American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION There has been a resurgence in Native American population and culture in the past two decades. From a probable population of about twelve million people on the North American continent at the arrival of Columbus, native populations declined remarkably, so that, by 1920, the U.S. census estimated less than 250,000 people. The genocidal horrors practiced on native populations by the descendants of invading Europeans from the 1850s through the 1920s made being an “Indian” during those years a humiliating and dangerous experience. Many of those who survived changed their names to Anglo labels, abandoned their religious faiths, and tried to fit in to the society of the conquerors. For generations, people denied their native heritage to their children, as so many European immigrants have done on their arrival on the North American shores. Some Native Americans who apparently were successful at assimilation wrote of their experiences with painful ambivalence. Ohiyesa, a Santee Dakota who transformed himself from a hunter to a physician, wrote six books from 1902 to 1916. A review of his works reveals several permutations in his life, primarily from an acceptance of the social Darwinism so popular at the time of his earliest writings to a deeper appreciation for his native culture and religion as he became critical of the agendas of the dominant society. A contemporary of Ohiyesa, Luther Standing Bear, an Oglala Lakota, appreciated his native culture and wrote prolifically about it; nevertheless, in the closing passages of his 1928 work, he literally begs the white man to “give the Indian a chance” at assimilation. These passages are depressing. Those were sorrowful times for American Indians.