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

If there were only one story

      Or one way of seeing things all stories would die.”

— “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea”

Sacajewea, the Lemhi Shoshone woman who accompanied the Corps of Discovery, didn’t have her thoughts recorded in journals for posterity.

What she felt or experienced, beyond a small handful of facts, left an opening for Debra Magpie Earling, a Bitterroot Salish author and professor emeritus at the University of Montana. 

Earling summons her own version of the story in her new novel, “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea,” released earlier this year by Milkweed Editions.

In some corners of the popular imagination, Sacajewea was a guide and interpreter for the group, which, at the turn of the 1800s, made its way across the West. In another way of looking, she was a young Native woman in her early teens sold or gambled to a French trapper, and then used as an interpreter and safety net for the white settlers as they moved through Indigenous lands.

Earling sees it as “a story that challenges all of our mythology about Lewis and Clark, and hopefully, makes other people think more deeply about what it was like for that young woman — or girl — to travel with 34 men and a child in diapers across waters and harsh land,” she said. That, and she was alone, “without someone to even express your feelings to.”

Written solely in first-person, in which the Corps doesn’t appear until halfway through, it becomes a story of survival, placing viewers behind her eyes as she endures enslavement and brutality.

While it’s a difficult read, in both its language and portrayal of violence against women, Earling hopes readers don’t look away.

“I wanted to write in her blood and bones,” she said. “I couldn’t ignore that — it seemed like a call, not only from her, but from the missing and murdered Indigenous women since the coming of Lewis and Clark. It seemed like a call to be present with them and to understand what they suffer and what they had suffered.”

A book with deep roots

Earling’s first novel, “Perma Red,” recounted a tragic story of a young woman on Earling’s home reservation, the Flathead, where she’d worked as a public defender before deciding to pursue fiction. Published in 2002, it won the American Book Award and led to honors like a Guggenheim Fellowship. After retiring from UM in 2021, she finally felt she had the time to dedicate to a project.

She chose one that had been on her mind for years. She came to the story of Sacajewea tangentially, and not out of a particular enthusiasm for the history of the Corps of Discovery. She was invited to contribute an essay to a book, “Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes,” which included nine Indian writers.

In reading the journals, she came across a woman in Mandan camp who was offered to Sgt. John Ordway. “The next evening, she was found stabbed and beaten by her husband,” Earling said.

That story “haunted me, and stayed with me.” (The woman appears in her “Lost Journals” as “Wife for Dark Nights.”)

In 2005, during the nationwide Voyage of Discovery bicentennial, western Montana had no shortage of events and celebrations. The Missoula Art Museum decided to organize something in response. An art exhibition, “Native Perspectives on the Trail: A Contemporary American Indian Art Portfolio,” included 15 Indigenous artists. The executive director, Laura Millin, and the curator, Stephen Glueckert, also invited Earling to write a response to the art.

She recalls that they told her to write whatever she wanted, however she wanted, a rare kind of permission for a writer to receive, either from themselves or anyone else.

“It frees up something,” she said, adding that she believes it will “influence me for the rest of my writing life.”

She recalls the first, much shorter version of the “Lost Journals” taking “45 minutes to write” in a rush of “emotion and image.”

Earling collaborated with Peter Koch, a master printer and Missoula native now based in California, on a limited edition version, with custom type and photographs, bound in a hide. (One copy is held in the Mansfield Library at UM.)

Sacajewea is mentioned in the journals but not extensively, so Earling’s version of her voice is a work of imagination, not an approximation as you’d see in many historical novels.

“I kept trying to figure out how she would have spoken, or how she would have understood the language,” she said.

When Earling decided to expand the work into a longer form, “it just seemed like the voice was suddenly there, and I think it’s a peculiar voice. I think it comes from a deeper source than I understand, a more mysterious source.”

And in her reading of what sources there were, survival became the theme.

“It just seems that she was bent on surviving,” Earling said, “and at one point, she almost didn’t make it.”

Hearing her voice

Earling calls the style of writing “shattered prose,” a poetic and invented grammar and descriptive language.

“My intent was to throw the reader in,” she said. “Immerse them in another way of seeing a story, another way of understanding a world.”

Without many footholds in place, the reader has to learn to read it as they go along, and “understand a world that is foreign to them.”

The unconventional manuscript found an eager home with Milkweed Editions, where she was given free creative reign. The publisher’s roster includes Richard Wagamese, an influential First Nations writer, and Ada Limón, the U.S. poet laureate. Montanans on its rolls include Rick Bass, Chris Dombrowski, Deidre McNamer, Annick Smith and, soon, Chris La Tray.

In a starred review, Kirkus said it’s “a profoundly moving imagining of the impressions and contributions of a major historical figure” and described the prose as having a “dream-like intensity.” Last month, it was included in a New York Times books article, “Reframing the West: New Fiction Makes Room for Voices Long Denied.”

Regarding the spelling she uses in the title, Earling said it returned to her from childhood memories, since it “conjures the Sacajewea I knew from grade school when all my teachers and everyone I knew pronounced her name that way. As other pronunciations came to light, the more I was corrected by non-Native people about the “correct” pronunciation of her name — with a glottal stop and hard “g”— I began to avoid talking about her. I noticed others did, too.”

The book begins years before the Corps, with Sacajewea living among her people, sketching out a vision of the culture and seasonal life — harvests, winters — as she approaches the age of marriage. Her beliefs inform the way she sees events unfold, whether it’s a sighting of a bear (“weta”) or swimming in the river. She learns all the tasks required for survival, which Earling lists at one point in a nearly page-long paragraph, one slice of which goes, “pick berries pound berries dry berries dry roots pound roots.”

After a sickened and solitary white man wanders into their camp, her parents encourage her to watch him and study him, ominously foreshadowing what’s ahead. (In another paragraph, arranged like a free verse poem, she lists all the people and things — i.e. nothing — that “is safe from their owning games.”)

After Sacajewea is abducted by another tribe, she’s forced to marry Charbonneau, a French trapper, and bears a son, Jean Baptiste. The language, on a sentence level, begins to shift.

“I don’t think it’s an easy read,” Earling said, “but as the story progresses, as Sacajewea moves closer and closer to civilization, it accelerates.

“There were just different ways of understanding and holding the world in a certain kind of light or love. And so that as the story progresses, and as she has more and more contact with the traders who are at Mandan camp, she begins to see the world more harshly, and she actually begins to lose some of the deep way of seeing that she saw in the earlier passages.”

Sounds and words

The readers’ immersion happens on a vocabulary level. Many of the Shoshone words can be discerned by context, such as “Appe” for “father.” Others can reveal themselves slowly, such as “Agai” (salmon). Earling coined nouns and verbs Threaded throughout whose meaning is implied by the situation and the sound, colorful words like wurtling, scritter, gaddering. While some sites, such as the University of Utah, have a Shoshone dictionary, you won’t find these anywhere.

“I used a broader dictionary, which is just the feeling of sound, and sound that surrounds us and especially when we’re in nature,” she said.

“Jickle” for example, comes up frequently, like “when you shake a dry seed pod, it does make that ‘jickle, jickle, jickle’ sound,” she said. When Earling was young, she read Lewis Carroll’s classic “Jabberwocky,” and admired his use of sounds as words and how, no matter how far he pushes the language, “you understand exactly what he means.”

While unconventional, she hopes that it ultimately has an emotive power, from the sections that are difficult to those that are not, and convey a feeling of compassion and exploratory empathy.

While some believe Sacajewea died in her early 20s, others say she lived to old age on the Wind River Reservation.

Earling’s belief that it’s a story about survival has one clue — when they reached Three Forks and she saw a woman known as Pop Pank, she was “overwhelmed” and she “wouldn’t stop crying.” However, as she was married to a white trapper, she wasn’t accepted back by the man she was to marry.

“She was essentially cut off from everyone, so she became a sovereign person at that point, and that’s what I admire most about her, as she got on that horse and said, ‘I want to see the ocean.’ ”

Earling prefers the version where she lives to old age, the one that’s ultimately “a story of triumph and power.”