The Lost Journals of Sacajewea: A Novel by Debra Magpie Earling

The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, Debra Magpie Earling’s second novel, is a stunningly crafted, linguistically intricate, morally challenging resilience narrative. The power of the book–like the spell cast by the author’s voice–emerges from the marriage of courage and complexity. Calling into question much of what we believe we know about the past and suggesting that this past has rapidly emerging implications for our future, the book is prescient, compassionate, heartfelt, and breathtaking. 

Earling tells the story of the woman known as Sacajewea, a girl stolen from the Lemhi Shoshone and eventually enslaved by a military expedition. She does this with breathtaking integrity, refusing at every turn to romanticize, compromise, or equivocate, refusing also to allow the codified myth of the expedition in which the enslaved woman is forced to participate to encroach upon the lived experience being recounted. In doing so, she tells more than the story of Sacajewea. She tells the story of a river, a landmass, a continental ecology subjected to the (supposedly) heroic whims of an invading agenda, one that tramples through the complex web of biological, cultural, and personal relationships it encounters, unable to see, refusing to see anything it cannot categorize within the hierarchy of its own needs. 

Earling contrasts this with glimpses of pre-contact civilization that is heartbreaking in its wholeness, reminding us again and again of all that has been lost, all we might yet still regain: 

We climb and climb and corn Necklace reaches for my hand to pull me. We reach top of giant bluff where we see All Around. She leads me on and farther. On past knuckle grass and Milk stem, on past needle grass and raider’s wort until we come to place Beyond All Things. We overlook a Valley of Corn so vast, so wide, Hawks sail overhead.

As Debai lifts Sky, Songs lift from Corn fields. Their voices sweet as berries. Sweet as spearmint on hot days. The hidden corn fields not be seen by Enemy, not be seen by white men. I tremble here. Who am I to come here? 

Walk softly, Corn Necklace says.

We thread hillside down to Prairie below.

Corn so high it pierces Sky.

Angry Crows call overhead.

The old stories move in me like light flickers into night.

Do not trust anyone who tells you you cannot tell your story. Do not trust anyone who tells you there is only one story.

What I loved first about this book is that it is an open experiment in the decolonization of language. In the “Dear Reader” note introducing the story, Earling openly offers the key to the signals she uses to encode those elements of her narrator’s experience that cannot be spoken or written, signals before and beyond language that underpin the narrator’s revelations of–and the authors awareness regarding–what has been lost. Earling tells us how to read the dots and dashes, italicizations and fadings we will encounter, explaining that Sacajewea, on the precipice of colonization… finds emancipation through her own peculiar language. In shattering our assumptions regarding what it means to read, Earling suggests an effective strategy for resisting even the most brutal, insidious, and persistent attempts at conversion: Do not trust anyone who tells you you cannot tell your story. Do not trust anyone who tells you there is only one story / she warns. If there were only one story / Or one way of seeing things all stories would die. 

What I came to admire most about this book, as a reader, writer, and woman, is the way in which it resists predetermined scripts regarding historical, political, and ecological experiences of displacement in order to resolve, unequivocally and unapologetically, into a narrative of personal, cultural, and ecological resilience. It is the story of Sacajewea, yes, and it also becomes the universal story of the woman who has always lived, the woman who–caught up in circumstances she cannot avoid or control–observes, absorbs, inhabits, envisions, enacts, and through the exercise of these simple human capacities, survives.

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Beth Russell was raised by wolves on a cold island in the Salish glacial carve. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Pacific University and is currently the Board Chair at CALYX Press in Corvallis, OR. Her work has been published in Cloudbank Magazine, The Fishtrap Anthology, and the Oregon Literary Review.