Parenting & Family Quote by Charles Eastman

Eastman elevates parenthood to a kind of earned holiness, then immediately fences it in. The parent may claim the “priestly office” only “in some degree,” only by permission, only because their power “approaches” divinity without ever becoming it. That calibrated language matters: it resists the easy move of turning family authority into absolute authority. Instead, he frames it as a borrowed sacral role with strict conditions: creation and protection, not domination.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to institutional religion and to any state or church that tries to monopolize moral legitimacy. By locating the nearest thing to Deity not in a pulpit but in the daily labor of safeguarding a child, Eastman shifts the moral center from doctrine to responsibility. “Supreme duty” lands like a cultural north star: parenthood isn’t sentimental; it’s consequential. The sacred isn’t a weekly performance, it’s a continuous obligation with a human being at stake.

Context sharpens the edge. Eastman, a Santee Dakota physician and writer navigating late-19th- and early-20th-century America, was translating Indigenous ethical frameworks for audiences primed to exoticize or dismiss them. The sentence reads like strategic code-switching: he uses Christian vocabulary (“priestly,” “Deity”) to smuggle in a different hierarchy of values, one that treats spiritual authority as relational and accountable. In a period defined by assimilation policies that attacked Indigenous family structures, sanctifying the parent is also a political act: an assertion that the most legitimate “office” begins at home, and that its power is measured by care.