Native American Indian Leaders “D...-E...-F...-G...-”
for the social studies classroom and home schoolers.

Vine Deloria
Charles Eastman
Louise Erdrich

Chief Gall
Tim Giago

Vine Deloria, Jr.
b. 3-26-1933; Martin, South Dakota
d. 11-13-2009; Golden, CO

Vine Deloria was an author, theologian, historian and activist who challenged whites to question stereotypes and take a new look at the history of American western expansionism.

Charles Eastman
née Hakadah, renamed Ohíye S’a
b. 2-19-1858; near Redwood Falls, MN
d. 1-8-1939; Detroit, MI

Writer, physician, and reformer Charles Eastman was of Santee Sioux and Anglo-American ancestry. Eastman, who had degrees from Dartmouth and Boston College, also helped found the Boy Scouts of America organization. He was married to Elaine Goodale, a poet and educator.

The actor Adam Beach portrayed Dr. Eastman in the movie adaptation of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

• The Essential Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa), Revised and Updated Edition: Light on the Indian World

Louise Erdrich
b. 6-7-1954; Little Falls, MN

Writer Louise Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota, where she was raised. She is the author of numereous award winning books such as Love Medicine (1984).

Tom Giago Contemporary Native Americans

Tom Giago
b. 1934; Pine Ridge Reservation, SD

Tim Giago's voice rises with anger when he talks of his childhood. Born in 1934 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, he grew up in a time when Native American culture was strongly discouraged. At age six, Tim went to live at a boarding school of Indians. Students' heads were shaved so they could not hae traditional tribal hairstyles, and anyone caught speaking a tribal language was beaten. “It was like a prison,” he says. He joined the U.S. Navy at 17, and completed high school while serving in Japan. He later earned a degree in business from the University of Nevada.

Today, Mr. Giago, an Oglala Sioux, is a leading Native American journalist, and he writes to help people understand the struggles Native Amerians have faced. He began his writing career as a reporter for a South Dakota newspaper in 1981. Mr. Giago founded the Lakota Times, an Indian newspaper for the people of the Pine Ridge Reservation. The paper was so successful that Mr. Giago expanded its coverage and renamed it Indian Country Today. Today it is America's largest Indian-owned newspaper. In 1998, Mr. Giago sold Indian Country Today to the Oneida Nation, although he continues to write for the newspaper.

Mr. Giago has also written books [Children Left Behind: The Dark Legacy of Indian Mission Boarding Schools], one of them about his experiences at boarding school. He believes that his writing has helped him deal with his own childhood and has also helped others understand native American culture.
...
Tim Giago’s Sioux name, Nanwica Keiji means,
“He Who Stands Up For You.” - more journalism resources at journalism.org

Geronimo Great Native American Leaders Art Print

Geronimo
b. 6-16-1829; New Mexico
d. 2-17-1909; Ft. Sill, OK

Poster Text: “[Arizona] is my land, my home, my father’s land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains. If this could be I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish as at present, and that our name would not become extinct.”
From Geronimo’s autobiography (1906)

Geronimo Holding a Rifle, 1884, Giclee Print

Geronimo was an Apache warrior. His tribe lived in Mexico and the southwestern United States. In 1877, the U.S. government forced the Apaches to live on a reservation in the desolate area of Arizona, but Geronimo lead a small band of Apaches that refused to settle on the reservation. After years of fighting, captures, and escapes, Geronimo surrendered for the final time in 1886, after the U.S. government promised that he and his tribe could return to their homelands in Arizona. After a brief period of exile in Florida, part of the Apache tribe was allowed to return to Arizona. But Geronimo and the tribe members who resisted with him were never again allowed to return to their homelands.

Graham Greene, Dances with Wolves Poster

Graham Greene
b. 6-22-1952; Ontario, Canada

Graham Greene was nominated for an Academy Award his performance as Kicking Bird in the 1990 movie, Dances with Wolves.