Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: Q&A with Julie Dobrow (M.A.C ‘84, Ph.D. ‘87)

Who can pinpoint the moment two people fall in love?” begins Annenberg School for Communication alum Julie Dobrow’s (M.A.C ‘84, Ph.D. ‘87) new book, Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage (NYU Press 2025).

In this dual biography, Dobrow, director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Tufts University and a professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development and the Film and Media Studies Program, traces the lives of Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale, whose 1891 interracial marriage, six months after the Wounded Knee Massacre, made headlines and challenged American norms.

The pair met at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where Goodale, a writer and teacher raised on a Massachusetts farm, was inspecting Native American day schools as part of her job as supervisor of education for the Dakotas. Eastman, a Santee Sioux physician, arrived to treat patients after graduating from Dartmouth College and Boston University’s School of Medicine. The pair, an “assimilated Indian” with an Ivy League background and a white woman who sought independence and a writing career, connected over their shared passion for Indian rights and education.

In her book, Dobrow shares how the Eastmans' lives reflect the shifting social and cultural issues in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from indigenous identity to women’s rights.

We recently spoke to Dobrow about the book, which is now available from NYU Press.

How did you become interested in the Eastmans’ story?

I have been interested in Elaine Goodale and Ohíye S’a, or Charles Alexander Eastman, for a very long time. The summer before my senior year of college, I had a job at the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College. One of my tasks was to sort and organize a new tranche of papers they’d received from the Goodale-Eastman-Dayton families. As I sifted through and read the yellowed newspaper clippings, fraying letters, and old photographs curling up along the edges, an amazing story literally leapt off the pages. The young white woman who traveled to the Dakota Territory to teach Native students, undaunted by society’s admonitions, fell in love with and married a Dakota man, and worked on behalf of Native American causes, captured my imagination and admiration. I wrote my senior thesis about Elaine Goodale’s life and wrote a couple of articles about her during the time I was studying at Annenberg.
 
Fast-forward several decades. After my first biography had been published, I began searching for who would be the subject or subjects of my next book. Although my then-editor and then-agent told me my next subject should “be someone more famous,” I found myself drawn back to the Eastmans. There were still many unanswered questions, still more work to be done, even though other people had helped to fill in some of the gaps. I knew a fair amount about Elaine, but less about Charles. I needed to do a lot of archival investigating (in 15 states, two Canadian provinces, the BBC, and a Native American archive), mine the hundreds of articles from long-defunct newspapers now electronically retrievable, and steep myself in Indigenous scholarship. I still found the story every bit as compelling as I had when I first discovered it, and I decided to write this book about two star-crossed lovers who came from such different worlds — even though it meant getting a new agent and a new editor.

In the book, you write that “the Eastmans were savvy about the ways emerging media shaped image and opinion. They were the poster couple for change.” Could you elaborate on the role that mass communication played in the Eastmans’ story?

The main form of mass communication in their era was, of course, the press. Both Elaine and Charles were quite well-known in the late 19th and early 20th centuries because of coverage of their early achievements in newspapers and magazines of the day — Elaine, because she’d achieved early fame as a childhood poet and Charles because he was a Dakota who’d been educated at Dartmouth and other schools, hailed by his white mentors as the epitome of what a Euro-American education could do for a Native person. News of their rare interracial marriage was covered in more than 200 papers across the U.S. and abroad.
 
But the Eastmans also both knew how to harness the power of the press. Elaine turned from poetry to prose after she’d become a teacher of Native American students and documented her thoughts about “Indian education” and policy in a series of articles published in all the leading periodicals, which led to her appointment as the first supervisor of Indian education for the Dakotas. When he turned from medicine to writing and lecturing, Charles strategically sometimes dressed in Euro-American suits and cravats and sometimes in traditional Sioux regalia for both his author photos and his talks, knowing full well that his appearance, itself, would often generate coverage.
 
And because they were so aware of the importance of the press in shaping images, after they’d been witness to the horrors of the Wounded Knee Massacre, where they’d both worked furiously to try to save some of the victims, they each wrote eyewitness accounts meant to counter the disinformation being put out about the tragedy, the fake news of 1890.

What are some of the ways that the Eastmans challenged popular narratives about indigenous Americans and women’s rights in the 19th and early 20th-century American history?

In the late 19th/early 20th centuries, it was widely believed that the optimal form of education for non-white people was either mostly Christian or mostly vocational training, given with the aim of assimilating them to Euro-American values. This was also most often deployed at boarding schools, where students were taken from their families, their communities, and their cultures — and as we know today, often with disastrous, even deadly results. Although Elaine began her teaching career at one such school (the Hampton Institute in Virginia), she quickly came to believe that education for Native students would be more impactful if it happened within their communities. This led her to open her own day school in the Dakota Territory, and later to an administrative position in which she continued to advocate for this form of education. That she also traveled to and around the West, unchaperoned, eschewing the hoop skirts and whalebone stays of the day for more comfortable, simple calico dresses and moccasins, wrote pieces about her experiences, and continued to publish her writing throughout her life — even as a mother of six children — challenged many of the day’s gender norms.
 
Charles’ entire life story challenged popular narratives about Indigenous people. He was educated and worked in different contexts, spoke multiple languages, published books that attempted to teach a wide audience about Dakota stories and lifeways, and their importance in contemporary American life, and skillfully utilized both his Euro-American education and his Indigeneity. His ability to navigate between the culture in which he was raised and the one in which he was educated no doubt caused him a lot of cultural dissonance, but it also meant that in his time, he was widely recognized as a leading “Indian voice” of his time.

As you researched this book, did anything surprise you?

Absolutely! One thing that surprised me was how many gaps in the Eastmans’ stories there were. Outside of his published writings, Charles left behind almost no personal papers, and Elaine severely curated her own written record. To tell their individual and collective stories holistically meant being very creative and very assiduous about finding sources. Another thing that surprised me, but probably shouldn’t have, was how virulent the racializing of Charles Eastman in the press of the day was, and how this rampant stereotyping even extended to stories about the Eastmans’ children.

Can you tell us about the Half the History Project at Tufts?

Women’s stories should constitute half the stories told, but they do not. For example, only about 20% of the biographies on Wikipedia are of women – and that’s an improvement from what it used to be! Women of color and women from marginalized groups are particularly underrepresented. At Half the History, we aim to change this, by using short-form biography, film and podcast to tell the untold and under-told stories of women’s lives.
 
I started this project with Jennifer Burton, one of my colleagues who is a filmmaker. Because we like to involve our Tufts students in our work, we usually select subjects for our short films who have ties to the Boston area. This has also enabled us to make films in which we can involve local communities in different ways, often becoming the essence of what I think of as civic media making. And for me, as someone who did not have formal training in media making, it’s also been wonderful to learn what it means to produce films and podcasts and to use the research I do as the basis for writing screenplays. I’ve loved picking up these new skills!

How has your time at Annenberg helped you in your current career?

I feel very fortunate to be the beneficiary of an interdisciplinary graduate education. The fact that my main mentors at Annenberg were themselves trained in different fields (George Gerbner – folklore, Ray Birdwhistell – anthropology, and Charlie Wright – sociology) meant that I learned the theories, methods, literature, and perspectives that had informed their work. I also took full advantage of the liberal policies on taking classes outside of ASC and studied with faculty in several other programs at Penn. It’s probably no surprise that my own work has crossed disciplines and that I’ve been the faculty administrator of two different interdisciplinary programs at Tufts.