They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story by Gretchen Cassel Eick

Abstract

Reviewed by: They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story by Gretchen Cassel Eick Janet Dean They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story. By Gretchen Cassel Eick. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2020. xiii + 353 pp. $45.00 cloth. When Charles Ohiyesa Eastman and Elaine Goodale married in 1891, they formed a power couple in the fight for Indigenous people in the United States. He was a Santee Dakota (Sioux) doctor, serving his community as government physician at the Pine Ridge Agency. She was a white teacher and writer from Massachusetts whose work with Indigenous students at Hampton Institute led to a government position as supervisor of education in the Dakotas. Despite [End Page 177] their Indian Bureau appointments, both had reputations as critics of federal Indian policy and advocates for western tribes. Joining forces in life and work, the Eastmans would go on to dedicate their lives to the advancement of Indigenous rights. But the inauspicious timing of their engagement, days before the massacre at Wounded Knee, suggests the magnitude of what they, and their marriage, were up against: no less than a national campaign to eliminate Native American peoples and cultures. Less discernibly, the couple faced tensions within the movement they helped lead, as well as changes in their individual views about what was in the best interests of Indigenous people. Gretchen Cassel Eick’s They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story uses the record of this fascinating shared life as a framework for exploring the conflicts and contradictions of the Progressive Era. Interweaving descriptions of the Eastmans’ nearly thirty-year partnership with overviews of major historical events, shifts in government policy, and developments in reform movements, Eick offers not so much an intimate portrait of a marriage as a case study in the convergence of the personal and the political. Eick draws on scholarly biographies and the Eastmans’ memoirs, but rather than just presenting side-by-side life stories, she illuminates the major events that positioned her subjects between white and Indigenous worlds. The opening chapters focus on the Dakota War of 1862, which made Charles Eastman a refugee when he was four years old. Charles was raised by his grandmother in a traditional Dakota community in Canada; at fifteen, he was reunited with his father and brothers, who had been imprisoned by the United States and had emerged Christianized and assimilated. Charles learned English, converted to Christianity, and earned degrees from Dartmouth College and Boston University School of Medicine, but as Eick notes, he retained a belief that practicing traditional culture was an important form of resistance. Eick devotes less attention to Elaine’s early years but outlines a childhood in a New England family dedicated to social reform and an early writing career (as a teenager, she published a book of poetry with her sister). By the time of her marriage, Elaine was writing articles criticizing the commissioner of Indian Affairs and exposing the corruption of land speculators, railroad companies, and political appointees who exploited tribes. She learned Dakota and spent a year traveling to reservations to document conditions. In the years that followed their marriage, Charles held a variety of positions as Elaine supported his career and raised their six children, writing when she could. Eick details Charles’s work as a representative for the YMCA (he started forty-three chapters of the organization on reservations around the country), a lobbyist, an educator, a Bureau of Indian Affairs official, and a founder and president of the Society of American Indians. She chronicles Charles’s growing [End Page 178] celebrity as an author and speaker and the couples’ creation of a summer camp devoted to teaching Indigenous practices. Alternating with these descriptions are analyses of historical events, from the Battle of Little Big Horn to World War I, and introductions to a cast of prominent figures, including Chief Red Cloud, Theodore Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin/Zitkala-Ŝa, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. While most of these figures did not directly interact with the Eastmans, their stories offer rich context for understanding the transformations in politics, society, and culture that the couple was experiencing at...