Fatherhood Quote by Charles Eastman

A small sentence, sharpened to a point: childhood isn’t just growing up, it’s being reassigned. Eastman’s “she turns him over” makes the moment feel almost transactional, as if boyhood is a parcel passed from one set of hands to another. The phrasing matters. It’s not “he goes” or “he learns”; it’s an adult decision, a deliberate handoff that treats identity as something engineered.

“About eight years” signals a cultural timetable, not a psychological milestone. Eastman is mapping a community logic in which nurture has stages and gender has jurisdiction. Up to that age, the mother’s world sets the foundation; then the father assumes custody of discipline, endurance, and public role. Calling it “Spartan training” is strategic code-switching for a non-Native readership: he borrows a classical reference that 19th-century Americans associated with virtue-through-hardship, making Indigenous childrearing legible (and defensible) within Western respectability politics.

The subtext runs two ways. On one level, it’s ethnographic description: Eastman, who moved between Dakota life and Euro-American institutions, is documenting a structured system outsiders often dismissed as “primitive.” On another, it’s a quiet argument against sentimental Victorian parenting. He’s implying that toughness is taught, not inherited; that masculinity is a social project, not a natural fact. The gendered handoff also exposes costs: boys are separated from maternal intimacy right when they might still need it, because the culture prioritizes readiness for hardship over prolonged softness. In one clean line, Eastman shows how a society manufactures adults by rationing tenderness.