"No one who is at all acquainted with the Indian in his home can deny that we are a polite people"
About this Quote
Politeness, here, isn’t a compliment the dominant culture can safely accept; it’s an accusation dressed in good manners. Charles Eastman stakes a simple claim - “we are a polite people” - but he frames it so that anyone “at all acquainted” with Native life must concede it. The wording corners the reader: if you disagree, you’re confessing ignorance; if you agree, you’re admitting that prevailing stereotypes (the “savage,” the “uncivilized”) were always propaganda, not observation.
Eastman’s intent is strategic. He’s writing in an era when “civilization” was the moral alibi for allotment, boarding schools, and forced assimilation. By choosing “polite,” he doesn’t argue on the colonizer’s favored battlefield of technology or wealth; he argues on the terrain of social ethics. Politeness signals restraint, reciprocity, attention to others - precisely the qualities settler narratives denied Indigenous people in order to rationalize dispossession. The subtext is devastating: if Native communities practiced courtesy in “his home,” what does it say about the society that arrived claiming superior manners while breaking treaties, renaming children, and criminalizing languages?
The pronoun work matters. “We” asserts collective dignity without begging for validation; “the Indian” registers the period’s reductive label, then quietly reverses it by attaching a domestic scene (“in his home”) that makes Native life intimate rather than mythic. Eastman’s sentence performs the very politeness it defends: measured, controlled, impossible to dismiss without revealing the listener’s prejudice.
Eastman’s intent is strategic. He’s writing in an era when “civilization” was the moral alibi for allotment, boarding schools, and forced assimilation. By choosing “polite,” he doesn’t argue on the colonizer’s favored battlefield of technology or wealth; he argues on the terrain of social ethics. Politeness signals restraint, reciprocity, attention to others - precisely the qualities settler narratives denied Indigenous people in order to rationalize dispossession. The subtext is devastating: if Native communities practiced courtesy in “his home,” what does it say about the society that arrived claiming superior manners while breaking treaties, renaming children, and criminalizing languages?
The pronoun work matters. “We” asserts collective dignity without begging for validation; “the Indian” registers the period’s reductive label, then quietly reverses it by attaching a domestic scene (“in his home”) that makes Native life intimate rather than mythic. Eastman’s sentence performs the very politeness it defends: measured, controlled, impossible to dismiss without revealing the listener’s prejudice.
Quote Details
| Topic | Native American Sayings |
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