I have had an interest in North American Tribes since we lived in Fort Huachuca for a year when I was 7.
I read this article this morning and have ordered the book.
https://georgespencer.substack.com/p/always-the-winner
Just thought I'd share with those that may have a similar interest.
THE PITIFUL LAST
The baby was not expected to live. His mother’s name was Wakan Tankan Win (Goddess). She had given birth to four other children. Now she lay dying of complications. It was the winter of 1858. The place—a buffalo hide teepee in a Santee Sioux reservation near Redwood Falls, Minnesota.
Members of the tribe debated what to name the baby. A medicine man suggested he be called Mysterious Medicine. Someone pointed out that the infant’s uncle already had that name.
So the child who grew up to be Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman—a physician who treated victims of the Wounded Knee massacre, the author of 11 books, a national lecturer, a leading figure in the YMCA and Boy Scouts, an Indian rights lobbyist, co-founder of the first American-Indian national political organization, and husband and father of six—got what seemed a more fitting name, given the circumstances of his birth.
He was to be called Hakadah (the Pitiful Last [Born]). “I was regarded as little more than a plaything by the rest of the children,” he wrote in his 1902 memoirs Indian Boyhood. Even as a toddler he says he knew his name was “humiliating.”