Charles A. Eastman

In the 1860s and 1870s, the boy who would become known as Charles Eastman was growing up in a Dakota community in Canada. On long winter evenings, he listened to elder Smoky Day tell the twelve legends of the Dakota creation cycle. They include stories of the marriage of the Sun and the Earth, the parents of all living things; the animal tribes and their councils; the misdeeds of the trickster Unktomi; the education of the first human, Waceheska;...

A full-blooded Sioux Indian describes his childhood experiences and training as a warrior in the late nineteenth century until he was taken to live in the white man's world at age fifteen.