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"From the award-winning author of Perma Red comes a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea"--
About the author
Debra Magpie Earling is the author of
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea and
Perma Red. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Montana Book Award. She retired from the University of Montana where she was named professor emeritus in 2021. She is Bitterroot Salish.
Summary
Winner of the Montana Book Award
From the award-winning author of Perma Red comes a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea.
“In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe’s rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water Baby’s cry.”
Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history.
Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, in this telling the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive”: gathering berries, water, roots, and wood; butchering buffalo, antelope, and deer; catching salmon and snaring rabbits; weaving baskets and listening to the stories of her elders. When her village is raided and her beloved Appe and Bia are killed, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper.
Heavy with grief, Sacajewea learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world teeming with fur trappers and traders. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves.
Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.
Foreword
- Author participating in Winter Institute 2023 Author Luncheon; galleys available during the conference; intimate bookseller dinner with the author and publisher
- Sampler copies available for booksellers at Heartland Fall Forum 2022 in St. Louis
- Major galley campaign, with galleys available for the sales force, major media, fiction media, regional media, Indigenous media, influential authors, booksellers and librarians; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss
- Major media outreach, positioning this as a singular and important book that will change the literary canon
- Major Indie Next campaign, with bookseller outreach focused on Mountains & Plains region
- Advertising in Shelf Awareness and MPIBA
- Major promotions for Native American Heritage (November) to set the book up for strong sales through the year
- Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 30K contacts
- Academic outreach to seed book in classrooms for literary and Indigenous studies courses
- Reader’s Guide available for download
- Major launch in Missoula, Montana
