Constructing a cultural identity is as easy as mastering the nuances of a foreign language while traveling to the country of its origin on an eight-hour flight. There are gifted individuals among us who may be able to carry out this task in less than eight hours. Fortunately or not, they are few in number. However, for most of us, nowadays, the process of constructing our cultural “selves” is the journey of a lifetime, struggling to position ourselves within a culture that is no longer (re)presented as monolithically uniform.
We constantly do battles with our cultural heritage (who we were before we were “we”, “I”) and our cultural repose (who “we” or “I” are now that we contribute to the “living out” of the cultural legacy), since for the most part these two notions are at odds with each other. In other words, we might be born into a certain ethnic group which, in turn, due to various social, political, religious circumstances may distinctly reshape and restructure its beliefs and customs, so that it strikes the outsider as non-existent in the first place. Therefore, when an individual decides to reaffirm his/her cultural identity against the background of strong ties to the indigenous culture which he/she was born into and the greater social milieu which he/she has assimilated to (as a result of education, religious conversion, power accessibility, etc.) the outcome may prove disheartening both to the individual and to his/her audience.
Often these palimpsestic attempts at coming to terms with “the individual” versus “the cultural” self are carried out in the arena of autobiography, a genre whose flexibility offers the author/protagonist the ability to assert himself/herself in front of a larger audience as he/she sees fit. Whether the audience will fully comprehend the “portrayed self” as the author/protagonist’s “true” self is not necessarily the principal claim behind an autobiographical work. When the personal becomes public through the act of writing it down, publishing it, or in the case of pre-literate autobiographies, when it becomes a part of the community’s oral narrative, an act of healing and/or an act of pain emerges. In the following paragraphs, I will try to examine Charles Alexander Eastman’s autobiography From Deep Woods to Civilization as both an act of healing and an act of pain.
Written and published in the first two decades of the twentieth century, this story of an Indian boy who rises to the position of a university educated doctor (Dartmouth College and Boston University), scholar, lecturer, lobbyist for Native American rights, government appointed official, differs both in its composition and intended audience from the pre-literate Native American autobiographies. Eastman’s unique life experience, beginning with his idyllic Indian boyhood and ending with his choice to retire in nature after having spent a socially-packed life under the influence of western Christian tradition, sets him apart from American Indian autobiographers in the early nineteenth century whose personal narratives may be closer to the six forms of American Indian pre-literate autobiographies. Nonetheless, From the Deep Woods to Civilization is a remarkable effort to verbalize a man’s life as he struggles to locate his personal and communal “self” while undergoing inevitable acculturation.
In his essay “Charles Eastman, Nicholas Black Elk, and Construction of Religious Identity” , Bradley J. Monsma reads Eastman’s autobiography as an attempt on the behalf of the author to use his personal identity/experience/life as a bridge between the two cultures in which he resides, the Sioux and the American. For Monsma, “Eastman’s personal identity becomes the model for his vision of tribal identity…as he was able to assimilate the white world, so should all other Native Americans.” In order to validate his attempt at creating a reliable cultural narrative, Monsma argues that “Eastman constructs his own self-image to mirror the values of the Anglo-Saxon American self-image.” Such an interpretation of Eastman’s portrayal of himself and his life experience stems from the influence of social Darwinism, quite a popular theory at the time, and throughout Eastman’s formative years. It also provides a convenient loophole for Eastman the lobbyist to support the Dawes Severalty Act that was designed to encourage Native Americans, by relinquishing the rights to their land, to take up farming and join the competitive individualism of American dominant culture. In essence, Eastman’s personal story is his culture’s act of healing, now that they are to understand the importance of adapting their tribal identity to modern white ways.
Although tempting to place Eastman’s personal narrative within the confining space of “bi-cultural composite authorship”, I would argue that there is more to this beautifully simplistic tale of hard-won victories. Eastman embraced Christianity as a key component of his assimilation to the dominant white culture, an ethic that often times seemed to be closer to the religious practices of his people than those of devout Christians. From the Deep Woods to Civilization bears witness to the events prior to the Wounded Knee Massacre and its subsequent repercussions on the Lakota Indians, along with detailed transcriptions of conversations between Eastman and a number of Native American chiefs while he was working as a Y.M.C.A official, (almost) in charge of Christian recruitment. All of these accounts point towards one undeniable fact – Eastman questions white man’s Christianity. In the final passages of his autobiography he examines the history of Christian cruelty and violence: “Why do we find so much evil and wickedness practiced by the nations composed of professedly “Christian” individuals? The pages of history are full of licensed murder and the plundering of weaker and less developed peopled, and obviously the world to-day has not outgrown this system. Behind the material and intellectual splendor of our civilization, primitive savagery and cruelty and lust hold sway, undiminished, and as it seems, unheeded.” (Italics added) In this respect, Eastman’s personal story is an act of pain, constructing and deconstructing one man’s struggle to come to terms with his newly embraced faith and the understanding of morality in the eyes of his people’s cultural heritage.
Perhaps all individual stories turned into cultural narratives, due to the presence of an audience (one’s self or one’s readers), heal through painful recollections of the individual, or at least attempt to provide a rationale so that the healing process may begin. Eastman’s American-Indian self has presumably healed through its commitment to civilization as the highest form of existence, and yet Eastman retrieved from modern life to the silences of the woods, similar to those of his Indian boyhood.
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