The Lost Journals of Sacajewea

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Call Number: Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / Earling, Debra Magpie
On Shelf At: Malletts Creek Branch, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / Earling, Debra Magpie	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / Earling, Debra Magpie	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / Earling, Debra Magpie	4-week checkout	Due 05-24-2024

"From the award-winning author of Perma Red comes a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea"-- Provided by publisher.

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Harrowing, important, beautifully written submitted by redwood on July 5, 2023, 2:09pm On the 2000 brass dollar coin, Sacajewea (in a portrait modeled after living Shoshone woman Randy’L Teton) looks over her shoulder, resolute and powerful, with her baby sleeping on her back. This is the most common image of the Shoshone woman known for accompanying the Lewis and Clark expedition. Debra Magpie Earling’s new novel emphasizes not this iconic image, but the truer, more painful parts of Sacajewea’s story. If you are looking for an easy or light read, this isn’t it. The events are harrowing, and the prose, peppered with Shoshoni, Hidatsa, and French and composed with unconventional syntax and capitalization, requires careful attention. And the novel is brilliant and deserves to become a classic.

Lewis and Clark don’t show up until more than halfway through the novel—this is a Native-centric story about Sacajewea. We begin with her among her people, observing the seasons and learning environmental ways from her parents, thinking about the man she has been arranged to marry. The rhythms of her life change entirely when her parents are killed and she is captured by invading Hidatsa, then gambled as a wife to French trader Charbonneau. Charbonneau is a disgusting man, exploiting a young girl—Earling reminds readers that Sacajewea is only nine. There are rape scenes in this novel. The baby that features on the dollar coin is a product of rape, born to an unwilling and overwhelmed girl, who has to cart him around as a burden on the expedition. Earling reclaims Sacajewea not as white men’s guide, but as their victim—a hero because she manages to survive the violence.

This would pair well with Frank K. Walker’s Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, which takes the perspective of the enslaved Black man whom Clark brought along (and whose character is underexplored here). This is a stylistically imaginative, historically necessary work.