01/29/2022
Having fun researching Amherst history and my family's ancestors, the Eastmans.
Charles Eastman and Elaine Goodale House - 850 Belchertown Road
By Christine Bjorge (UMass Public History Program) and edited by Janet Marquardt (Amherst Historical Commission)
“Children must early learn the the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving.”
-Charles Eastman
“A gifted, lovable, self-reliant people stood at the crisis of their fate...The hour had struck for a swift transition to another pattern of life altogether, before their self-respect had been undermined and their courage exhausted. Education was the master-key.”
-Elaine Goodale Eastman
Ohiyesa Charles (1858-1939) and Elaine Goodale (1863-1953) Eastman lived with their six children in this house from 1911 to 1919, the period in which Charles published nine of his eleven books and Elaine published three of her seven books.
Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman was born on a Santee Sioux reservation in Redwood Falls, MN in 1858. His father was Sioux and his mother was multiracial. The Eastman family fled to Canada as refugees after the Sioux Indian Uprising of 1862. Eastman earned his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1887 and his M.D. from Boston University in 1890. Once Eastman embraced his ethnicity, he adopted the name Ohiyesa, which means “The Winner” in Sioux. In 1890, Eastman went to work as a physician in the Pine Ridge Agency where he provided care for victims of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. There, he met Elaine Goodale, a social worker and poet, who was Superintendent of Indian Education for the Two Dakotas.
Elaine Goodale was born October 9, 1863 to a sophisticated and progressive New England farm family in Mount Washington, Massachusetts where social reformer friends were regular visitors. She and her sister, Dora, wrote poetry that was published while they were still young. Elaine graduated from Smith College in 1884 and went to teach at a boarding school for Native American children in Virginia until 1886 when she moved to White River Camp, a Sioux reservation, in the Dakota Territories to set up a model day school. Six years later she was made Indian Education Supervisor in the Dakotas under the government Bureau of Indian Affairs and used the position to try lobby for education on the reservations rather than separating Native American families by sending their children to distant boarding schools. She met Eastman while helping care for victims of the Wounded Knee Massacre.
Continue reading here:
https://amhersthistoric.org/items/show/11