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New Books Network Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Julie Dobrow about her book titled Love and Loss After Wounded Knee, a biography of an extraordinary interracial marriage published by NYU Press in 2025. Now, that subtitle gives us a very good sense of what we're going to be talking about. We're going to be talking about a, a marriage, but also the two people that come into it, their lives beforehand, how they meet, the marriage itself, also the impact of the marriage on not just them, not just on their immediate families, but as we're going to be talking about. This was actually kind of national news for a while, which is really interesting and kind of what the impact of that sort of fame is on each of them as individuals, on their relationship, on really a whole bunch of things. So this is a book that's operating at multiple levels. We're going to be talking about kind of very specific people and circumstances, but also big picture, a whole bunch of things that link to those individuals as well. So I'm trying not to give too much away at this point. But Julie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
Dr. Julie Dobrow
Miranda, thank you so much for having me.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
Dr. Julie Dobrow
Certainly. My name is Julie Dobraun. I am a professor at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, which is outside of Boston. And I am also a writer and a biographer. I love to answer this question about why I chose to write this book because it's honestly a story that has been with me for a very, very long time. You see, it was the summer before my senior year of college when I had a summer job in the Sophia Smith Women's History Archive at Smith College. And part of what I was tasked with that summer was sorting through a new tranche of papers that the archive had received. As I started to read through these papers and organize them, going through these old yellow newspaper clippings, these letters that were fraying at the edges, old photographs that were curling up, this absolutely amazing story literally leapt off the pages to me. I just found this story so compelling that I decided to write my senior thesis about it. But even then I felt like I wasn't really done with the Eastmans. Not yet. And then we can fast forward several decades later after my first biography, After Emily, which was a dual biography of Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, the mother daughter team who brought Emily Dickinson's poetry to publication, I was search for the subject of what would become my second biography. Despite the advice from my then editor and then agent that my next biography should really be about someone more famous, I kept finding myself drawn back to Elaine and Charles Eastman. They were quite well known in their own time, but today, not so much. And yet I felt that they should be. I felt that their story was truly fascinating. And I found that I felt the draw of this incredible story every bit as much as I did when I first stumbled upon it many years ago.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I always find it interesting what the backstory is behind a book, but I have to say that's a particularly good story. So thank you for sharing that with us. Getting into then, one of the two Eastmans, kind of. And what's so compelling to you? Let's start with Elaine. We meet her in the book for the first time in December 1890 in South Dakota. Where did she come from to end up in South Dakota in December 1890?
Dr. Julie Dobrow
That's part of what is so extraordinary about this, Miranda, because there's no reason that when you think about where Elaine was born, that she would have ended up in South Dakota in December of 1890. Elaine Goodenedale was born in 1863 in a tiny remote village called Mount Washington in the southwestern most corner of Massachusetts in the Berkshi. And she spent her childhood wandering the fields and mountains near her home, along with her three siblings. All four children were homeschooled by their mother at the elegiacally named Sky Farm. Even today, when there's really not much there other than the ruins of the barn, it's pretty clear that this is a magical place. Where the fields meet the sky and the mists lift off the mountains. Elaine and one of her younger sisters, Dora, showed an early and very unusual facility with words. By the time she was 13 years old, Elaine had already had numerous poems published in the widely circulated St Nicholas magazine. By the time she was 15, her poetry had been published in a book called Apple Blossoms that garnered much critical acclaim, sold 10,000 copies, went through five editions, and really generated a lot of what we'd call buzz today. By the time she was 18, Elaine had already authored or co authored five books of poetry and essays, and she and Dora were known as the childhood Poetic Prodigies of the Berkshires. But being a childhood poetic prodigy really could only take you so far and was certainly no guarantee of being able to support oneself, I think if the poetic prodigy happened to be female. And so, like many other educated women of her era who had extremely limited career options, Elaine became a teacher. But instead of teaching in the little one room schoolhouse in Mount Washington, Elaine elected to travel to Virginia, where the dashing General Samuel Chapman Armstrong had started the Hampton Institute, a boarding school that was teaching at first newly emancipated black children, and then later they took in Native American children as well. Elaine came to Hampton and became a teacher, and she just fell in love with her Native American students. She was so curious about where her students came from and felt that she would be a better teacher of them if she saw where they came from. And so she traveled to what was then called the Dakota Territor in 1884, and one thing led to another, and she eventually became a teacher in a school in White River, South Dakota, where she was also documenting things that she saw and observed at the school with her Native American students in a series of articles that she wrote that were published in all of the leading newspapers and magazines of the day. That actually gave her a very high profile voice on the issue of Indian education, which was a hot button issue at the time. And that in turn led her to become appointed as the first supervisor of Indian education in the newly subdivided states of north and South Dakota. And it was in that capacity that she was traveling around the state and ended up in Pine Ridge in December of 1890.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay. That is a very helpful foundation to her story because it's exactly as you said. You know, if you just look at kind of where and when she's born, you would not expect her to find her at this point. So helpful to see sort of the path she gets to at this point. And it sounds like she's already involved, Right. In the sort of lived realities and contested politics of relations between Native Americans and the US government. Is that right?
Dr. Julie Dobrow
100%. It's interesting too, because in the late 1880s, early 1890s, Elaine's ideas about the most impactful kind of education that Native Americans could receive was in some ways very different from the prevailing notions and in some ways quite similar. So it was different in that there was this boarding school model that of course, today we know was awful that it had. It ripped students away from their families, from their communities, from their cultures, in an effort to, quote, unquote, assimilate them to American standards and norms. And of course, we know today that many of these boarding schools actually had quite tragic ends for some of the students, many of the students who attended them. So Elaine started out with this being trained herself in the boarding school model, and she did embrace this idea of assimilation, but she thought that it would happen more impactfully if students were actually taught in their own communities, surrounded by their families. And that's why she started advocating for this day school model. So that was something that was actually quite progressive. The other thing that I think was interesting about her was that although education at these government run schools was mandated to be in English, you had children who came to these schools who were coming from oral cultures, were coming with many different language groups. They didn't know English. And Elaine saw that, and she sort of intuitively believed that a bilingual education would be more effective. So I think that was another rather progressive idea that she had about education for Native Americans.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely interesting. To place her in the context of what debates are happening at that point and gives us a sense of kind of how she got to where she is in December 1890 in South Dakota. What about the other side of the marriage? Obviously, they meet at that key place and time. How does Charles get to that moment? To what extent was his background or upbringing at all similar, what you've just been telling us?
Dr. Julie Dobrow
It was not at all similar. It couldn't have been more different. Well, so, Charles, the first thing that you need to know about. Charles Eastman is, like many Dakota, he went by different names at different points in his life. As his biographer, I've come to believe that what he called himself at any given time also is an insight into what might have been going on in his life. So when he was born, he was named Hakada. He was born in 1858 somewhere near Redwood Falls, Minnesota, which is about 116 miles west of present day Minneapolis. Unfortunately, like much about his life, there is not very much documentation of his early years. But one of the things that we do know is that his mother died shortly after giving birth to him, which is the reason that he was named Hakada, which would translate roughly into the pitiful last. And he was then his grandmother and his uncle were the ones who primarily raised him. So in this period of time, in the late 1850s was a very tense time in Minnesota. Minnesota had become an official US state the same year that he was born, 1858. As white America was pushing its boundaries ever westward, the Dakota and Lakota, collectively known as the Sioux, became increasingly embroiled in different sorts of controversies with the US government. As their lands were taken over and compromised, there were many skirmishes that erupted. And by 1862, what is sometimes known as the Sioux Uprising and sometimes known as the Dakota War started. With white troops advancing on Dakota images and shooting indiscriminately, Hakata, along with his grandmother and other relatives fled north to Manitoba. His father and his brothers were believed to have been captured by the army and killed in the largest mass execution in American history. When he was in Manitoba, where he lived through his mid teenage years, Hakada took on a new name, Ohiyesa, which translates to the winner. And he was named that because of his athletic prowess. So in about 1873, when he was 15 years old, Ohiosa was shocked to discover that his father and his brothers were in fact still alive. They had been incarcerated, not killed, and during their imprisonment they had converted to Christianity. And his father, now calling himself Jacob Eastman, had come north to reclaim his youngest son and bring him to Flandreau, South Dakota, where he had a farm. At this point, his father Jacob believed that really the best path forward for Native Americans was to become as Americanized as possible, including receiving a westernized education. So at this point, Ohiosa took on yet another name, Charles Alexander Eastman. He became a Christian, he cut his hair, and he embarked on a series of day schools, preparatory schools and boarding schools at which he excelled. He eventually landed at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he was the only native student in his class, received his undergraduate degree there, and then went on to medical school at Boston University. So his background could not have been more different than Elaine's.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a very different background indeed. I'm curious then, about the Dartmouth side of things and the kind of going off to study. He becomes a medical doctor. How does he get that education? And he uses it in your book. You talk about him working both in Indian country and outside of it, kind of crossing back and forth. So can you tell us about that aspect of him?
Dr. Julie Dobrow
Sure. Well, the education that he received at Dartmouth was at a really classic liberal arts education. But while he was receiving this, Charles became convinced that part of what he wanted to do was to find a way of giving back to his people. And he was initially torn between receiving a postgraduate legal education and a medical education, and eventually decided on a medical education which led him to the medical school at Boston University. Whereas I mentioned he was once again the only native student in his class in those days, Boston University offered a homeopathic education, which is something that I think tracked very well with Charles's Dakota philosophy. Mind and environment and body, all coming together in the most, most healthful ways. So this was a sort of education that he really embraced. At the end of his medical school training, Charles wanted to give back to his people again. So he was able to procure a position with the US Government as agency physician in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, which is how he ended up in Pine Ridge in November of 1890.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so we've now gotten them both to the end of 1890 in the Dakotas. Obviously, that's important for the two of them, but that's a really tense moment in the Dakotas and In Native American U.S. relations more broadly. Can you help us understand kind of what else is going on at this point and how Elaine and Charles managed to fall in love in the midst of all of it?
Dr. Julie Dobrow
I will try. So, yes, the 1890 was an incredibly tense moment in Euro American, Native American relations. Over decades, the US Government had been taking land away from indigenous people and pushing them onto smaller and smaller reservations, trying to instill in many people who were basically a hunting and gathering culture, that they should have more agricultural food procurement, which often did not work and did not mesh with their beliefs. There were many treaties made, many treaties broken. There was rising poverty and rising disease across Indian country. And it was really a very, very difficult time for many Plains Indian groups. So as a result, many of them turned to a revivalist practice called the Ghost Dance, in which people would gather together, often in large numbers, eat certain foods, go to sweat lodges, paint their bodies, wear particular clothing, and engage in singing and dancing in the belief that this is something that could help connect them to relatives who had passed away and would in some way bring them back to a time before the white Americans made all of these incursions on their lands and their cultures. However, the white Americans looking at the Ghost Dance did not see this for what it was. They didn't see it as the reclamation of certain traditions. They really saw it as a threat. And so they called in the troops, many of them. In fact, By December of 1890, there were, I think, 5,000 troops or so that were stationed in Pine ridge and another 4,000 that were stationed not far by. Not far away. This was really the largest military deployment that there had been since the Civil War in the United States. So tensions could not have been higher. In addition, the press, sort of sniffing a conflict about to unfold, gathered in great numbers in the frontier towns adjacent to reservations, which further ratcheted up tensions. And so, in the middle of all of these incredible amount of rising tensions, Elaine and Charles both happened to be in Pine Ridge. They were both invited to a tea party by the local rector. And when they met, something magical happened. Elaine and Charles saw something in each other that they recognize. Let me just perhaps read just two little quotes from things that they had written at the time that I think gives a sense of how this romance was born. Charles wrote, I had laid my plans carefully and purposed to serve my race for a few years in my profession, and I had decided that it would not be wise to think of marriage for the present. I had not given due weight to the possibility of love. And Elaine wrote, when only a few weeks after our meeting, I promised to marry Dr. Eastman, it was with a thrilling sense of twofold consecration. I gave myself wholly in that hour. At the same time, I embraced with a new and deeper zeal the conception of lifelong service to my husband's people. So in answer to your question, Miranda, I don't know how we ever know how it is or why it is that two people will actually fall in love. But what I do know from reading these sorts of things, the few things that each of them wrote about the time of their meeting, was it wasn't. Each of them saw it, not just about them. They saw it as something bigger. They saw it as something about. About this particular time that they were meeting, and they saw it as something about the goal that they both had of trying to help native peoples who were in such dire straits at that particular time.
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Dr. Julie Dobrow
Well I.
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Dr. Julie Dobrow
Now.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That'S really interesting that they're thinking about it as bigger than them because they're not the only ones thinking that right there's attention on this relationship. It's not just the two of them. So what were some of the reactions like to for example, their engagement? Why was it such of interest to people who didn't even know them?
Dr. Julie Dobrow
Yeah, well, I mean there were very few interracial relationships at all. And to the extent that there were interracial relationships, it was much more common to see a relationship between a white man and a native woman than the other way around. And I think the other thing to remember is that both of them had separately already developed quite a few a high profile in the press. Elaine because being a childhood poet who had turned into a journalist who was publishing in all of these Newspapers and Charles, because he was one of the very few Native Americans who had had this degree of educational attainment at places like Dartmouth College and the Boston University School of Medicine. He was very articulate in English, and frankly, he was also a very good looking man. And he was often photographed in the press. And so the two of them were bringing a lot of star power, as it were, into this relationship in the beginning and their engagement and then subsequently. Their wedding was covered in more than 200 newspapers coast to coast in the United States and even in many newspapers abroad. But the coverage often was not exactly objective, shall we say. The coverage often emphasized the difference in their backgrounds. And in particular, the coverage of Charles usually described him in highly racialized and stereotypical ways. Some of the headlines at the time of their wedding were. One newspaper had a headline that they ran that said, Poetess Mary's Big Engine. The San Francisco examiner, pretty major newspaper in the United States, ran a headline that said, Fair Bride of an Indian Elaine Goodale Weds the Red man of Her Choice. Often these articles would focus on Charles's educational background, but misrepresented it, suggesting that he had attended Cornell or Harvard or Yale. The point seemed to be more that this was a Native American who had attended an American Westernized university, not any particular university that he went to. He was often referred to in the press as a specimen with language that discussed his physical attributes. There's one quote that I sort of love hate. He is of medium height with all the peculiarities of his people in his features. His eyes are small and glittering. His nose and face are broad. His cheeks are very pronounced. And this was the kind of coverage that they got initially. And frankly, the kind of coverage that would dog them throughout the entire course of their marriage.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a pretty intense coverage. So I was not surprised to then read further into the book that, like, they noticed and it had an impact on them. So how did they respond to all of this outside attention and pressure and. And what did it do to their work, their relationship, themselves?
Dr. Julie Dobrow
Yeah, so it's interesting, and it was certainly a challenge for me as a biographer, because I have to say that when we think about things like the newspaper coverage, surely they noticed it. Surely it was very hurtful to them. And especially after they started having children who were themselves covered in highly racialized and stereotypical ways in the newspaper, they must have been very protective, just as any parent would be. And yet they left behind no record of this. Charles left behind almost no personal papers. And as I discovered in doing the Research for this book, Elaine severely curated the records that she left behind. So your answer to your question about how do they respond to these pressures? To a certain extent, we don't know. And to a certain extent, I would say that it played out in different ways in terms of the pressures on their relationship. So I'm sure that that was one of them. But another one was that Charles Eastman had many different jobs, many, many different jobs over the course of his lifetime. The Eastmans had six children. They had a lot of financial pressures that became worse all the time. And he went from one job to another, never bringing in very much money. So that was another stressor on their marriage. Many of the jobs that he had took him away from home. He was on the road more than he was home, leaving Elaine at home with more and more and more children. And that was also difficult. And then, of course, part of what is so interesting about Charles Eastman is that he did become a very successful writer later in his own time. One of the things that happened as they were having financial pressures after his medical practice failed, was Elaine suggested that he start writing down some of the stories of his childhood that he was telling his bedtime stories to their kids, which she helped to edit and helped to get published initially in St. Nicholas magazine and then based on the very positive reception that that received as a book. And he would end up becoming a writer and wrote several books that were very well received in the press, did bring in some money, but also kept him out on the road quite a lot.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That sounds like a pretty tricky sort of multiple things there to navigate. Were there any benefits to all of this publicity for them or their ideas?
Dr. Julie Dobrow
Well, I think the clear benefit was that he in particular did become quite well known during his time, which I'm sure increased sales for his books and probably helped him land some of the many different jobs that he had. He also became very much of a spokesperson within Native American political circles. And I think for a time he became the president of the Society of American Indians. He spent a lot of time and energy advocating for American Indians to become US Citizens. So I think that, you know, he did do or at least laid the groundwork for some important work in political advocacy. And part of that came because of the publicity that he received for Elaine. I think it was probably much harder. I mean, remember that going into the marriage, she, too, had quite a successful literary career. As a child, she had been told that she could have been one of America's greatest poets, and how difficult that must have been for her to Shelve all of that. And she would later, somewhat disparagingly put it, tread the path so well worn by so many women of needing to stay home and care for and nurture their children. And, of course, she was also caring for and nurturing Charles's literary career and putting her own aside for quite a while. So I think that, too, was a stressor in their marriage.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I bet. So she didn't get any kind of national profile or publicity from any of this. Did her ideas get to develop at all, or did it all have to get put aside?
Dr. Julie Dobrow
Well, I think that she always tried to keep a hand in the profile that she had already established for herself, mostly about Indian education. And throughout her life, even when she was home with the children, she was still writing articles that would periodically be published in different newspapers and magazines. So it wasn't that she was completely forgotten or forsaken, but certainly his career took center stage and hers took a back seat.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Got it. Well, given all those pressures you've just described, I was not hugely surprised to read that their marriage doesn't last. But maybe you can give us more specifics about when, why, and how they split up.
Dr. Julie Dobrow
Sure. Well, in addition to the different pressures that we've already discussed, the. Let me just set the stage for this a little bit. So one of the many things that the Eastmans did to try to bring in some much needed funding was to tap into the growing American camping movement. So in the Beginning of the 20th century, sleepover camps became much of a thing. And many of the sleep wake camps were tapping into this idealized sense of American Indians, that they would utilize some of the crafts and some of the philosophies of Native Americans and put together these Indian themed camps. And so the Eastman saw an opportunity there. And honestly, what better for marketing purposes than to have a camp director who actually was a Native American? The Eastmans leased a property on Granite Lake in the state of New Hampshire, and they procured enough funding to start a summer camp. And for the first few years, Camp Oahe became a pretty good endeavor for them, where they were able to bring in some income. And to be sure, they were sort of tapping into ways of monetizing being indigenous. But also, I'm quite convinced that Charles also saw this as a way of really trying to bring some indigenous philosophies and values to white girls and boys who he thought really needed to hear about these philosophies. It was all going away, going fairly well until 1918, when the pandemic that had been sweeping the world. Started to rear its ugly head in the United States in 1918, when the influenza pandemic was. We started seeing it here in the States. The Eastman seemed to think that if they were living in relatively isolated places, that they would be immune from it. And Elaine and Charles and some of the younger children decided to remain in New Hampshire even after the camping season was over. A couple of their older children were in different places, mostly in semi rural areas, with one exception, their second oldest child, Irene Taluta. Irene was an incredibly talented, gifted singer. She may have been one of the first crossover artists, actually, because she was equally talented at singing and Native American traditional songs. She often opened for Charles in some of the talks that he gave and also classic Western operatic repertoire. And Irene was actually located in New York, and she had just been accepted by the Metropolitan Opera and traveled to New Hampshire in the fall of 1918 to tell her parents the good news. But unfortunately, just days after she arrived in New Hampshire, Irene fell ill. And a few days after that, she became One of the 675,000 known Americans to die in the influenza epidemic. So I think that the death of a child is an almost unimaginable, unthinkable tragedy that probably affects every member of the family. And instead of turning to each other in the wake of Irene's death, Elaine and Charles turned apart. There was a relationship that, of course, had started amid the tensions that were building between Euro Americans and Native Americans the late 19th century. It was a relationship that blossomed just ahead of the Wounded Knee massacre. It had teetered on the brink for years after, and it was really on the precipice when Irene died. And it went over the edge with what was subsequently revealed in their marriage, which I actually don't want to discuss. And if people would like to know about that, you should read the book.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Fair enough. Can you give us maybe a brief sketch then of what their lives are like after they separate?
Dr. Julie Dobrow
Sure. Well, they did separate after that, in 1921. They never officially divorced. Charles went back to the Midwest where he had been born. He, for a time, didn't have any place that he called home. For a time, he was living with their son, Ohi in Detroit. And then he eventually built a cabin for himself. He tried to get back to writing, but he was never able to publish anything again. And that may also be a clue into something that happened in Eastman's marriage. There's, to this day, I think, a very real question about how heavy a hand Elaine had in the editing of Charles's books. Elaine, after they split up, moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, where a couple of her married daughters lived. And she was spent the rest of her life living a sort of peripatetic existence where she would go from one daughter's house to another. She did actually reclaim a lot of her writing career after they split up, partially out of necessity. And she wrote a number of things that she referred to as her pot boilers. Books that were not meant to be great literature, but were meant to bring in some much needed money. But she also tried her hand at a lot of different genres. She wrote novels, she wrote plays. She wrote a couple of nonfiction books. She continued to write occasional poems that were published in newspapers back in the era when newspapers regularly publish poetry. She also wrote a memoir that was published posthumously a couple of decades after she passed away. And, you know, each of them, to a certain extent, I think, tried to reclaim some of the things that had been important to them earlier in their lives, in their later lives that they were living separately again, because we don't know. Since Charles didn't leave behind personal papers, it's hard to know how he thought about this, how he processed any of this. And with Elaine, as I mentioned earlier, she really severely curated the record that she left behind. For example, their much storied wedding that I mentioned earlier that had been descriptions of which were in hundreds of newspapers. There's not a single photograph from the wedding that exists in the archive. She eliminated all of those things. But there are some clues about how she thought and what she thought about and how she processed all of this. Because for much of her adult life, Elaine was a very good correspondent with her youngest sister, Rose. And although Elaine did not save the letters that Rose wrote to her, in which Rose had clearly asked her some very pointed questions, what Elaine didn't know and couldn't have anticipated was that one day Rose's family would turn over the letters that Elaine had written. And these were a gold mine for a biographer because they really contained a lot of unfiltered thoughts about Charles, about the marriage, about the children, about Elaine's own disappointments in her life. And so they were fascinating, if somewhat poignant, coda to this life.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I can imagine what that would have been like to find them. And fascinating that you were able to get all this detail and, you know, finally put all those threads together that you've been pulling for such a long time to put all of this in a published book. So thank you for giving us a sense of it. Can I ask what might be on your desk. Now that this big project is done, whether or not you're working on another book, is there anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
Dr. Julie Dobrow
Sure. There are a lot of books on my desk right now that are about the next project. And the next project is going to be about some of the people who lived in a historic house called the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts. The Old Manse is a fascinating place. It is known because it is the place where Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Nature, which is the essay that is thought to be the foundation of the transcendentalist philosophy. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American author, also lived in the Old Manse for the first three years of his marriage. But it turns out that there were some pretty amazing women who also lived in this house over many, many years. And as I started doing research on this, I thought that these were some incredible stories that have not been told and really should be. So that'll be the next project.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds interesting. Best of luck pursuing it.
Dr. Julie Dobrow
Thank you so much.
Dr. Miranda Melcher
In the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled Love and Loss After Wounded Knee, a biography of an extraordinary interracial marriage, published by NYU Press in 2020. Julie, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Dr. Julie Dobrow
Miranda, thank you for having me today.
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Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Julie Dobrow
Date: November 22, 2025
This episode explores Julie Dobrow’s new book, Love and Loss After Wounded Knee, a dual biography of Elaine Goodale Eastman and Charles Eastman — a white woman and a Native man whose extraordinary marriage bridged profound social divides in the late 19th and early 20th century. Dobrow, in conversation with host Dr. Miranda Melcher, discusses the Eastmans' individual backgrounds, the societal context of their union, the international attention their marriage generated, the personal and societal pressures they faced, and their eventual separation. The episode reveals how the Eastmans’ intersecting lives illuminate not only American interracial marriage, but also the complicated history of U.S.-Native American relations, period media portrayal, and personal ambition amid social turmoil.
“I just found this story so compelling that I decided to write my senior thesis about it. But even then I felt like I wasn’t really done with the Eastmans. Not yet.” – Julie Dobrow (03:47)
“She thought it [assimilation] would happen more impactfully if students were actually taught in their own communities, surrounded by their families.” – Julie Dobrow (10:38)
“His background could not have been more different than Elaine’s.” – Julie Dobrow (15:58)
Societal and Political Upheaval
Their Meeting and Swift Engagement
“Something magical happened. Elaine and Charles saw something in each other that they recognize.” – Julie Dobrow (20:45)
“When only a few weeks after our meeting, I promised to marry Dr. Eastman, it was with a thrilling sense of twofold consecration.” – Elaine Goodale (21:24)
“He is of medium height with all the peculiarities of his people in his features. His eyes are small and glittering…” (27:31, paraphrasing period coverage)
Media, Money, Gender, and Opportunity
“[Elaine] would later, somewhat disparagingly put it, tread the path so well worn by so many women of needing to stay home and care for and nurture their children.” – Julie Dobrow (32:54)
Elaine’s Continued, Though Diminished, Advocacy
The Impact of Personal Tragedy
Life After the Split
“They really contained a lot of unfiltered thoughts about Charles, about the marriage, about the children, about Elaine’s own disappointments in her life. And so they were fascinating, if somewhat poignant, coda to this life.” – Julie Dobrow (42:22)
Julie Dobrow on fate and biography:
“I kept finding myself drawn back to Elaine and Charles Eastman. They were quite well known in their own time, but today, not so much. And yet I felt that they should be.” (04:20)
On the impact of fame:
“Their engagement and then subsequently their wedding was covered in more than 200 newspapers coast to coast in the United States and even in many newspapers abroad.” (25:55)
On Elaine’s overlooked contributions:
“…she was also caring for and nurturing Charles’s literary career and putting her own aside for quite a while. So I think that, too, was a stressor in their marriage.” (32:48)
On the aftermath and revealing archives:
“…one day Rose’s family would turn over the letters that Elaine had written. And these were a gold mine for a biographer because they really contained a lot of unfiltered thoughts…” (41:59)
Julie Dobrow’s Love and Loss After Wounded Knee uncovers the rich, nuanced, and often tragic story of Charles and Elaine Eastman—a couple whose lives, ambitions, and relationship existed at the crossroads of some of America’s thorniest debates around race, identity, gender, and historical memory. The podcast episode provides a deep dive into their dramatic lives, the forces that shaped (and sometimes broke) them, and the enduring relevance of their story for understanding American history.