Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Eastman

Eastman’s sentence moves with the calm authority of someone borrowing a familiar yardstick - “the position of woman is the test of civilization” - and then quietly swapping in a different civilization to be tested. The phrasing “It has been said” is strategic: he invokes a Western progressive maxim, then uses it to validate Indigenous social order on its own terms. The intent isn’t only praise of women; it’s a rebuttal to the colonial assumption that Native societies were “savage” and therefore in need of correction. If you want to measure us, he implies, measure us where you claim to be moral.

The subtext is also a warning about what conquest disrupts. “Secure” is doing heavy lifting: it suggests a world where women’s authority, safety, and social standing were stable before outside interference. Eastman ties women to communal continuity - “standard of morals” and even “purity of our blood” - language that sounds uncomfortably close to Victorian racial hygiene, but it’s better read as a defensive translation. He’s writing to an audience trained to respect “morality” and “bloodlines,” so he frames Indigenous values in the vocabulary that would pass through U.S. gatekeepers.

That choice creates tension. By vesting morality and identity in women, the line elevates women while also turning them into symbols: guardians of virtue, vessels of lineage. It works rhetorically because it forces the reader to confront an irony of “civilization”: the culture claiming to uplift women often brought policies - boarding schools, forced assimilation, sexual violence, legal disenfranchisement - that made women less secure, not more.