Yellow Star: A Story of East and West by Elaine Goodale Eastman
Angel De Cora (c. 1869-1919) Binding Design, 1911 For Yellow Star: A Story of East and West by Elaine Goodale Eastman (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911; 1923 reprint) Carol Jording Rare Book Acquisition Fund, Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, Delaware Art Museum
Author Elaine Goodale Eastman (1863-1953) exerted significant influence on late 19th-century Native American education. Born into a literary and reform-minded New England family, she began teaching at the Hampton Institute’s Indian Department, then moved to the Dakota Territories to better understand her students’ lives. There she opened a day school on a Sioux reservation and eventually became Supervisor of Indian Education for the Two Dakotas.
Working in the post–Civil War climate that sought to “civilize” formerly enslaved and Native peoples through schooling, Eastman opposed sending Native children to distant boarding schools, instead promoting reservation education as a means of assimilating and strengthening entire communities. She believed that adaptation to white society was necessary for Native survival.
Yellow Star tells the story of a Lakota girl orphaned in the Wounded Knee Massacre and raised in a New England village while trying to maintain her Indigenous identity. The novel explores tensions between assimilation and cultural survival, culminating in Yellow Star’s return west to teach children in her own community—a trajectory that reflects Eastman’s own educational work.
De Cora and her husband, William "Lone Star" Dietz, created four illustrations for Yellow Star. De Cora first met William Lone Star Dietz in 1904 at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, where both were participating in events that showcased Native culture and artistic achievement. By 1906, De Cora had joined the faculty of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where Dietz soon enrolled as a student and studied illustration under her guidance. Their shared commitment to developing a modern Native visual language drew them together personally as well as professionally, and they married in 1907. Although their partnership placed them at the forefront of early twentieth-century Native art education and design, their relationship later faltered amid professional pressures and growing controversy over Dietz’s claimed Native identity. They divorced in 1918, just a few months before De Cora's death during the influenza pandemic.
Angel De Cora (c. 1869-1919) William Henry "Lone Star" Dietz (1884-1964) “'I seem to be just in time, again, Stella,' was all he said" and "A girlish figure swung down out of the old apple-tree and dropped lightly upon its feet," 1911 For Yellow Star: A Story of East and West by Elaine Goodale Eastman (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911; 1923 reprint) Carol Jording Rare Book Acquisition Fund, Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, Delaware Art Museum
