Elaine Goodale Eastman

In southeastern South Dakota, wild animals begin to stir as day turns to dusk. A curious raccoon emerges from his bed and starts hunting for food. Tempted by sticky honey oozing from a bee's nest, the little raccoon finds trouble he did not bargain for. The Raccoon and the Bee Tree combines an old American Indian tale written down by Charles Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman with a traditional European fable. Written one hundred years ago, The Raccoon and the Bee Tree has a lesson for children that is still important and relevant in today's modern society.

In 1885 a genteel New England girl traveled to the western frontier to open a school on the Great Sioux Reservation. For six years, Elaine Goodale Eastman taught, hunted with, and lived among the Lakotas, who were experiencing profound changes as buffalo herds dwindled and they were forced to adjust to reservation life. Her informative and sometimes poignant recollections of those years tell much about the daily lives of the Lakotas and how they grappled with challenges to their way of life. Goodale Eastman witnessed the arrival and flowering of the Ghost Dance religion, visited with Sitting Bull shortly before his death, and in December 1890 was at Pine Ridge, where she and her future husband, Dr. Charles Eastman, cared for the survivors of the Wounded Knee massacre. Sister to the Sioux bears witness to a critical and tragic era in Lakota history and reveals the frequently contradictory attitudes of outsiders drawn to them.

"Charles Eastman, in collaboration with his wife, Elaine Goodale Eastman, has assembled in this collection a composite, condensed sampling of his tribe's values, and presents them in a language that is at once direct and engaging. To say these allegories are 'wise' begs the question; they are the distilled conclusions of generations upon generations of Plains society and point to the essence of what it is to be a decent, thoughtful, respectable human being—a Sioux Tao told in prose a child of any culture, of any time, can comprehend." Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) (1858-1939) was a mixed-blood Sioux who became one of the best-known Indians of his time. He earned a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth and a medical degree from Boston University. From his first appointment as a physician at Pine Ridge Agency; where he witnessed the events that culminated in the Wounded Knee massacre, he sought to bring understanding between Native and non-Native Americans. He wrote eleven books, some, such as Sister to the Sioux (also available as a Bison Book), in collaboration with Elaine Goodale Eastman. His From the Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian, Indian Boyhood, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, Old Indian Days, and The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation are all available as Bison Books.