Lee's Reviews > The Lost Journals of Sacajewea

I was surprised by how much of the story was NOT about the Lewis and Clark expedition. Of course that's the reason Sacajewea has entered our national consciousness so it's not surprising it gets mentioned prominently, but they don't even show up here until the novel is two-thirds over. I found the novel to have a larger focus, one right there in the cover flap summary: "casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history."

The sexual violence against women is everywhere in this novel. It's in her Shoshone community, especially in the story of White Crow, but also in casual harassment as in this evocative passage: "Walks Back Night runs around camp, his Man-push like a knife sticking out below his bloat-gut. All day he runs... His Man-push flapping. How many Rutting Seasons has he plagued us?"

She's repeatedly raped, as a 9 year old, by a warrior in a hostile tribe of Siouan people after being kidnapped by them. Taken to their village far from her own land, the reader sees sexual violence everywhere in the mixed community of white traders and native men. And this is all before Lewis and Clark arrive. They're newcomers in a long line of abusive men we've seen. Perhaps it's a reminder that violence against women crosses all cultural lines, and did not need to wait for European colonizers to arrive to exist in North America.

The language the book uses, a fractured language of an abused and traumatized girl, reminded me a lot of Eimear McBride's "A Girl is a Half-formed Thing", which in that respect did the same thing. Earling's language is more obviously linked to poetry though, and incorporates much more of nature, but for instance here's Eimear McBride:

"Like smoke in my lungs to be coughed out. I'd throw up excitement. What is it? Like a nosebleed. Like a freezing pain. I felt me not me. Turning to the sun. Feel the roast of it. Like sunburn. Like a hot sunstroke. Like globs dropping in. Through my hair. Spat skin with it. Blank my eyes the dazzle. Huge shatter. Me who is just new. Fallen out of the sky."

Not too far from Earling's Sacajewea?

I am in a Land no longer my own. The scents around me are not scents I know. My legs jolt and stiffen out like a butchered Deer. My body is broken. My body is a different Country. A different River breaks my blood. Weta roars…
Roars over my hush liver.
Roars over sleep hands.
Roars into days no longer me.
Roars into gone .. Appe Bia Cameahwait Blue Elk Otter Woman. Pop Pank.
His roar becomes voices of Rivers, patters of Water. Sparkling hands of Ogres.
When I breathe out, no more,
No more
no me.