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More Than Talking Animals: Charles Alexander Eastman's Animal Peoples and Their Kinship Critiques of United States Colonialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Christopher J. Pexa
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Abstract

Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), an early collection of stories for children by Charles Alexander Eastman, a Dako$$ta author, was largely viewed by his critical contemporaries as a politically innocuous analogue to Kipling's Jungle Book Stories. Through consideration of the Dako$$ta oral-historical genre of hituᒋkaᒋkaᒋpi (“long ago stories”) and of Dako$$ta peoplehood more broadly, this article proposes an alternative view of Eastman as a resistance writer who cited a long-circulating Dako$$ta kinship philosophy to criticize the enduring conditions of United States settler colonialism—a criticism that would become more pointed in his later, better-known autobiography, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1915). In viewing Eastman's animal tales as opposed to United States colonialism, we may see more clearly his innovative translations of Dako$$ta politics into narratives that both appealed to and challenged United States settler society. These challenges were made in relation to Dako$$ta conceptions of peoplehood, power, and gift.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 652 - 667
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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