Indigenous Voices Book Club: "The Lost Journals of Sacajewea"

Join Elsie Souza each month to read and discuss compelling books by Indigenous writers across genres, generations, and traditions. The Indigenous Voices Book Club is devoted to reading and discussing books by Indigenous writers, bringing together fiction, memoir, history, poetry, and more. Each month, we'll encounter stories and perspectives that deepen our understanding of Indigenous experiences, histories, cultures, and contemporary life. This month, we're reading Debra Magpie Earling's The Lost Journals of Sacajewea—a bold reimagining of the life of one of the most familiar, and most frequently mythologized, figures in American history. Rather than retelling the Lewis and Clark expedition from the explorers' point of view, Earling places Sacajewea at the center of her own story: a young Shoshone girl kidnapped from her people, sold into marriage, and eventually brought along on a journey that would help open the West to further colonization. Written in lyrical, fragmented prose and shaped as a series of imagined journal entries, the novel gives voice to experiences largely absent from the historical record while refusing the tidy version of Sacajewea many of us were taught in school. Strange, fierce, and formally inventive, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea asks us to look again at a story we think we know—and to consider who gets remembered, who gets to do the remembering, and what disappears when history is told by the people who claimed to discover it. ABOUT THE BOOK: Winner of the 2024 American Book Award Winner of the Montana Book Award Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award An Indie Next Pick, selected by booksellers “In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe’s rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water Baby’s cry.” Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history. Here, the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive.” When her village is raided, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper. Heavy with grief, she learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves. Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Debra Magpie Earling is the author of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea and Perma Red. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Montana Book Award. She retired from the University of Montana where she was named professor emeritus in 2021. She is Bitterroot Salish.