Julie Dobrow presents Love and Loss After Wounded Knee
Schedule
Thu, 23 Apr, 2026 at 06:30 pm
UTC-04:00Location
45 S Main St, Concord, NH, United States, New Hampshire 03301 | Concord, NH
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Julie Dobrow (After Emily) returns to Gibson's Bookstore with her new book, Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage. About the Book
A dual biography of two activists whose marriage challenged the gender and racial norms of their time
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 offers a dual biography of Elaine Goodale and Oh ye'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.
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.
About the Author
Julie Dobrow is a professor at Tufts University, where she is also the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. She is co-principal founder and producer of the Half the History Project, a multi-modal project that uses short-form biography, film and podcast to tell the untold and under-told stories of women’s lives. She serves on the New England Biography committee at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Dobrow has published articles in a variety of popular and academic venues. Her previous biography, After Emily, told the intertwined stories of the mother/daughter team who first brought Emily Dickinson’s poems to publication.
A graduate of Smith College and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Dobrow lives outside of Boston.
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Where is it happening?
45 S Main St, Concord, NH, United States, New Hampshire 03301Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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