As is true with 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. She’ll talk about her book and the fascinating way in which she first discovered this story. Dr. Dobrow previously visited the Salem Athenaeum 2019 to discuss her book After Emily.

Julie Dobrow is a professor at Tufts University, director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and co-principal investigator of the Half the History Project. Her published work has appeared in a variety of academic and popular venues. Her previous biography, After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet, told the intertwined stories of the mother/daughter team who first published and publicized Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Dobrow is a graduate of Smith College, where she studied anthropology, sociology and women’s history, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.