A “Second Look” at Charles Alexander Eastman
Angela Calcaterra In his 1914 article "`My People': The Indians' Contribution to the Art of America," Mdewakanton Dakota author Charles Alexander Eastman associates an Indian "sense of the aesthetic" with "religious feeling" (179). "That which is beautiful," he writes, "must not be trafficked with, but must be reverenced and adored only. It must appear in speech and action" (179). Eastman disdains art in which "there is no mystery left; all is presented." Native representational art differs from art of "the civilized world" not "in the lack of creative imagination" but "in [the Indian's] point of view," which is averse to commercialization of the sacred and mysterious (179).1 Despite Eastman's contempt for art that presents "all" with "no mystery left," scholars consistently argue that Eastman sought in his many publications to demystify Indian art for a non-Native audience. In such readings, Eastman is an "`Indian informant'" who works against Indian stereotypes; he aims to draw "equivalencies between Indian and Euroamerican culture" or "to teach his readers that the tribes were noble" (Powell 421; Vizenor, Manifest Manners 5051). In more tribal-centric accounts, Eastman "seeks to demystify and deromanticize" Dakota practices, and he works to transport his "reader into a Dakotacentered world" (Kelsey 53; Martínez 33).2 This essay argues that Eastman aims not to make Indians legible for white readers but to demonstrate the complexity of Indian information exchange and representational practice for distant audiences. Combining print publication with multiple voices and sites of knowledge in his work, Eastman creates an aesthetic that opens rather than seeks to resolve questions about Native peoples. This aesthetic emerges from childhood lessons that encouraged young...