Elaine Goodale Eastman’s Yellow Star as Counter-Narrative for American Indian History-Telling

Abstract

In 1911, Elaine Goodale Eastman, longtime editor of writing by her husband, Indigenous writer Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa), published Yellow Star, a narrative for white family audiences. Both the Eastmans’ already-troubled marriage and their parenting of mixed-race children illuminate the text, as does their history of linked authorial experiences. Anticipating twenty-first-century battles over competing historical narratives about Indigenous peoples in school curricula and public discourse, Yellow Star’s depiction of history-in-the-making underscores intersections between the domestic and the public, as well as between communal lived experience and larger social issues. The text simultaneously claims a potential role for young people’s literature in the cultural construction of historical understanding. Eastman’s main character, Stella/Yellow Star, arrives in a fictional New England village as an orphan of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Determined to continue valuing her Indigenous community, Stella models both a particular brand of assimilation and resistance to its would-be totalizing power. Before returning west to teach children of her tribe, she also articulates an alternative historical voice. Yellow Star draws on Eastman’s background as a white woman involved in assimilationist education. Progressive in her commitment to on-reservation learning rather than boarding schools, Goodale Eastman was nonetheless implicated in white culture’s racial hierarchies.