The Lost Journals of Sacajewea: A Novel
Debra Magpie Earling“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 & guide for Lewis & 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 & recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history.
Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, the young Sacajewea, in this telling, is bright & bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive”: gathering berries, water, roots, & wood; butchering buffalo, antelope, & deer; catching salmon & snaring rabbits; weaving baskets & listening to the stories of her elders. When her village is raided & her beloved Appe & Bia are killed, Sacajewea is kidnapped & then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French-Canadian trapper.
Heavy with grief, Sacajewea learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world teeming with fur trappers & traders. When Lewis & Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast & brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, & a company of men who wish to conquer & commodify the world she loves.
Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art & a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.
“Poetic prose . . . interweaves factual accounts of Sacajewea’s life with a first-person narrative deep