So19: Charles Eastman and Elaine Goodale, the subjects of your book, are fascinating figures, but neither is well known today. Tell us when and how you first learned of them and also how that awareness led to this book.
Dobrow: I first learned about Elaine and Charles the summer after my junior year of college. I had a job in the Sophia Smith women’s history archive where they had received a new tranche of papers from the Goodale-Eastman-Dayton family. My job was to start organizing these papers. And from the yellowed newspaper clippings, old letters and faded photographs, this remarkable story literally sprang off the pages. I was fascinated! During my senior year, I wrote a thesis about the life of Elaine Goodale Eastman, who I viewed, somewhat naively, as this amazing woman who learned the language of the Native American students she taught, traveled to the Dakota Territory in the 1880s, and seemed to have such progressive ideas about race, education, and gender roles. At the time I felt that I knew something about Elaine, but very little about Charles, and I thought he was intriguing, too.
After college, I wrote a couple of articles about Elaine but then moved on to other topics. And yet I felt I wasn’t done with this story. Not yet.
After college, I wrote a couple of articles about Elaine but then moved on to other topics. And yet I felt I wasn’t done with this story. Not yet.
Fast-forward several decades to when I was searching around for the right subject or subjects for my next biography. Even though, following After Emily (2018), my then-editor and then-agent told me that my next biography should be about “someone more famous” than Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, I kept finding myself drawn back to the Eastmans. Once I decided to take them on again, I had to find a new agent and a new editor. But I’m glad I did!
So19: Before we go on, could you talk to us about Charles Eastman’s names?
Dobrow: Like most traditional Dakota people, Charles Eastman was given different names at different points in his life. His mother died soon after he was born, and he was given the name “Hakadah,” or “pitiful last.” When he was a teenager, he helped his village win an athletic tournament and was then given the name “Ohiyesa,” or “the winner.” Today, the preferred transliteration of this would be written “Ohíye S’a.” That might have been it, but when he was fifteen, his father, who had been incarcerated during the 1862 Dakota War and converted to Christianity, insisted that his son take a Euro-American name and become educated in boarding schools that taught Euro-American ways. So, he then became “Charles Alexander Eastman.”
But Charles never truly let go of his Dakota name; he often published using both names. As a biographer, I’ve learned that how people choose to refer to themselves often tells us a lot; in Charles/Ohíye S’a’s case, I think this is an illustration of the conflicts this man felt for most of his life, straddling the culture in which he was raised and the one in which he was educated.
So19: The book has the drama and scope of a novel, but it’s also deeply and meticulously researched. Tell us a bit about the sources and travels involved.
Dobrow: Doing the research for this book involved several different processes. I read a lot of secondary material to better understand US policies toward Native Americans and the period in which Elaine and Charles lived. I read a lot of scholarship by Indigenous scholars to better understand Native perspectives on Native history, and I spoke with several Indigenous academics to try to understand various aspects of Charles Eastman’s writing and life.
In terms of primary source material, Charles left behind very little other than his published works. Elaine left more, but, as I learned, she severely curated what she gave to the Sophia Smith Collection. Seeing what was not there actually became another important source of information.
Because the Eastmans moved back and forth across the country so much, there were materials scattered in many places. I drew materials from archives in fifteen states, the National Archives, two Canadian provinces, the BBC, and a Native American archive in South Dakota.
To try to deal with Charles’ archival paucities and Elaine’s archival omissions, I found that using information from old newspapers—many of them long since out of circulation but newly digitized— helped to fill in some of the gaps.
And yes, I did travel to many of the places that the Eastmans lived and worked. As a biographer, I find this kind of “footstepping” can be an extremely useful way of understanding my subjects. I traveled to Minnesota, where Charles was born and where the Eastmans lived for a few years, and to South Dakota (including a gut-wrenching trip to Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee). And I also went to the places nearer to where I am based in New England that the Eastmans lived—Mt. Washington, Massachusetts—the tiny town where Elaine was born and raised in the Berkshires; Munsonville, New Hampshire, where they ran a summer camp; and Amherst, in western Massachusetts, where they lived for two decades. Amherst had practically become my home base for the last book, and it is a place I know very well. Weirdly, it turns out that the first house the Eastmans lived in in Amherst was right next door to Mabel and David Todd!
So19: The universe is full of odd synchronicities, isn’t it? For those who haven’t read the book yet, I wonder if you could you offer a bit of an introduction to the couple and their marriage. They come from such different worlds. How did each grow up, and how did their trajectories meet?
Dobrow: Elaine grew up in the remotest part of the Berkshires at the elegiacally named Sky Farm. She was home-schooled by her mother. Elaine and one of her younger sisters showed an early facility with poetry; by the time she was eighteen, she had authored or co-authored five books of verse and essays. But because poetry couldn’t exactly earn you a living—especially not if you were female— Elaine became a teacher.
Rather than teach in the little one-room schoolhouse locally, she went to Virginia to become a teacher at the Hampton Institute, a boarding school where Black and Indigenous students were taught a highly assimilationist curriculum. Elaine eventually went to the Dakota Territory to teach students in their communities, believing that this would be more impactful than the boarding school model that ripped kids from their families (and, as we know today, was also toxic in many ways—even deadly—for many of the students who attended). She was eventually appointed the first supervisor of education in the Dakotas, and it was in this capacity that she traveled to Pine Ridge.
Ohíye S’a, or Charles Eastman, was born near Redwood Falls, Minnesota. His early years were marked by trauma and displacement. His family fled during the Dakota War and ended up in Manitoba before going to South Dakota. Because his father firmly believed that the only path forward for Native Americans at that point in time was to receive a Euro-American education, Charles went to a series of boarding schools that eventually landed him at Dartmouth College, then Boston University Medical School. His first job out of med school was as agency physician at the Pine Ridge Agency.
It was at Pine Ridge that the very unlikely meeting of Elaine and Charles took place. And this is where they fell in love, just three weeks before the booming Hotchkiss rifles alerted everyone to what would later be called the Wounded Knee Massacre.
So19: Despite their immediate early attraction, the Eastmans’ marriage was not ultimately successful. I wonder if you might talk to us about why.
Dobrow: There’s no question that the differences in their backgrounds affected their marriage profoundly. For one thing, they were dogged from the very beginning by articles in the press of the day that emphasized their dissimilarity from each other, often rife with stereotyped and racialized language about Charles. These articles never ceased throughout the course of their marriage; even their children were often subjects of stereotyped and offensive coverage.
But I think the proverbial nail in the coffin of their marriage was that Elaine never truly understood Charles’ Dakota self. She was a believer in assimilation when they met, and she never gave up the belief that this was the optimal way forward for Native Americans—and this despite her knowing quite a lot about and respecting many aspects of Sioux culture. As he got older, Charles had an increasing desire to return to his Dakota roots, something that sadly, was an anathema to her.
So19: I was interested to learn from the book that Eastman became a popular and widely known lecturer, and that he varied his self-presentation in the course of that work. Sometimes he appeared in traditional indigenous garb, sometimes in the same kind of suits White businessmen of his era might wear.
Dobrow: Charles became a featured speaker on the Chautauqua lecture circuit during the early 20th century. He lectured widely and often, speaking before groups ranging from the YMCA to the Boy Scouts of America, and giving book talks at libraries, town halls and lyceums. He also spoke on a broad range of topics about different aspects of Native American culture, politics, and life.
I think the personal cost to him of all this lecturing was that it kept him on the road more than he was at home. Elaine began to resent this, even as the talks added desperately needed income.
So19: I found Elaine’s profound contradictions both fascinating and heartbreaking. She was a woman with an enduring commitment to bettering the lives of Native Americans, but also one whose behavior whose belief in assimilation failed to honor the racial identity of her husband and children. Does that assessment feel fair?
Dobrow: Sadly, yes, I think this is fair. I already mentioned how her staunch beliefs served to marginalize her husband, but it is also true that she never seemed to recognize her own children as biracial. She listed them as “white” on the 1910 census and wrote letters to one of her sisters in which she stated she never thought of her children as “Indian” at all. I think she deliberately refused to acknowledge her children’s identities in ways that probably were hurtful not only to Charles, but also to the children.
So19: Today, interracial marriages like the Eastmans’ no longer occasion the kind of national attention—or the unapologetically racist tropes!—that their nuptials did. Yet we’re obviously still struggling violently (in both a literal and figurative sense) to navigate our nation’s racial, gender, religious and other differences. How to you feel their story speaks to our own possibilities and predicaments today?
Dobrow: I do think that their story illuminates issues of an America where ideas about race, gender, and Indigenous identity were rapidly changing. In their day, to the extent that there were interracial marriages, at all (which was not very much), it was more common to find Native women marrying white men than the other way around.
But I also think their story is one for today, in an America where once again, there are forces in government that seem to be evincing preferences for Euro-Americans and marginalizing people of color in different ways. The Eastmans’ stories suggest to us why it’s so hard for people who come from different backgrounds to truly understand one another, but also, why we should try to.
So19: I see that you’re one of the founders of a project called Half The History, dedicated to using short-form biography, film and podcasts to illuminate women’s stories. Tell us about that.
Dobrow: My colleague at Tufts and dear friend Jennifer Burton and I started this project several years ago. Jenn is a filmmaker, I’m a biographer, but we share an interest in trying to tell some of the untold and under-told stories of women’s lives. It’s been amazing to collaborate on this work. And I’ve loved learning how to produce films and podcasts. In addition to the new skills I’ve picked up, I find that telling stories visually and auditorily has also informed my writing in new ways.
So19: I know you’ll be doing a number of book-related events this fall and winter (readers can visit the events page at www.juliedobrow.com for dates and locations.) But I also know you just well enough to guess that you already have your next book project queued up! Am I correct, or are you taking a bit of a (well deserved) break?
Dobrow: You do know me well enough, Suz! Yes, I have already started on the next book, which will focus on the people who lived in the Old Manse, in Concord, MA.
People know about this historic house because Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Nature,” the essay thought to be the foundation of Transcendentalism, while living there. Nathaniel Hawthorne also lived at the Manse for the first three years of his marriage and published Mosses from an Old Manse, a collection of short stories that actually begins with an autobiographical essay about the years he and Sophia lived in this remarkable old house. But it turns out that there were also some other amazing women who lived there over the years, women whose stories haven’t often been told. I was grateful to have the Ruth R. Miller Fellowship in Women’s History at the Massachusetts Historical Society this past summer, where I did a lot of the research to jumpstart this next project.
So19: I greatly look forward to learning more. Thanks so much for your time, your insights and this wonderful book.