though I suppose they may not stick to the facts regarding him.
http://www.startribune.com/357/story/1208183.htmlDakota doctor's dreams for his culture died at Wounded Knee Indian doctor's voice might finally be heard by America
By Nick Coleman, Star Tribune
Last update: May 26, 2007 – 5:54 PM
HBO's take on one of the most notorious massacres in American history, the 1890 slaughter by the 7th Cavalry of 300 Lakota Indians on a snow-covered South Dakota knoll above a creek known as Wounded Knee, begins airing at 8 Sunday night. The film is called "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee." The title comes from the late Dee Brown's 1970 polemic about centuries of genocide against American Indians. One of the film's main characters is a fascinating Minnesotan, a college-educated Indian physician and influential native author named Charles Eastman. His life was lived in a turbulent effort to mediate the conflict between Indian tribes and a white government determined to either take Indian lands and pressure the tribes into adopting white culture, or to take the lands and destroy the Indians.
A lot of government officials believed the second plan was easier.
Eastman was a Dakota (eastern bands of the "Sioux" spoke Dakota, western bands spoke a variant known as Lakota) who was born near present-day Redwood Falls in 1858, the year Minnesota became a state. He was just a child when his family fled to Canada after the 1862 Dakota war on the Minnesota frontier, barely escaping a punitive military expedition. Eastman's boyhood Dakota name, Ohiyesa, meant "the winner." His father, a warrior named Many Lightnings, was imprisoned for several years after the 1862 war. When he was released, he changed his name to Jacob Eastman and decided that young Ohiyesa should become Charles Eastman. He arranged for his bright young son to get a good education.
Eastman's life spanned the decades-long war between the government and the Sioux, from its bloody origins here to its gruesome conclusion at Wounded Knee, where Eastman was serving as the reservation doctor. It wasn't just the members of Chief Big Foot's band who died in the bloody snow at Wounded Knee. It was the dream of people like Eastman that the long war between the government and the Indians could end without Indian culture being brutally crushed.
Educated at Dartmouth and trained as a doctor at Boston University, Eastman was unable to get a medical practice off the ground in St. Paul. White people, he discovered, didn't want an Indian doctor. He was practicing on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation at the time of Wounded Knee, when the Army paid back the Sioux (so the Indians believed) for their victory 14 years earlier over Gen. George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn.
After the massacre, Eastman helped search for the wounded and recover the slain - who included women and children. It was an event that traumatized him for the rest of his life, and affected his teaching and writing, including the books "Indian Boyhood,"The Soul of The Indian" and "From the Deep Woods to Civilization."
P.S. For those not familiar with Nick Coleman who wrote this column, he is NOT related to that weasel Norm Coleman
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