"Our old age was in some respects the happiest period of life"

Charles Eastman suggests that happiness ripens with time, not in spite of age but because of it. The emphasis falls on a shift of center: from striving and assertion to belonging and transmission. In many Indigenous lifeworlds that shaped Eastman, elderhood is not a private diminishment but a public office. The elder becomes a keeper of memory, a teacher of conduct, a counselor whose authority arises from endurance and proven judgment. Social esteem, kinship reciprocity, and the expectation that elders will be listened to make the later years a season of fulfillment rather than exile.

The happiness he names is not the exuberance of youth; it is a steadier clarity. Responsibilities change their weight. The burdens of proving oneself or accumulating prestige give way to the freedom to interpret experience, to sift what matters from what merely glittered. Perspective itself becomes a kind of wealth: the capacity to see patterns across calamity and prosperity, to greet both with humor and composure. There is relief in recognizing limits, a gentler ambition that asks for enough rather than more.

Eastman also gestures toward a cyclical sense of time. If life is understood as seasons, then elderhood is harvest, gathering what was sown, sharing it, and nourishing others. Grandchildren, students, the community’s future offer continuities that soften the fear of finitude. Even bodily frailty can be reframed: dependence is not humiliation when interdependence is the norm, and care received is simply care reciprocated across a lifetime.

Set against modern anxieties about aging, where usefulness is measured by productivity and elders are often isolated, his line reads as a quiet indictment and an invitation. Make a world in which wisdom is needed, in which remembrance is labor, in which attention to the past steers the living. Then old age can be a crest rather than a decline: a time when life’s meaning, once scattered, gathers itself and holds steady.