Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 297he presented his own career as exemplary, charting the route to assimilation. And in
The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation (1911) he tried to interpret Indian culture
for his white readers: to make them understand the system of religious beliefs that
were in place when the early settlers arrived in America. The portrait Eastman
paints here of Indian “worship of the ‘Great Mystery’ ” is intensely idealized and
clearly designed to invite sympathy. “The native American,” the reader is told, was
an “untutored sage,” in “sympathy and spiritual communion with his brothers of
the animal kingdom.” “Being a natural man, the Indian was intensely poetical,”
Eastman explains, and his worship of his Maker was “silent, solitary, free from all
self-seeking.” “He would deem it sacrilege to build a house for Him who may be met
face to face in the mysterious, shadowy aisles of the primeval forest, or on the sunlit
bosom of the virgin prairies”; his innate nobility of soul found an appropriate place
of worship in the “cathedral” of nature where in “solitary communion with the
Unseen” he could express his instinctive “consciousness of the divine.” “The spirit
of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same,” Eastman suggests.
What stands out in marked contrast to both is the Christianity of his own day
which, with its brute materialism, its “professionalism of the pulpit,” and “lust for
money,” has lost touch with the primitive purity of its origins. Eastman hoped to
draw the two cultures between which he existed closer together, by making connec-
tions such as this. To remind white readers of the crass failures in their own society,
and the residual nobility of the Indian, also played a part in this project. His hope,
and that project, were both sorely tested by his witnessing the carnage left after the
massacre at Wounded Knee: an experience he recalls in From the Deep Woods to
Civilization. But neither was ever really abandoned. Even in his last years, Eastman
was still writing books like Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (1918), now aimed at
youthful readers. He still believed, perhaps desperately, that Indians could assimi-
late and that whites would welcome them once they recognized the noble traditions
and powerful potential they brought with them into American society.
A similar predicament, a sense of belonging neither in the white world fully
nor in the Indian, haunted Gertrude Bonnin or Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird) (1876–1938).
The daughter of a white man of whom little is known, and a Sioux woman, Bonnin
left the reservation to attend a Quaker school in Indiana, “the land of red apples”
as she called it. She returned to the reservation but found herself culturally without
anchor age: “neither a wild Indian nor a tame one,” as she described herself in an
auto biographical essay, “The Schooldays of an Indian Girl,” published in the Atlantic
Monthly in 1900. Feeling herself separate from her mother but also outraged by
mistreatment of her people by white America, she began to write articles denouncing
racial injustice and describing her own sense of cultural disorientation. In “The
Schooldays of an Indian Girl” she recalls how she knew “but one language” until she
was 8, “and that was my mother’s native tongue.” She then traveled east “on the iron
horse” to learn another. “I want to see the wonderful Eastern land,” she told her
mother before she left; and her mother, while she feared her daughter would “suffer
keenly in this experiment,” accepted her departure as necessary for her education.
Disillusionment, as Bonnin remembers it, soon set in. On the journey east she soonGGray_c03.indd 297ray_c 03 .indd 297 8 8/1/2011 7:54:25 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 25 AM