Ohiyesa: The Soul of an Indian | movie | 2018 | Official Trailer - video Dailymotion

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Charles Alexander Eastman was a renowned physician, author, lecturer and Native American rights advocate. His life has b | dG1fb3FSV3pCblJTRXM

Transcript

00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:04 He was the first American Indian writer

00:07 of international renown.

00:09 He presented Indians to whites to explain what

00:13 it was like to be an Indian.

00:16 [SPEAKING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE]

00:19 My family and I have spent the last 10 years

00:22 searching for the story of my grandfather, Charles Eastman,

00:25 and bringing it back to our Dakota homeland.

00:27 Everyone always uses the suit or the headdress

00:30 to show the two sides of the family.

00:32 It was a rarity for any member of an Indian community

00:35 to become a writer.

00:37 I was sitting in the library at Dartmouth,

00:40 and the librarian had pulled out the Charles Eastman

00:42 papers to show me.

00:44 And I felt his presence there.

00:46 He was trying to tell me something.

00:49 It was about my family all the way back to that time.

00:54 What boy would not be an Indian for a while

00:57 when he thinks of the freest life in the world?

01:00 This life was mine.

01:01 Every day there was a real hunt.

01:03 There was real game.

01:05 We studied the habits of animals,

01:07 just as you study your books.

01:09 [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:12 Basically, our ancestors who were living here

01:16 were starving then.

01:17 [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:22 He was only four years old when the Dakota War happened.

01:25 And to experience that again--

01:27 There's probably about 280 people in there,

01:30 buried in there.

01:31 It must have been traumatic.

01:33 It must have brought back a lot of feelings and emotions

01:36 about what happened to his own community and family.

01:40 He really, to me, is a kind of towering figure of his time.

01:44 In incredible circumstances of loss,

01:48 he's able to retrieve his dignity

01:52 and keep that sense that his people come first.

01:57 Indigenous people today still live in the kind of world

02:00 that Ojiesa lived in, where his population was disregarded,

02:04 that we are forced to work within structures

02:06 that are not our own.

02:07 They were his struggle.

02:08 They're still ours.

02:11 Oh, wow.

02:12 Look at that.

02:13 I've never seen a picture of him smiling that big or that happy.

02:19 That's not the person that you hear about

02:22 or that gets written about.

02:23 This is actually who he was.

02:26 [MUSIC PLAYING]

02:29 (gentle music)

02:32 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Ohiyesa: The Soul of an Indian | movie | 2018 | Official Trailer

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