Indian Boyhood

What boy would not be an Indian for a while when he thinks of the freest life in the world? This life was mine. So writes Charles A. Eastman, one of the first Native American authors to tell his own story on his own terms. Born to the Dakota Sioux in the years before reservation policy reshaped the Plains, Eastman recalls his childhood under the boundless sky of the Dakota prairie, where his grandmother named him Hakadah, "the pitiful last," after his mother died giving him life. Hers was the hand that shaped him, teaching him to track deer through morning mist, to listen to the wisdom of elders, and to find courage not in violence but in patience and observation. The memoir pulses with the texture of a vanished world: the crack of buffalo hunts, the laughter of cousin-players, the sacred rhythms of a people who understood themselves as part of the land, not separate from it. Yet Eastman writes with the painful knowledge that this world was already ending as he lived it. A vital document of indigenous experience and a boy's-eye view of a civilization in transition, Indian Boyhood endures because it offers something rare: the voice of a people telling their own story, in their own words, before the telling became impossible.