Love and Loss After Wounded Knee

Like many star-crossed lovers, it was amazing that Elaine Goodale and Ohíye S’a, Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, ever met in the first place. She was white woman from a remote corner of the Berkshires, who went west in 1884 to teach Native American children; he was a Santee Dakota who’d gone to Dartmouth College and the Boston University School of Medicine. Somehow, they both ended up at the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota in December of 1890 and fell in love at first sight. Three weeks later, they announced their engagement. Then the Wounded Knee Massacre changed everything.

Author, biographer and Tufts University professor Julie Dobrow’s new book, Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage, tells the complicated story of the Eastman’s lives. Joining Professor Dobrow to talk about the Eastmans and their unusual marriage will be Professor Kiara Vigil, Associate Professor of American Studies and Dean of New Students at Amherst College. Professor Vigil’s work centers on the history of representations of and by Native peoples from the Americas. In addition to her historical work, she’s currently working on a project about Native people in US films and television, and with support from the Mellon Foundation’s “New Directions” fellowship, studying the language of her Dakhota ancestors.

Tickets: Free to Members | $20 Non-members | Card to Culture

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