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Teaching Charles Alexander Eastman’s “The North American Indian” in Dialogue with Elaine Goodale Eastman’s Yellow Star
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2024
Abstract
Charles Eastman’s “The North American Indian” address for the 1911 Universal Races Congress (URC) in London provides multiple pathways for teaching in a comparative context. One productive approach involves setting the lecture in dialogue with Elaine Goodale Eastman’s Yellow Star, published in the same year. Another entails asking students to situate Charles Eastman’s talk in the context of the URC as a vital milestone in global thought leaders’ engagement with questions about race. This approach could include juxtaposing Eastman’s lecture with one by W. E. B. Du Bois delivered at the same convention. Pedagogy for Eastman’s speech can also locate this text in the context of his larger oeuvre, including more assertively anticolonial discourse in later writings for Indigenous readers.
Keywords
- Type
- Teaching the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
- Information
- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 23 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: Literary Studies and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , January 2024 , pp. 107 - 114
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)
References
Notes
1 Hughes, Linda K., Robbins, Sarah Ruffing, and Taylor, Andrew, eds., Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776–1920 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Different excerpts from Eastman’s London speech appear here: 302–05, 382–84, and 553–54. The anthology has recently been issued in an open access edition to extend accessibility beyond the still-available print formats: https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/342762182/HughesEtal2022TransatlanticAnglophoneLiteratures.pdf (accessed Jan. 24, 2024).
2 Thrush, Coll, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Charles Alexander Eastman, M.D. (Ohiyesa), “The North American Indian,” in Papers on inter-racial problems, communicated to the first Universal Races Congress, held at the University of London, July 26-29, 1911, ed. Gustav Spiller (London: P. S. King, 1911), 367–76. For one example of a widely-accessible copy, see the Civil Rights and Social Justice database in HeinOnline. For an open-access copy, see the Internet Archive online edition at https://archive.org/details/papersoninterrac00univiala/page/367/mode/1up?q=Eastman (accessed Jan. 24, 2024).
4 Bonakdarian, Mansour, “Negotiating Universal Values and Cultural and National Parameters at the First Universal Races Congress,” Radical History Review 92 (Spring 2005): 118–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, focuses on contributions of attendees from Iran and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), whom Bonakdarian views as “represent[ing] small cross-sections of cosmopolitan and secular-oriented public opinion in their countries” (119) but whose speeches are nonetheless noteworthy, in relation to Eastman’s comparable stance, for their anti-imperialist arguments. See, too, de Souza, Vanderlei Sebastiao and Santos, Recardo Ventura, “The Universal Congress of Races, London, 1911: Contexts, Themes and Debates,” Boletim do Museu Paraense Emilio Goeidi Ciencias Humanas 7, no. 3 (2012): 745–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which analyzes participation by two representatives from Brazil, Joao Baptista de Lacerda and Edgard Roquette-Pinto, and situates them in sociopolitical context.
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6 Haddon, A. C., “The First Universal Races Congress,” Science 34 (Sept. 1911): 304–06CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Additional examples for classroom discussion include E. L., “First Universal Races Congress,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 1 (Mar. 1911): 935–36, a preview of the event, and a review by Weatherly, Ulysses G., “The First Universal Races Congress,” American Journal of Sociology 17, no. 3 (1911): 315–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Smith, “The greatest event,” 218.
8 Spiller, Papers on Inter-Racial Problems.
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11 Biddiss, “Universal Races Congress,” 37.
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13 Burghardt Du Bois, W. E., “The First Universal Races Congress.” Independent 71 (Aug. 24, 1911): 402.Google Scholar
14 Mays critiques what he sees as hesitancy among some historians of the Progressive Era to bring studies of Black and Indigenous culture of the time in dialogue: “While scholars have speculated why Blacks and Natives were not close allies, few have discussed the parallel opposition of Blacks and Natives to similar forms of oppression or their common stance against colonialism. I argue that Black Americans and Native Americans found common ground in responding to colonialism, at least in part, by traveling to London” (243). Mays, Kyle T., “Transnational Progressivism: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Universal Races Congress of 1911,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 25 (Summer 2013): 243–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Eastman, Charles A. (Ohiyesa), From the Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian (Boston: Little, Brown, 1916), 189 Google Scholar.
16 Eastman, Charles, “The Sioux of Yesterday and To-Day,” American Indian Magazine 5, no. 4 (1917): 233 Google Scholar. This essay is available online via Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/sim_american-indian-magazine_october-december-1917_5_4/page/232/mode/2up.