The Soul of the Indian

’Let neither cold, hunger, nor pain, nor the fear of them, neither the bristling teeth of danger nor the very jaws of death itself, prevent you from doing a good deed,’ said an old chief to a scout who was about to seek the buffalo in midwinter for the relief of a starving people.
—The Soul of the Indian By Charles Alexander Eastman

So were the heroic deeds and courage of the Native American people from long ago. But reservation days were hard and difficult, at best, and many of these ideals, once so well understood, were trampled under the onslaught of men who saw the Native Americans as a people to suppress, not as a people to exemplify.

And how was their suppression accomplished?

From the same book, The Soul of the Indian, An Interpretation, Charles Eastman says, “A willful murder was a rare occurrence before the days of whiskey and drunken rows, for we were not a violent or a quarrelsome people.”

Whiskey, other alcohol and drugs are well-known to steal away the spirit of a person, and in particular, men were the targets of this spiritual theft in the early reservation days, for if the men of a society cannot defend it from its bad elements, the entire culture can and usually does collapse. This did happen, and it is a history of our past that should be taught to our young, so that the trap of losing oneself and one’s self-respect to a mindless addiction does not rob away the life of the individual or the society.