I refer to Debra Magpie Earling's "The Lost Journals of Sacajewea," a fictional imagining of how this Lemhi Shoshone child experienced a life of violence, cruelty, rape by Charbonneau, and pregnant with Jean Baptiste as she provided translation and guidance to Lewis and Clark from the Agaidika (salmon eater) Shoshone lands along the Snake River to the Columbia. The retelling doesn't always jibe with what little we know of the timeline of Sacajewea's life, but then we don't know much (born 1787, died 1812). What has amazed and enlightened me was experiencing an Indian way of seeing, the way of thinking about oneself as a member of a tribal community, and in both practical and spiritual relation with the natural world. The book is a bit trying to start until you get a sense of who the narrator is and how she thinks. There is no glossary, so you will have to figure out for yourself Shoshone words like Bia, mother; Appe, father; Debai, sun; Agai, salmon; Weta, the bear -- silent, wise observer/protector. I promise you will never forget having read this novel, or glimpsing an alternative narrative of the Corps of Discovery.
There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t. – John Green, author
Posts: 16698 | Location: Las Cruces, NM | Registered: 03 June 2000
Interesting. Sounds like a white man bad Indian good retelling. Violence and rape by Charbonneau? I guess after she was kidnapped by Indians and traded as a captive slave. Fools Crow by James Welch is a fantastic book and very insightful.
Looking back on all those 50s TV westerns, it was stereotypical that the Indians were cowardly evil stupid savages out to harm the innocent peaceful white man. That's the kind of crap we were raised on, + while I admit growing up that it was entertaining as we knew it, it was certainly a far cry from the truth. They didn't even stay true to other white men; case in point, Bat Masterson + Wyatt Earp by Gene Barry + Hugh O'Brien. But I remember ordering Bat Masterson's "extra" cane (he had 2 you know) from the back of a cereal box.
Posts: 4440 | Location: Austin,Texas | Registered: 08 April 2006
As brilliant as a story like this might be, understand it is simply part of a larger deconstruction narrative of all things U.S. the reimagining of our history has been undertaken to undermine it. When I drove through Charlottesville last October and turned left onto Main Street, there was a pedestal but no longer the statue of Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea. Two blocks off the downtown mall there is no longer the Lee statue. It has been melted and one of the antagonists was quoted as comparing its destruction to Humpty Dumpty.
You may think this is proper stuff given outlet current age, but as was recently shown in Pennsylvania with the William Penn monument, the country is being dismantled and its history re-written to serve a pernicious narrative.
Just remember what Winston Smith said in 1984:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
