Scholar Julie Dobrow will lecture on her new book about Elaine Goodale and Ohíye S’a, or Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, 19th-century Indian education and policy advocates who defied their era’s norms, fell in love, and were determined to marry—until the Wounded Knee Massacre changed everything.

Thursday, February 26
6:30–8:00 p.m.
St. Paul & St. Andrew United Methodist Church
263 West 86th Street, New York

Purchase tickets.

Elaine Goodale (1863–1953), born on a remote Massachusetts farm, earned early fame as a poet and then turned to writing prose and to teaching. She eventually forged a path to the Dakota Territory, where she taught Native American students and became a school administrator. In 1890, she met and fell in requited love with Ohíye S’a, or Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman (1858–1939), a Wah’Peton Santee Dakota who was educated at Dartmouth College and the Boston University School of Medicine. Days after announcing their engagement, they heard the booming Hotchkiss rifles at nearby Wounded Knee Creek. What would later be called the Wounded Knee Massacre had profound and long-lasting effects on US/Native American relations and policy. And its aftermaths shadowed the Eastmans’s marriage. Julie Dobrow’s talk will draw on her 2025 book, Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage (NYU Press), about the fascinating, star-crossed Eastmans. They began their relationship idealistically, determined to combat the world’s inequities, bonded together by cultural collisions that would eventually tear them apart. The normal tensions in any marriage were exacerbated in theirs by conflicts that went far beyond them, as Native lifeways were challenged and suppressed.Julie Dobrow is an author, biographer, and professor at Tufts University, whose writing has appeared in academic and trade publications. Her 2018 book, After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet (Norton), was longlisted for PEN’s Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, shortlisted for the Biographers International Organization’s Plutarch Award and the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Book Award, and received the Amherst Historical Society’s Conch Shell Award. A graduate of Smith College and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Dobrow lives outside of Boston.Her biography of the Eastmans will be available for sale and signing at the event.

Photo credit: Courtesy Julie Dobrow