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Contemporary Fiction Views: Restoring a legendary woman's voice [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-07-11
Across cultures, across centuries, women have had their voices silenced. And yet they have endured.
Author Debra Magpie Earling restores the voice of one famous woman in The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. This is an imagining of what life was like for the Shoshoni girl. Earling, a Bitterroot Salish author, writes in Sacajewea's voice about her parents, her work, her paying attention to everything around her at the behest of her parents.
The voice the author creates is an important part of the book. In the forward, she explains how she created Sacajewea's language, not naming important things that should not be named, creating patterns and rhythms. It's all in service to restoring her heroine's power.
History has long been translated by the powerful, so Sacajewea’s translations and transfigurations become her power.
While the rhythms can sometimes be swirling and daunting, it's best to not parse them so carefully that the overall gist of the story is lost. This is definitely a story in which it pays to go with the flow.
It is expected of Sacajewea to be a hard worker, and she is. But even more significant are what her mother and father show her about nature and beyond. Both are attuned to the spirits of nature that surround them, and want her to know them as well. They also are prone to forecasting the future based on what is happening at the time.
All things have their own way of being in this World, Bia said, a pattern, a footprint, sounds to make babies laugh, sounds to make children see trouble.
When a white man is injured and stays with them for months, her parents know his being there does not bode well, that others will come. The contrast between the way their unwanted visitor sees the world and the way they do is a window into the two cultures and what they value. The protracted visit also foreshadows Sacajewea navigating white men's ways when she ends up on that famous journey to the Pacific.
There is a lot more to Sacajewea's life than guiding Lewis and Clark. As a girl on the verge of womanhood, she is promised to a handsome man in her tribe who also is a great hunter. Another young woman, who matured earlier than our heroine, wants him too. This part of the story reveals more of Sacajewea's character -- she wants to be herself instead of only being known through her connections to others. It also is formative in a major reason that she goes along with her child's father, Charbonneau, when he signs on with Lewis and Clark. After all,
In All Ways, Women carry Men in all their ways. Women carry Men to survive.
The next major event in her life is being kidnapped in a raid by another tribe. Her parents are killed. She tries to keep track of other young people, especially the other girls, taken when she was. In time, the survivors adapt in various ways to endure. When there is an opportunity to go back home, Sacajewea seizes it.
Some women endure. Some do even more. Some women become legends. And their voices need to be restored. This is what The Lost Journals of Sacajewea does.
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