More than talking animals: Charles alexander eastman's animal peoples and their kinship critiques of United States colonialism

Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), an early collection of stories for children by Charles Alexander Eastman, a Dakot.a author, was largely viewed by his critical contemporaries as a politically innocuous analogue to Kipling's Jungle Book Stories. hrough consideration of the Dakot.a oral- historical genre of hi tu?ka?ka?pi ("long ago stories") and of Dakot. a peoplehood more broadly, this article proposes an alternative view of Eastman as a resistance writer who cited a long- circulating Dakot. a kinship philosophy to criticize the enduring conditions of United States settler colonialisma-a criticism that would become more pointed in his later, better- known autobiography, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1915). In viewing Eastman's animal tales as opposed to United States colonialism, we may see more clearly his innovative translations of Dakot. a politics into narratives that both appealed to and challenged United States settler society. hese challenges were made in relation to Dakot. a conceptions of peoplehood, power, and git.