Now Online Via Zoom! Join local author Julie Dobrow for a presentation of her new book, Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage. 

Description from the Author: This book tells the story of the unlikely meeting and marriage of Elaine Goodale and Ohíye S’a, Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman. These star-crossed lovers came from different worlds: she, from a farm in the remote Berkshires hills, and he from a Santee Dakota reservation in Minnesota. Elaine was a teacher, a writer, a young woman with an unquenchable spirit of adventure who traveled to the Dakota Territory undaunted by society’s admonitions. Charles, educated at a series of boarding schools, Dartmouth College and Boston University’s Medical School, was thought of by his white mentors as the epitome of what an “assimilated Indian” in 19th century America could be. The pair met at the Pine Ridge Agency in December of 1890, just a few weeks ahead of the Wounded Knee Massacre. And that event changed everything. Based on extensive research done in more than a dozen states, my book traces the amazing trajectory of the Eastmans’ love and lives, as they went on to become well-known Indian education and policy reformers, writers, speakers, and parents of six biracial children. But the experience of Wounded Knee haunted them forever, and became, perhaps, an unfortunate metaphor for a marriage that didn’t last. LOVE AND LOSS AFTER WOUNDED KNEE tells Elaine and Charles’ story but also reflects on how their marriage manifested larger trends in shifting attitudes toward gender, race, and Indigenous identity in late 19th and early 20th century America.

Learn more about Julie Dobrow at juliedobrow.com