“DO NOT TRUST ANYONE who tells you you cannot tell your story. 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,” Debra Magpie Earling writes in her new novel, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. Old Woman’s advice to the Lemhi Shoshone woman known as Sacajewea could also apply to Earling, a Bitterroot Salish author whose lyrical and inventive works strive to give voice to Indigenous women like Sacajewea.
marks the long-awaited return of this critically acclaimed, immensely talented writer, whose career was hampered by the shuttering of her first publisher, BlueHen, shortly after her award-winning first novel, , was published in 2002. In early February, I drove to Missoula from my home in, and I recalled the poignant, intense moments when the main character, Louise White Elk sets out on foot, fleeing dangerous, obsessive men and her own forced attendance at boarding school.
