They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans' Story

When Charles Ohiyesa Eastman, a degreed Dakota physician with an East coast university education, met Elaine Goodale, a teacher and supervisor of education among the Sioux, they were about to witness one of the worst massacres in U.S. history: The Wounded Knee Massacre of unarmed Indians participating in a religious ritual. Their bond began there as they witnessed the horror. It carried them across the U.S. advocating for Native Americans and whistleblowing the corruption and racism of the nation's Indian policy. They wrote 22 books while organizing a national organization of and for Indians that paralleled the NAACP. They lobbied Congress, made speeches, wrote articles and protested the steady erosion of Native rights and resources. Their books, excerpted here, make the history of this very bleak time for Americans of color come alive. This book connects the experiences and responses of Indigenous Americans with those of African Americans and white progressives during the period from the Civil War to World War II. Social and political history combine here to paint vivid pictures of this time. Tensions between the Eastmans mirror the dilemmas of gender, cultural pluralism and ethnic differences that Charles and Elaine faced as they worked to make their homeland care about Indian impoverishment. Their story is a national story. It is also intensely personal. It reveals the price American reformers paid for their activism and the cost exacted for American citizenship. Effectively written, this book will keep you reading and thinking about the connections between their time and ours.

Table of Contents:
Preface List of Illustrations PART 1 1 Beginnings 3 2 Retribution 3 Lincoln's ""War of Races"" and Dakota Conscientious Objectors 4 Mis-Trials, Death Camps, Flight, Mass Execution, and Removal 5 Refugees PART 2 6 Sky Farm, Western Massachusetts, and Homesteading in South Dakota 7 Military Pacification, the Churches and Dakota Resistance 8 Reunion 9 The Black Hills and Little Big Horn 10 Parallel Policies: The South and The West 11 Nonviolent Forms of Resistance 12 The Politics of Indian Policy 13 Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee: 1890 PART 3 14 The Consequences of Whistleblowing, a Pan-Indian Identity, and Lobbying Congress 15 ""Scholarship"" and the New Racism 16 Working for Pratt, at Crow Creek, and Writing Endnotes Bibliography About the Author

About the Author :
Gretchen Eich is an award winning author and professor of history at Friends University in Sichita, Kansas. She and her husband divide their year between Witchita and in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina(BiH), where they teach in the English Department of the Dzemal Bijedic University in Mostar, BiH.

Review :
"An inherently interesting work of seminal and meticulous scholarship by history professor Gretchen Cassel Eick, They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans' Story is an extraordinary and unreservedly recommended addition to community, college, and university library Native American Studies collections and supplemental curriculum lists." --Midwest Book Review "Eick communicates massive amounts of material that any reader of history will enjoy perusing." --Bookin with Sunny "Eick's project aligns with efforts to study settler colonialism and its abuses relationally. Thus, she underscores resonances between post-Civil War assaults on African Americans and persistent moves by Congress and a series of US presidents to suppress Native people. Through such details, linking the Eastman's personal and professional lives with this larger historical narrative, They Met at Wounded Knee provides an informative critique of structural racism." --Sarah Ruffing Robbins, English Department, Texas Christian University "Historian Gretchen Eick has employed biography to write a brilliant history of the US genocidal policy of elimination or assimilation as the choice presented to Indigenous Peoples of the United States. The Dakota physician, author, and activist, Charles Eastman, used his own assimilation to promote self-determination, while his 'friend of the Indians' Euroamerican wife and writing partner of three decades chose assimilation, destroying their marriage. This is a gripping text exploring the nadir of Native American nations' existence from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century." --Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States "With rich social and political context and a sympathetic biographical flair, They Met at Wounded Knee brilliantly tells the story of one of the most intriguing couples in American history. Gretchen Eick sure-handedly demonstrates the ways that individual lives reveal the structural dilemmas of settler colonialism, representational politics, and the painful entanglements of race, class, and gender." --Philip J. Deloria, professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Harvard University