Charles Alexander Eastman, aka: Ohiyesa (1858-1939) - A Santee Dakota Indian, Eastman was known as Ohiyesa, meaning “the winner” to his people. He was born in 1858 near Redwood Falls, Minnesota of full-blood Sioux, Many Lightnings, and the half-blood daughter of a well-known army officer. His mother died soon after his birth and he was raised by his paternal grandmother and an uncle. After the Minnesota massacre in 1862, the family fled to Canada where he lived until the age of 15. At that time, his father, who had accepted Christianity and had become “civilized,” came for him and brought the teenage boy to his home in Flandreau, South Dakota. There, several Sioux families had established themselves as farmers and homesteaders. Ohiyesa was then placed in the mission school at Santee, Nebraska, where he made so much progress in a two year period that he was selected for a more advanced course and sent to Beloit College, in Beloit, Wisconsin. He would later attend Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and Kimball Academy and Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1887 and immediately entered the Boston University School of Medicine, where he received an M.D. degree in 1890. Dr. Eastman was then appointed as the government physician to the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota, a position he held for almost three years. In 1891, he married Elaine Goodale of Massachusetts, a poet and Indian welfare activist. The couple would eventually have six children. In 1893 he moved his family to St. Paul, Minnesota where he started a private practice.

Afterwards, he acted as an attorney for the Sioux at Washington, again as a government physician at and Croy Creek, South Dakota. In 1903 he was appointed by the Office of Indian Affairs to the special work of revising the allotment rolls and selecting permanent family names for the Sioux. Eastman was also an accomplished author and his first book, Indian Boyhood, appeared in 1902. He died on January 8, 1939.

Kathy Weiser/Legends of America, © July, 2008

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