Charles Alexander Eastman (1858-1939) was a mixed- blood
Sioux. His maternal grandmother, a daughter of Chief Cloud-
man of the Mdewankton Sioux, was married to a well-known
western artist, Captain Seth Eastman, and in 1847 their daughter
Mary Nancy Eastman became the wife of Chief Many Lightenings,
a Wahpeton Sioux. Their fifth child, Charles Alexander Eastman,
as a four-year old was given the name Ohiyesa (the Winner).

During the Sioux Uprising of 1862, Ohiyesa became separated
from his father, his mother had died soon after his birth and fled
from the reservation in Minnesota to Canada under the protection
of his grandmother and uncle. There he was schooled in the Indian
ways until the age of fifteen, when he was reunited with his father,
who took him back to his homestead in present South Dakota.

"The Soul of the Indian" is to paint the religious life of the typical
American Indian as it was before he knew the white man.