Indian To-day

One of the first Indigenous voices to speak directly to white America, Charles Alexander Eastman brings his dual perspective as a Santee Dakota physician and American reformer to this urgent portrait of Native American life in the early 20th century. Eastman witnessed his people caught between two worlds, and he writes with intimate knowledge of both the government's machinery and the communities it reshaped. He tackles the institutions that defined Indian existence: the boarding schools designed to erase Indigenous identity, the health crises ravaging reservations, and the bureaucratic agencies tasked with managing Native affairs. But this is more than documentation. Eastman argues for citizenship, for fair treatment, for a reckoning with America's promises broken. His tone is measured but passionate, a man who believed reform possible but who refused to soften his critique of the systems destroying his people. The book captures a critical turning point when Indigenous Americans faced assimilationist pressure unlike anything before, yet also began claiming new forms of political voice.