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.

Praise for The Lost Journals of Sacajewea

“[In The Lost Journals of Sacajewea] the suffering—and bold, ingenious agency—of women held as captives by both Native and Euro-Americans is rendered with special vividness [. . .] The narration is rich in realistic detail but animated by a dreamlike intensity [. . .] Throughout the text, Sacajewea memorably enacts what Gerald Vizenor dubs survivance, the negotiation of existential challenges with a spirited, oppositional inventiveness. A profoundly moving imagining of the impressions and contributions of a major historical figure.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“At its surface, this may be a novel, but deeper down, it’s a spirit- song, an invocation, a magical incantation. The language simultaneously keeps Sacajewea unknowable and gives us a path to greater understanding. The poetic prose elevates it from a tragic story to a founding mythic ethos of America. In this, Earling has given us a new model for the literature of the West. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea changes how novels will be written, or at least it should.”—Big Sky Journal

“[The Lost Journals of Sacajewea] offers new perspective on what is known, and debated, about the life of Sacajewea, including her age, her marriage to a French fur-trader (Toussaint Charbonneau), and her experience as the only woman traveling on the 1804-1806 Corp of Discovery expedition with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. In poetic prose, Earling interweaves factual accounts of Sacajewea’s life with a first-person narrative deeply rooted in the physicality of landscape and brutality of the times.”—Seattle Times

“[The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is] an impressionistic, poetic account, one that vividly renders external hardships and internal thoughts, giving equal weight to each. [. . .] it delivers a uniquely thorough perspective on the mind of a particular young woman, both ordinary and extraordinary. In this way, we come to understand Sacajewea more deeply—certainly more than we understand the men of famous names like Lewis and Clark. lt’s a book to enjoy like a river: you give yourself over to it and follow where it takes you.”—Chicago Review of Books

“Earling adds a much-needed Native woman’s perspective to Sacajewea’s story, bringing a note of resilience to her unflinching account of the white men’s violence and depredation: ‘Women do not become their Enemy captors. We survive them.’ This is a beautiful reclamation.”—Publishers Weekly

“Earling ‘shatters’ conventional form to create a movement that is akin to poetry but much more dynamic. Earling bends and slants words, electrifying Sacajewea’s attempts to comprehend and describe what is happening in her often violent and unstable world .[ . . .] Earling creates immersive landscapes where women like Sacajewea and Louise Yellow Knife  [from Perma Red] are given an opportunity to speak; she writes with distinct, unflinching attention even as her characters suffer brutal physical and sexual violence.”—High Country News

“If the Olympics awarded medals for feats of the imagination, this book would be good for the Gold. Marvelously dreamed, starkly and poetically told. The story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition will never be the same.”—Ted Kooser, author of Delights and Shadows

“Debra Magpie Earling’s gorgeous retelling of Sacajewea’s journey shatters modern-day narrative conventions and documented history. With mesmerizing language and incantatory rhythms, Earling delivers an urgent accounting from the true world in a work that feels more alive than written. Yes, alive in a way I didn’t recognize—yet still felt! How deeply, deeply I fell into this story. The bottom line is that The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an awakening, a revelation, a devastating triumph, and a literary magic act.”—Adrianne Harun, author of A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain

“The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is a wonder! Earling reclaims Sacajewea from non-Native histories and characterizations and restores the fulness of her being. She unflinchingly depicts the complexities of a girl navigating layers of trauma, yet preserves Sacajewea’s agency and power. Earling’s Sacajewea tells us a new story, closer to the bone. In gorgeous, startling, revelatory prose, the author commands the English language in profound ways, shapes it to her purposes, and designs a new speech. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is a literary masterpiece, a whirlwind of a story that made me shiver in response to its difficult beauty.”—Susan Power, author of Sacred Wilderness 

“The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is a masterpiece, not just of historical fiction, but of any genre. This raw and bracing retelling of Sacajewea’s life is a thorough dismantling of the legend of the Corps of Discovery, to be sure. But in line after stunning line, Earling reveals Sacajewea in an astonishing and heartbreaking fulness. This sublime book will leave you shook and touched at once, on every single page.”—Smith Henderson, author of Make Them Cry

“Not since James Welch’s monumental Fools Crow has such an immersive work of narrative genius risen out of the West. In luminous, image-laden prose, as if by way of elemental reconstitution, Debra Magpie Earling awakens a voice that our American mythology had hoped would stay sleeping, and in so doing unearths The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, a harrowing—though ultimately triumphant—once-in-a-generation work of art.”—Chris Dombrowski, author of The River You Touch

“The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an immensely moving and transcendental work of literature. Debra Magpie Earling masterfully tells a story with prose so determined and so full of light and beauty that it’s impossible to look away. This is a striking, elegant, and impressive work of art that persists in the reader’s mind even after the book has ended.”—Morgan Talty, author of Night of the Living Rez