Goodale Sisters
They published their first poetry as children still living at home, and were included in Edmund Clarence Stedman's classic An American Anthology (1900).
She married Dr. Charles Eastman (also known as Ohiye S'a), a Santee Sioux who was the first Native American to graduate from medical school and become a physician educated in Western medicine.
Goodale collaborated with him in writing about his childhood and Sioux culture; his nine books were popular and made him a featured speaker on a public lecture circuit.
[1] She attracted positive reviews when she published her last book of poetry at age 75 in 1941, in which she combined modernist free verse with the use of Appalachian dialect to express her neighbors' traditional lives.
They had a brother Robert, and a sister, Rose Sterling Goodale, who married James A. Dayton and preserved much of the family's history and manuscripts.
[6] Friends helped collect the two girls' early writings; Elaine was fifteen and Dora twelve when their first book was published: Beginning in 1881, the Goodale sisters contributed to such periodicals as Scribner's Monthly, Harper's and Sunday Magazine.
As the biographer Theodore Sargent noted, both young poets were included in Edmund Clarence Stedman's classic An American Anthology, 1787-1900, published in 1900.
Their daughter Irene, a promising opera singer and Charles' favorite, died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, leaving both parents devastated and further straining their relationship.
In 1935, when she was more than 70 years old, she published both her best novel, One Hundred Maples, and a biography of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School.
[5] Her 1935 biography of Pratt and a 1945 article on the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee Massacre are recognized as "important historical documents on the transition period in Plains Indian history.
"[8] After her death of natural causes on December 22, 1953, her ashes were scattered in the Spring Grove Cemetery in Florence, Massachusetts, near where her daughter Dora and her family lived.
In 1941 she published Mountain Dooryards, her last book of poetry, a work that was written in modernist free verse and used the dialect of the people of the Appalachians and expressed their traditional but changing world.
[2] In the HBO film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007), Elaine Goodale was portrayed by the actress Anna Paquin.
