Lost, and found

As a creative writing professor emeritus at the University of Montana in Missoula, Debra Magpie Earling has helped plenty of stories along. For three decades, she held space for students working toward their writing dreams, even at the expense of her own. 

Earling’s first novel, “Perma Red,” was published in 2002, but went out of print after publisher BlueHen Books went under. It would take 20 years for the novel to be re-released by Milkweed Editions in 2022, shortly after Earling left her job at the university. In May of this year, her long-anticipated second novel, “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea,” made its debut.

“When I was at the university, I didn’t realize how hard I was working,” Earling said in a recent interview with Montana Free Press. “I knew I was exhausted. And I knew that whenever I took on student stories, I let go of my own stories to get into somebody else’s head. It takes up the same creative space to try to figure out how to help somebody.”

Earling, who is Bitterroot Salish, began teaching at UM in 1991 and held positions in both the Native American Studies and Creative Writing departments. In 2016, she became the first Native American director of the creative writing program in its then-96-year history. In 2021, she decided to move on. 

“I don’t think I retired. But I feel like I just one day said, ‘I quit. I’m not going to do this anymore,’” Earling said. “Teaching for me was brutal … It became a job. And I was afraid. … Can you support yourself? Will it matter? What can you do with your life?”

Leaving the university was an awakening, Earling said. 

“When I quit school, I had this time, and it felt like this enormous pressure just lifted from me. I was able to write again and see more clear-eyed than I ever had. And I didn’t have anybody else’s stories haunting me or pressing me, and it was so wonderful. I thought, ‘Wow. Writing is easy.’ And I wrote gleefully.”

In just seven months, she completed “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea,” a searing and hauntingly poetic work of fiction about one of the most famous and misrepresented Native women in history.

“It had been on my mind that I was never able to complete it,” Earling said. “I had all these bits and pieces of it.” 

Earling started the project as a response to artwork at the Missoula Art Museum during the 2003-2006 bicentennial of the famed Corps of Discovery expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Sacajewea accompanied the explorers, helping guide them to the headwaters of the Missouri River. 

“The Lost Journals of Sacajewea” is written from the point of view of the Lemhi Shoshone woman known as Sacajewea — though the name, historically, has been spelled several different ways, MTFP is using the spelling presented in Earling’s novel — as voiced in journals that Earling imagines she might have kept. 

There is sparse and conflicting documentation of the life of Sacajewea, who has been cast by historical accounts as a willing participant in the travels of Lewis and Clark. There are no photographs of Sacajewea, no drawings, and only brief mentions of her in the logbooks kept by Lewis and Clark during their travels between May 1804 and September 1806. Her name and its spelling are contested, and her tribal identity is claimed by several Indigenous nations. Even her age at the time of her capture by an enemy tribe, the date and place of her death and her role in the expedition are uncertain.

Earling rewrites the narrative of Sacajewea, positing her not as a willing participant in the Corps of Discovery, but as a young girl who was kidnapped at age 9 and sold into slavery. 

“An enslaved young girl traveling with a military expedition spoils the long held notion that the expedition was wholesome,” Earling writes in the novel’s introduction. “And yet, two hundred years after the Lewis and Clark Expedition the ‘historical’ Sacajewea codifies an account that does not sully the discovery narrative. She does not speak. She does not fight back in visible ways. She participates. Or does she?”

As a Lemhi Shoshone, it is likely Sacajewea lived with her tribe in the upper Salmon River basin in present-day Idaho, according to the National Park Service. Historical accounts note that she was abducted at an unknown but young age by the Hidatsa during a deadly raid on her village in 1800. She was taken to Mandan and Hidatsa villages near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota, and sold to Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian fur trader living at the villages. He took her for a wife and they had a son shortly after. 

Historical accounts note that Charbonneau was hired as a guide for the expedition primarily because Sacajewea had knowledge of the territory. She would recognize the land where three rivers became one to form what’s now called the Missouri River, near present-day Three Forks, and could ease relationships with Indigenous tribes and guide Lewis and Clark into a landscape unfamiliar to them. Sacajewea and Charbonneau left with Lewis and Clark just months after she gave birth to a son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, whom she carried with them during the entire expedition.

Sacajewea’s fictive journals describe the brutality she endured and her mental rebellions. There is little flinching in the writing, which depicts the blood and bile and grit of human survival in the face of violence, colonialism and rape.

“There can be great beauty in some of those really violent stories of people showing their internal power and the ways in which they have dignity in this world,” Earling said. “The ways in which all of these things can befall them, but they still somehow have been able to maintain their culture and heritage.”

‘FROM THE BREATH AND BLOOD’

Stories have always been a central part of Earling’s life. She is descended from the last recognized chiefs of the Flathead Indians, including her great-grandfather, Paul Charlo, and his paternal grandfather, Chief Charlo, who was head of the Bitterroot Salish until his death in 1910. Earling’s family was forcibly removed from their homelands in the Bitterroot Valley and forced to move onto the Flathead Indian Reservation, where her grandmother died at the age of 29, leaving behind four daughters who were brought up with stories of their ancestors.

“My mother was raised by her great-grandmother, who knew the stories from the breath and blood of her grandmother,” Earling said. “The oral stories, they were so alive.”

Earling describes her mother as a terrific storyteller. “She would make you feel that you were there,” Earling said. “She remembered how someone dressed, whether they liked to wear a lot of bracelets, whether they had white teeth or had poor teeth … she remembered all these things about people, even the way they smelled.”

Growing up around storytelling influenced Earling. “My mother was very generous with all her stories,” she said. “It made you come alive to the world in unique ways. I think fiction does that. Fiction makes you feel something, where nonfiction makes you think.”

So when Sacajewea’s story kept pulling at Earling, she decided to take it on through fiction. 

“With fiction, you can get into somebody’s bones,” she said. “You can try to experience the life that they lived, and you can bring your reader into that world.”

To enter the timeframe of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Earling read their logbooks, looking for references and clues as to Sacajewea’s frame of mind during the expedition. 

“I forced myself to sit with the journals and try to see what they were actually saying,” Earling said. “As a woman, if I’m sitting next to them, and they’re saying these things, and they’re cataloging and all of this, and they’re killing these animals and they’re sending them back to the ‘Great White Father,’ one thing after the next. They’re renaming and touching and claiming. And I thought about what that would have been like to be a really young girl with a baby, and all of a sudden, the top went pop … I realized that her journey wasn’t paralleling their journey and their conquest, but her journey was just a matter of survival.”

Many readers have told Earling the book is a challenge to get through, she said.

“It’s hard to get people to read this book, and I knew that I was asking a lot of people,” Earling said. “It’s really curious about how people want to control a particular narrative and not just allow it to be what it is.”

Since leaving teaching behind, Earling said, she’s found herself filled with stories. 

“All these ideas are rushing in,” she said. “There’s a road ahead of significant stories and stories that will also fill me with joy. And hopefully the readers as well. I’m hoping that the next novel after ‘The Lost Journals’ will not be that reckoning with history, but something even more challenging — but not challenging to the reader.”

After decades in academia, Earling has finally arrived at a place where her own writing is her primary focus.

“It just felt like one day you’re looking at a wall where there’s no light, and the next day you’re looking out this window. You’re opening up a door, you’re stepping through into another world. You’re hearing these sounds, and the earth is speaking to you and it has a song it wants to sing to you. And that’s how writing feels to me.”

Milkweed Editions will release a paperback version of “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea” in summer 2024.