Debra Magpie Earling

In the beginning Sacajewea describes herself as a young girl in the Lemhi Shoshone tribe, living a happy childhood, learning the skills, traditions and spiritual beliefs of her people and dreaming of the man she plans to marry.

Then she is stolen away by a raiding tribe. Her family members are killed; she herself is raped, brutalized and turned into a slave. After some years she is gambled away to a French-Canadian trapper named Charbonneau, who continues to treat her as a slave. When Charbonneau is engaged by the Lewis & Clark expedition, Sacajewea is taken along and her myth is created.

This was a truly challenging read. As a “journal” it’s written in a stream of consciousness which, begins as a young child in abbreviated language. As Sacajewea matures, so does her thinking, vocabulary and knowledge. But even as the language improves and becomes easier to read, the brutality against her is told in graphic terms. We are used to seeing the statues of Sacajewea standing triumphantly with her child strapped to her back and pointing the direction with her outstretched arm. This is as much a white-man fiction as the happy slaves on southern plantations.

I had the privilege of hearing Debra Earling speak soon after this book was published. She said the story was ‘given’ to her almost in its entirety. And while it follows much of the standard story of Sacajewea, I really liked the ending – and as hard as it was to read, I like very much the woman and history it portrays.… (more)

I couldn't get into this. I really respect what Earling is doing, but I found it very difficult to read. First of all, she uses a lot of words that are never defined, so it's really hard to tell if a word is referring to a person or a concept or an object. I think I ultimately would have liked that, and would have liked to be forced to question whether the categories of "person", "concept", and "object" are meaningful, except it made it very difficult to understand what was going on. The bigger problem for me was that a lot of the book is written in a very choppy sentence structure, which to me ended up sounding like the Hollywood stereotype of "How, me Big Injun, smoke peace pipe, how." I gave up about 10% into the book.… (more)

I wanted this to be a journal showing how smart Sacajewea was and how much she knew over the white men, but in this rendition, the speech is short and choppy and IMHO doesn't make her look intelligent. She does manage to learn a lot of English, but she keeps the knowledge to herself and uses her insights to figure out the plans, but never really to guide the exploration. She has a tough life, kidnapped and made pregnant by white men, stolen from her husband and people. This is a rough read, and maybe that is the whole point. Her reality sucked.… (more)

I usually have problems with real historical people having fictional words put into their mouth. But here we have one of the most marginalized, yet mythologized historical figures that was barely mentioned in even the accounts of Lewis & Clark, who apparently needed her around for their benefit. But since Sacajewea was hardly allowed her own story, I'm willing to read a fictionalized story of Sacajewea written from a Native perspective, as this author is. Here, Sacajewea spends the early part of the book as a child with her family, but then is kidnapped by enemies and is forced to marry a white man. She stays in her husband's lodge until Lewis & Clark arrive. But this summary just makes it sound like the narrative is following the generic myth of Sacajewea. It is so much more. The book is difficult to read in all the ways, like making your way through a river of dead buffalo. I did not expect a historical person like Sacajewea to have a modern vernacular, and I appreciate the inventiveness of the writer here, but reading this is always work, at times it was a bit TOO confusing, with sometimes a few puzzling things even within one sentence. (I still haven't figured out what the "Ogres" represent...) But a narrative like this shouldn't be easy, by any means, for any of the reasons. For all its harshness and brutality, there is also a ton of beauty. If you can pick apart some of this, I don't think it could possibly be richer or fuller. If it were simpler, it might lean into cliche by default, no matter the skill of the writer. I ended up loving the confusion of what was spirit and what was not. There is a ton of memorable beautiful imagery here, but also some horrifying, miserable imagery as well. But I can see the reason: this isn't supposed to be the sugarcoated/myth/history book version from school. This is realistic. With this writer's power, she can make Sacajewea live in your heart. And I think that was the entire point.
*Book #147/340 I have read of the shortlisted Morning News Tournament of Books… (more)