Love and Loss After Wounded Knee traces Elaine and Charles’ lives from her humble beginnings on a farm in a remote corner of the Berkshires in Massachusetts and his, chased from his home in a Sioux encampment in Minnesota to the woods of Manitoba after the US Army attacked the Sioux in 1862, to their very unlikely meeting at Pine Ridge Agency in 1890 just ahead of the tragedy at Wounded Knee Creek. They would go on to marry. Their improbable interracial union would ultimately yield nineteen books; hundreds of articles, lectures, stories, novels and poems; numerous posts in government agencies and civic organizations working on behalf of Native American rights; and six children. Charles would become one of the best known and most photographed Indians of his era; Elaine’s name remained well-known during her lifetime from her plentiful publications and advocacy on behalf of Native American education. Despite these metrics of success, their marriage foundered. Eventually, it dissolved. Over three decades together and the remainder of their lives, apart, the Eastmans navigated the complex boundaries of their individual and collective identities, crossing into and out of Indian Country geographically, personally and professionally.

Drawing from extensive primary research done with archives in fifteen states and Washington D.C., two Canadian provinces, the BBC and newspaper archives in England and Wales, and one Native American college library on the Pine Ridge Reservation; the work of many Indigenous scholars as well as a host of other historical and literary secondary sources, Love and Loss After Wounded Knee interprets the Eastmans’ lives through many lenses. At a time of profoundly unsettling controversies around race in this country today, the story of Elaine Goodale and Charles Eastman gives us a personal, romantic lens into why it’s so difficult for people who come from different background to truly understand each other. But their story also suggests why we should try.