The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation

About

Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa) was a Sioux physician and writer — one of the first Native Americans to write extensively in English — and The Soul of the Indian (1911) is his meditation on Indigenous spiritual life: a direct, unapologetic argument that Sioux spiritual practice embodied values — reverence for the sacred in nature, the priority of silence, the ethics of restraint — that European Christianity preached but rarely achieved. As reading material it offers an important and rare perspective.