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Harvey Markowitz/The Newberry Library
From 1841 to 1848, Mary Henderson Eastman resided
with her husband, Army captain and artist Seth Eastman, at Fort Snelling,
near present-day St. Paul, Minnesota.
Dahcotah contains a series of vignettes in which she
portrays the “habits, manners and motives” of her Indian neighbors.
Some of the data contained in Eastman’s book are
of great ethnohistorical value. However,
they must be filtered through a hermeneutics of suspicion. “it is not pretended,” she states “that all the
incidents related in [the] stories occurred exactly as they are
stated” (p. 5). More
importantly, her descriptions of Sioux personalities and customs is
couched in the “evolutionary” thought of her day that envisioned
Indians as savages on a scale of social growth culminating in
Euro-American civilization and Christianity.
It was the duty of pious folk like Eastman to help usher
benighted heathens such as the Sioux into the light of Christian
civilization. It was thus
neither in her temperament nor methodology to separate matters of
ethnographic and historical “fact” from ”value.”
That the Afton Historical Society Press has spared
no expense on the book’s publication is nowhere more obvious than in
its superb reproductions of Captain Seth Eastman’s watercolors. The vibrancy and crispness of these images compare very
favorably to the originals.
Rena Neumann Coen’s excellent introduction provides
the biographical context necessary for understanding and evaluating
Eastman’s writings. She
ant the Afton Historical Society Press are to be commended for this
important contribution to Dakota ethnohistory.
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