Elaine Goodale Eastman

Born in Massachusetts in 1863, Elaine Goodale Eastman began publishing poetry while still a child, writing alongside her sister Dora Read Goodale. She grew up in a literary and reform-minded family, and that early mix of writing and social conscience shaped the rest of her life.

She later worked in Native American education, first through Hampton Institute and then in Dakota Territory, where she opened a day school on a Sioux reservation and eventually became Supervisor of Indian Education for the Two Dakotas. Although her views reflected the assimilationist thinking of her era, she also argued against sending Native children far from their families to boarding schools and became a public voice on Native rights and life in the West.

Her marriage to Charles Eastman, the Santee Dakota physician and writer also known as Ohiyesa, linked her personal and literary life even more deeply to that world. Over the years she wrote poetry, fiction, journalism, and memoir, including Sister to the Sioux, a vivid account of her experiences in the Dakotas and of a period in American history she witnessed up close.