Hello.

This is Inside the Cover and I am your host, Ted Ayres.

I am pleased that you're watching PBS and that you are with me now as we talk about yet another fascinating book and author.

Tonight's book is They Met at Wounded Knee by Dr. Gretchen Cassel Eick.

It is now time to go inside the cover.

I have for some time appreciated the scholarly work and writing talents of historian and activist Dr. Gretchen Eick.

Her 2001 book, Dissent in Wichita, was an award winning work and it is a truly important book about the heroics of a collection of young Wichitans who through their courage, determination and good planning integrated the lunch counters of the Dockum chain of drugstores in 1958, well before the much more publicized activities in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Eick worked on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. for over a decade as a foreign and military policy lobbyist before earning her Ph.D. degree in American studies from the University of Kansas and becoming a noted professor of history.

Retiring from Friends University.

Prior to the pandemic, Eick and her husband, Michael Poage spent half the year in Bosnia and Herzegovina teaching English at a university there, and half the year in Wichita, where she writes, teaches and manages a publishing company.

In 2011, Eick was one of the featured speakers at a sesquicentennial event in Wichita celebrating Kansas statehood.

Tonight, I want to feature and discuss her book.

They met at Wounded Knee, which was copyrighted in 2020 and published by the University of Nevada Press.

This book is a story of the United States from the Civil War to World War Two, told through two people Charles Eastman, a Dakota Sioux physician who was the best known Native American of his time, and Elaine Goodale Eastman, his Puritan Heritage wife.

In binary thinking, one member of this couple was of the dominant white “us ” and the other was the part of the subjugated “them ”.

They were a mixed race couple living in a highly radicalized time from the 1890s through the 1930s.

They were at the center of conflict about how Native Americans should be viewed and treated.

Both Asians were activist and writers producing between them 22 books and dozens of articles that invited readers to enter their experiences and their historic time.

The history of this era is told through the Eastman's lives and writings.

You will also meet numerous other individuals red, white and black, whose stories are interwoven with the Eastman's the Eastmans used their writing to expose the damage done by governmental policies that were intended to confine silence and even exterminate Native Americans.

They were progressive reformers who named the corruption that kept most Native people in poverty and enriched those who exploited them.

The stories of the Eastman's and the history they lived help unwind the myth that continues to dominate many people's understanding of the American past.

If you are a regular viewer of Inside the Cover, you know that I love to make connections between books I recently reviewed here on Inside the Cover, a new book about Jim Thorpe called Path Lit by Lightning by David Maraniss.

From that book, you'll remember that Thorpe was set off as a young man from his native Oklahoma territory to the Carlisle Institute in Pennsylvania.

Elaine Eastman wrote a biography of Richard Henry Pratt, which was published in 1935 by the premiere press for Books of Native Americans.

At the time, the University of Oklahoma.

Richard Henry Pratt was the founder of Carlisle.

Tonight's book has been They Met at Wounded Knee by Dr. Gretchen Cassel Eick.

This is a carefully written and intensively researched scholarly work that is, however, very readable.

Eick writes with both passion and objectivity while telling a story that is very important to her.

I am pleased to recommend this book to you.

That's our show.

Thanks for watching PBS Kansas, and I hope you'll come back again next week.

Here to Inside the Cover.