1 Renée Sansom Flood’s biography of Zintka (Lost Bird) Colby, an actual infant survivor of Wounded Knee, proposes that Eastman’s novel is an idealized appropriation of Lost Bird’s life narrative. Despite judging the book to be “well-intentioned,” Flood speculates that Zintka would have felt frustrated by the release of Yellow Star, excerpts of which Eastman, an “old friend” of Zintka’s adoptive mother Clara Colby, provided ahead of publication. Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota (New York: Scribner, 1995), 263.

2 Deloria, Philip J., Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Delora, Indians in Unexpected Places, 6.

4 Eastman, Elaine Goodale, Yellow Star: A Story of East and West (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911), 41 Google Scholar. Thank you to Ruba Akkad for attentive assistance with editing this essay.

5 Conforti, Joseph A., Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 6Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

6 Walker, Greg, “Introduction: Literature and History,” Reading Literature Historically: Drama and Poetry from Chaucer to the Reformation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 1Google Scholar.

7 Arguments mounted by advocates of New Criticism, including William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in their 1946 essay on “The Intentional Fallacy,” cautioned against attempting to address authorial intention and biographical context; this view held decades-long sway in literary studies. Forceful refutations of that principle and associated constraints on analysis incorporating biography (and broader cultural histories) include Farrell, John, The Varieties of Authorial Intentions: Literary Theory Beyond the Intentional Fallacy (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Khosravi, Sareh and Barekat, Behzad, “‘The Intentional Fallacy’, itself a Fallacy: A Critique of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s ‘The Intentional Fallacy,’” Language Art 6, no. 2 (2021): 77–90 Google Scholar.

8 Robbins, Sarah R., Managing Literacy, Mothering America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004)Google Scholar. See also Phegley, Jennifer, Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and Cultural Health of the Nation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 15–17, 30Google Scholar; Sicherman, Barbara, Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), especially 1–6 Google Scholar.

9 Phillips, Michelle H., “Along the ‘Paragraphic Wires’: Child-Adult Mediation in St. Nicholas Magazine ,” Children’s Literature 37 (2009): 85.Google Scholar

10 Robin Cadwallader and LuElla D’Amica, “Introduction: ‘Little Women’ in a Transatlantic World,” in Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Robin Cadwallader and LuElla D’Amico (London: Routledge, 2020), 3. See also Elbert, Monika, ed. Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature (London: Routledge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 39.

12 Goodale Eastman suggests that the children themselves initially “knew no difference” in social status, “but it must be admitted that the caste idea grew with their growth, and that in grammar-school and academy circles the lines were drawn more definitely … to the end of needless resentments and heartaches.” Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 39.

13 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 39.

14 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 40.

15 On Dietz, see Ewers, John C., “Five Strings to His Bow: The Remarkable Career of William (Lone Star) Dietz: Artist-Athlete-Actor-Teacher-Football Coach,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 27 (Winter 1977): 2–13 Google Scholar. On De Cora’s art and pedagogy, see Waggoner, Linda M., Fire Light: The Life of Angel De Cora, Winnebago Artist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

16 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 40.

17 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 41–42.

18 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 42.

19 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 42–43.

20 In the mid-1930s, when Congressman Francis H. Chase tried to gather support for a bill that would have provided reparations to Lakota survivors, one of the sticking points was army opposition to acknowledging Wounded Knee “was a real massacre, and not a battle.” Although Case was unsuccessful, Jerome Greene reports that he “drew encouragement for his legislation from supporters such as Elaine Goodale Eastman,” still advocating for Indigenous Peoples decades after having seen the results of the massacre firsthand. Greene, Jerome A., American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 373, 376.Google Scholar

21 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 43–44, emphases in original.

22 Warren, Louis S., Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and The Wild West Show (New York: Vintage, 2005)Google Scholar chronicles the cultural power claimed by Cody’s shows, thereby confirming the boldness of Yellow Star’s (and Goodale Eastman’s) counter-narrative: “For generations of Americans and Europeans, Buffalo Bill defined the meaning of American history and American identity. From California to Maine, and from Wales to Ukraine, crowds who came to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show spoke so widely and fervently about it for years afterward that it became a defining cultural memory—or dream—of America” (xi). See also Elliott, Michael A., Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 79.

24 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 79.

25 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 79–80.

26 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 80.

27 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 80.

28 Deloria emphasizes that some “Indian people” viewed work in Cody’s show as “not so much of escape or economics” but as a chance to shape the larger culture’s narrative while also “craft[ing] new visions of themselves” similar to the controversial Cody himself, by participating in “modern celebrity culture” and seeing places in the East United States and abroad. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 70–71.

29 Building upon earlier groundbreaking work by L. G. Moses, Linda Scarangella McNenly has argued that, despite the critiques frequently pointing to Wild West shows’ exploitation of Native performers, “some Native people considered working in Wild West shows an opportunity. Native people had their own goals and intentions and were therefore active agents” in these manager-performer relationships. Linda Scarangella McNenly, Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 39. See also Moses, L. G., Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

30 See Justice, Daniel Heath and O’Brien, Jean M., eds., Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021)Google Scholar, and Rose Stremlau, “‘To Domesticate and Civilize Wild Indians’: Allotment and the Campaign to Reform Indian Families, 1875–1887,” Journal of Family History 30 (July 2005): 26–86.

31 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 202–03.

32 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 202–03. For an Indigenous performer’s perspective (though mediated by white editorial intervention), see John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition (1932; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), especially chapters 19 (“Across the Big Water”) and 20 (The Spirit Journey”).

33 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 203.

34 For well-informed approaches to addressing similar attitudes among students today, see the excellent essays in a special double issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures co-edited by Michelle Coupal and Deanna Reder. In their introduction, “A Call to Teach Indigenous Literatures,” Coupal and Reder affirm Native Studies’ commitment to “socially responsible criticism” (xi), assert the need for “non-Indigenous people to contribute” to ethical pedagogy (xii), and call for promoting “what Métis scholar Warren Cariou calls ‘critical humility,’ an attitude of respect and deference” to the teaching of Native literature and culture (xiii). Coupal’s individual essay in the issue, “‘Hard to Share, Hard to Hear’: Teaching Residential School Literatures in Canada,” provides compelling examples from a classroom cultivating just such a stance. Reder’s individual essay, “Unlearning History: Using Indigenous-Informed Close-Reading and Research Skills to Unlearn,” offers approaches parallel to the Yellow Star character in Goodale Eastman’s novel, but with the benefit of being guided by a Native educator steeped in knowledge from her Cree-Métis heritage and recent scholarship in Indigenous Studies. Michelle Coupal and Deanna Reder, “A Call to Teach Indigenous Literatures,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 34 (Spring-Summer 2022): i–ix; Michelle Coupal, “‘Hard to Share, Hard to Hear’: Teaching Residential School Literatures in Canada,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 34 (Spring-Summer 2022): 1–15; Deanna Reder, “Using Indigenous-Informed Close-Reading and Research Skills to Unlearn,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 34 (Spring–Summer 2022): 59–74.

35 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 204.

36 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 204.

37 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 205.

38 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 206.

39 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 208–10, 212, 219.

40 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 231–32.

41 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 232.

42 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 233.

43 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 234.

44 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 235.

45 On assistant farmers, see Wessel, Thomas R., “Agent of Acculturation: Farming on the Northern Plains Reservations, 1880–1910,” Agricultural History 60 (Spring 1986): 233–45Google Scholar.

46 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 207, 210.

47 Eastman, Elaine Goodale, Sister to the Sioux: The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman, 1885–1891 (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2004), 79 Google Scholar. As Theodore D. Sargent’s introduction to the 2004 edition notes, that text addresses “a period of only seven years in the life of a woman who lived to be ninety” (v). As such, it captures what Sargent dubs “some of her most exciting and memorable years” (v), before her marriage and multiple decades of later experiences that shifted her stance on a number of intersectional social issues, including assuming a more positive position toward Pratt. Nonetheless, Sargent asserts that, despite considering both Pratt and General Samuel Armstrong mentors, “she differed from these two men—indeed, she differed from most of the early leaders of the Indian reform movement” in having “lived and worked among Indians for many years” and in “advocat[ing] that education for Indians should take place in day schools located on their own reservations rather than at distant boarding schools like Hampton and Carlisle” (viii). See Elaine Goodale, “Incidents of the Indian War,” Independent (Jan. 22, 1891), 6. A complex mix of negative stereotypes with affirmations of some rights that should be accorded to Indigenous children and their parents, this essay exemplifies Goodale Eastman’s own blend of progressive ideas and underlying racist assumptions: “The Model Indian Day School,” Christian Union, Aug. 21, 1890, 232–33.

48 Eastman, Elaine Goodale, The Voice at Eve (Chicago: The Bookfellows, 1930), 25 Google Scholar. Goodale Eastman reported here that she “became rather proud of speaking it correctly enough to be occasionally mistaken for a native when travelling with Indians in the long summer vacation” (25).

49 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 202.

50 Goodale Eastman, Voice at Eve, 25.

51 Goodale Eastman, Voice at Eve, 25.

52 Goodale Eastman, Voice at Eve, 25.

53 Goodale Eastman, Voice at Eve, 25.

54 Goodale Eastman, Voice at Eve, 26.

55 Goodale Eastman, Voice at Eve, 26–27.

56 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 256–57.

57 Sarah Ruffing Robbins, “Elaine Goodale Eastman, Modernist Author?: Re-visiting a Border-crossing Woman Writer’s Place in Literary History,” E-rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde Anglophone 16, no. 2 (2019), https://journals.openedition.org/erea/7121 (accessed Mar. 7, 2024).

58 Goodale Eastman, Sister to the Sioux, 66–67.

59 “Review of Pratt, the Red Man’s Moses by Elaine Goodale Eastman,” American Historical Review 41 (July 1936): 781, 783.

60 “The Bride of a Sioux: Elaine Goodale, The Poetess, Marries Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman,” Washington Post, June 19, 1891, 4. A story in the Chicago Daily Tribune used a contrast between the Eastmans’ likely future and a recently dissolved mixed-race union to tout Elaine and Charles as well suited. “Miss Goodale is a charming poetess and a young woman of more than ordinary refinement and culture. Her husband also is a man of peculiar refinement and has been well educated. He has lived in the East many years, and has been received in the best society of Boston, where he has always shown himself a gentleman.” “Two Recent Indian Marriages,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 29, 1891, 12.

61 On the Eastmans’ collaborative authorship as productive despite facing “deep fissures of gender and cultural difference,” see Clark, Carol Lea, “Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) and Elaine Goodale Eastman: A Cross-Cultural Collaboration,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 13 (Autumn 1994): 271–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Clark posits an authorship incorporating three identities: Elaine’s, an assimilated version of Charles, and Ohiyesa’s, a perspective demonstrating continued affiliation with “his native cultural identity” (271). See also Robbins, Sarah Ruffing, “The ‘Indian Problem’ in Elaine Goodale Eastman’s Authorship: Gender and Racial Identity Tensions Unsettling a Romantic Pedagogy,” in Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century Literature: National and Transatlantic Contexts, ed. Elbert, Monika M. and Ginsberg, Lesley (London: Routledge, 2015), 192–208 Google Scholar.

62 See Jacobs, Margaret D., “The Eastmans and the Luhans: Interracial Marriage between White Women and Native American Men, 1875–1935,” Frontiers 23, no. 3 (2002): 29–54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Eick, Gretchen Cassel, They Met at Wounded Knee: The Eastmans’ Story (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2020), 234–35Google Scholar. On Martindale and her daughter’s link to Charles, see an accounting of letters from Henrietta to other Martindales, now housed in a collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives. Sargent, Theodore D. and Wilson, Raymond, “The Estrangement of Charles Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman: The Mystery of the ‘Other Woman’ Solved,” South Dakota History 40, no. 3 (2010): 213–42.Google Scholar

64 Goodale Eastman, Voice at Eve, 31.

65 Goodale Eastman, Voice at Eve, 30.

66 Goodale Eastman, Voice at Eve, 30.

67 Intriguingly, Charles Eastman’s trip to London was in 1911, the year Yellow Star was published. Delivered as an invited address to the Universal Races Congress, the speech subsequently appeared in an essay collection by luminaries including W. E. B. Du Bois, Franz Boas, and Israel Zangwill. Charles Alexander Eastman, M.D. (Ohiyesa), “The North American Indian,” in Papers on inter-racial problems, communicated to the first Universal Races Congress, held at the University of London, July 26–29, 1911, ed. Spiller, Gustav (London: P. S. King, 1911), 367–76Google Scholar. One section of Eastman’s lecture addressed “Inter-racial Marriage” and referenced unions between Indigenous women and “the French and Scotch [as] predominating” during prior eras of post-contact, with, according to Eastman, the “great majority” of children of such unions eventually “cast[ing] in their lot with their mothers’ people and grow[ng] up as ‘Indians’” (375). Perhaps thinking of his own marriage, Eastman added: “Within the past twenty or thirty years … there have been a great many inter-marriages of a different character, between educated Indians and Caucasians; and whereas in the early days only Indian women contracted these alliances, of late years almost as many Indian men choose Anglo-Saxon wives. Such marriages, based upon mutual sympathy and affection, have been generally happy” (375). See Mays, Kyle T., “Transnational Progressivism: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Universal Races Congress of 1911,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 25 (Summer 2013): 243–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Goodale Eastman, Voice at Eve, 30.

69 Noble, Marianne, Stockton, Elizabeth, and Faherty, Duncan, “Thirty-Fifth-Anniversary Reflections on Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 by Nina Baym,” Legacy 31, no. 1 (2014): 113–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 263–64.

71 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 271.

72 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 271.

73 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 243–44.

74 Goodale Eastman, Yellow Star, 243–44.

75 Goodale Eastman can be seen as illustrating the limited understandings of race and inadequate commitments to genuine advocacy shown by white women liberals of her own and later generations. Schuller, Kyla, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021)Google Scholar.

76 Goodale Eastman, Voice at Eve, 31.

77 Goodale Eastman, Voice at Eve, 31.

78 Reviews of the novel in two publications offered assessments ranging from enthusiastic praise of its literary merit to lukewarm acknowledgement of its potential as a teaching text. “Eastman, Elaine Goodale. [Review of] Yellow Star,” Book Review Digest (Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson Company, 1911), 138; Children’s Department, Cleveland Public Library, “Eastman, E. (G) Yellow Star.” Eighty Tales of Valor and Romance for Boys and Girls (White Plains, NY: H. W. Wilson Company, 1917), 3.

79 As Waggoner notes in Fire Light, like other work reflective of Angel De Cora’s artistry and influence, the images in Yellow Star merit further analysis for their representation of the Indigenous protagonist, consistent with current calls for providing students from minority groups to have access to depictions of themselves in personal and school reading.

80 See note 1 above. Mary Zaborskis, in “Unsettled Colonialisms” in American Literature in Transition, 1876–1910: Volume 4, ed. Lindsay V. Reckson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), offers one account of this real-life child survivor of Wounded Knee. See also “Biopolitical Temporalities and Native Girlhood in Elaine Goodale Eastman’s Yellow Star,” Zaborskis’s paper presented at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in January 2022: https://ccsproject.org/2022/02/16/biopolitical-temporalities-and-native-girlhood-in-elaine-goodale-eastmans-yellow-star-mary-zaborskis/ (accessed Mar. 7, 2024).