically, our ancestors who were living here
01:16 were starving then.
01:17 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:22 He was only four years old when the Dakota War happened.
01:25 And to experience that again--
01:27 There's probably about 280 people in there,
01:30 buried in there.
01:31 It must have been traumatic.
01:33 It must have brought back a lot of feelings and emotions
01:36 about what happened to his own community and family.
01:40 He really, to me, is a kind of towering figure of his time.
01:44 In incredible circumstances of loss,
01:48 he's able to retrieve his dignity
01:52 and keep that sense that his people come first.
01:57 Indigenous people today still live in the kind of world
02:00 that Ojiesa lived in, where his population was disregarded,
02:04 that we are forced to work within structures
02:06 that are not our own.
02:07 They were his struggle.
02:08 They're still ours.
02:11 Oh, wow.
02:12 Look at that.
02:13 I've never seen a picture of him smiling that big or that happy.
02:19 That's not the person that you hear about
02:22 or that gets written about.
02:23 This is actually who he was.
02:26 [MUSIC PLAYING]
02:29 (gentle music)
02:32 [BLANK_AUDIO]