Julie Dobrow, "Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage" (NYU Press, 2025)

Nov 22, 2025

Julie Dobrow, a biography professor, joins to discuss her compelling work on Elaine Goodale and Charles Eastman, an interracial couple bound by love and activism. The podcast delves into their tumultuous journey from different backgrounds, social fame, and the strain of public scrutiny. Dobrow reveals the impact of personal tragedies, including the 1918 influenza loss, on their marriage. With insights from their letters and archival research, she paints an emotional picture of their lives and the context of their times.

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ANECDOTE

Archive Discovery Sparked Lifelong Project

Julie Dobrow discovered the Eastmans' story while sorting papers at the Sophia Smith Archive and wrote her senior thesis on them.
The story kept drawing her back and became the subject of her later full biography decades later.

INSIGHT

From Child Prodigy To Indian Education Advocate

Elaine Goodale rose from a remote Berkshire childhood to national prominence through early poetry and journalism.
She used that profile to shape and advocate for Indian education reform in the Dakotas.

INSIGHT

Identity Shifts Shaped Eastman's Path

Charles Eastman transformed from Hakada to OhíyeʼSa to Charles through family, conversion, and Western education.
His Dartmouth and Boston University training positioned him as a rare, bilingual Native professional and advocate.

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Like any set of star-crossed lovers, Elaine and Charles came from different worlds. Elaine, an acclaimed childhood poet from a remote corner of the Massachusetts Berkshires, traveled to the Dakota Territories to teach Native American students, undaunted by society’s admonitions. Charles, a Dakota Sioux from Minnesota, educated at Dartmouth and Boston University Medical School, was considered by his Euro-American mentors the epitome of an assimilated Indian. But when they met just ahead of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, the magnetic pull of love brought them together despite the tremendous odds stacked against them.
Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage (NYU Press, 2025) by Dr. Julie Dobrow offers a dual biography of Elaine Goodale and Ohíye’Sa, (Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman), exploring their individual lives as well as their highly publicized interracial marriage. Both well-known in their own time– Elaine as a poet, journalist, and advocate for Indian education and Charles as writer, public speaker, and ardent activist for Indian rights– their marriage started with a shared vision to work on behalf of Indians. In the face of extreme prejudice, financial burden, and personal tragedy however, the marriage began to unravel.
Dr. Dobrow paints an intimate, emotional portrait of the Eastmans’ lives drawn from Elaine and Charles’s letters, papers, and hundreds of accounts of the Eastmans’ lives from newspapers. Along the way, she skillfully illuminates the shifting late 19th and early 20th century definitions of Indigenous identity, and reveals how the Eastmans’ legacies reflect changing American attitudes toward gender, interracial relationships and biracial children. The result is a compelling new history that weds the private and the political, and Native America and the United States of America– entwined yet separated, inextricable yet never fully joined, just like Elaine and Charles themselves.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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