Faith & Spirit Quote by Charles Eastman

There is a quiet provocation in Eastman’s phrasing: “Among us” draws a boundary and then immediately flips the usual power dynamic. He’s not asking for recognition from a dominant culture; he’s asserting a complete moral world that already exists. The line is built to counter the era’s favorite American story - that Indigenous people needed to be “civilized,” Christianized, and taught to stand up straight in body and spirit. Eastman answers with a reversal: we already stood erect, because we already knew who we were.

The theological language is doing double duty. “Sons of God” speaks in terms that white Christian readers would recognize, but “conscious of their divinity” quietly refuses the missionary premise that holiness must arrive from outside. This isn’t assimilationist piety; it’s a strategic translation. Eastman repurposes Christian vocabulary to describe an Indigenous ontology in which dignity is not granted by institutions but assumed as a starting condition.

“Stood erect” lands as both physical and political. It evokes posture - the refusal to bow, to be made small - while also hinting at an alternative civic order: a community where personhood is not tiered by race, class, or credential. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as boarding schools, allotment policy, and “kill the Indian, save the man” ideology tried to remake Native life, Eastman insists on an older anthropology: divinity is not exceptional; it’s communal. The subtext is an indictment delivered without shouting: if anyone needs conversion here, it’s the society that can’t recognize upright humans when it sees them.