Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Eastman

A lot of modern politics starts by pretending the family is “private,” then quietly building the state around that assumption. Charles Eastman flips the premise: for many Indigenous societies, the family wasn’t merely where you belonged, it was where power lived. The line is deceptively plain, but it’s a radical claim about scale. Government, in Eastman’s framing, isn’t an abstract machine hovering above daily life; it’s embedded in kinship, obligation, and reciprocity. Authority is relational before it’s institutional.

The intent lands as both clarification and critique. Eastman, writing as a Dakota physician and author in an era when federal policy pushed allotment, boarding schools, and the forced remaking of Native life into nuclear-family individualism, is preserving a political theory that Americans often refused to recognize as “government” at all. Calling the family a “unit of government” insists that Indigenous governance had structure, legitimacy, and enforcement mechanisms even when it didn’t resemble courts, ballots, or bureaucracies. It’s a refusal of the colonial trope that equates civilization with centralized institutions.

The subtext cuts deeper: dismantle kinship and you don’t just “modernize” a people, you decapitate their polity. Eastman’s sentence reads like anthropology, but it functions like an indictment of assimilation. If governance is distributed through family networks, then policies targeting language, child-rearing, marriage, and inheritance aren’t social reforms; they’re regime change carried out at the level of the household.