Interview with Debra Magpie Earling, author of “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea” by Rey M. Rodríguez and Thomas Dayzie

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, the Montana Book Award, and the American Book Award. She retired from the University of Montana, where she was named professor emeritus in 2021. She is Bitterroot Salish.

Earling’s latest novel The Lost Journals of Sacajewea forces a total reevaluation of what it means to engage with history in literature. The work stretches the potentials of novel form and the English language itself into scarcely imaginable shapes, all in a way that profoundly honors “the stolen sisters of all native nations” to whom it’s dedicated. Rarely has any novel’s form and language been so closely tied to its moral force. Reading it entails forgetting and relearning how to read, how to experience the radically different modes of perception with which Sacajewea and her contemporaries would have known the world. Unlike other stories written from between the lines of historical record, this book doesn’t merely dramatize known events but reaches to the heart of the matter: the human heart, Sacajewea’s, her way of seeing beauty and forging a consummate life amid catastrophe. 

In the IAIA Creative Writing MFA’s spring residency, Earling spoke to us of writing and her writing process with humor, wisdom, and care. She generously agreed to an interview with the Storyteller’s Corner, in which she shared more of the same. Earling’s words prove the truly wonderous power of Native writing. We continue to find inspiration in her insights and stories. 

RR: Debra Magpie Earling. Welcome to the Chapter House Storyteller’s Corner, the literary blog of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). 

Cool to be here. Thank you for inviting me. 

RR: All of the IAIA MFA students kept referring back to your presentation at the IAIA Winter Writers Residency. We were all so moved by how kind you were, and how you made us feel we were important. And so we are very grateful to you. 

Oh, thank you. I feel I'm home at IAIA. It felt great to be in the company of so many wonderful writers, so many storytellers, and in a place that honors Native writers. I always feel accepted and welcomed at IAIA. 

RR: So, Debra, tell us how did you get into writing? 

I have always liked to write. When my best friend, Susan, died at the age of 14, I wrote to her mother about my memories and as I began to write and share the things my friend and I had done together I realized what a power and responsibility writing is. The act of writing evoked something deeper and more substantial than memory.  I've said this before about craft and writing. It's a conjuring of sorts, a deeply transcendent experience. When you're in the act of writing about a person or a character, and you're remembering or inventing every small thing, every scent, every lit scene of stories remembered or imagined, events come to life again or animate for the first time, and the more that you pay attention to the vehicle--which is the craft of writing--the sentences, the sentence structure, and word choice, than the instrument of conjuring becomes a spell. Experiences replay, reawaken. I wanted so much to honor my friend Susan and her mother, to write something that reflected what I cherished about her life. My friend’s death initiated a serious writing practice which is an attentiveness to the living world, and a deep sympathy and empathy for what persists. And I hope my writing is a writing journey, an ongoing experience with memory and imagination made vibrant for others. I hope the more I write the more clearly and more deeply I see. Writing is a celebration of life. As I’ve grown older there are more and more stories I feel called to write, compelled to write, and now choose to write. I had to write about my Aunt Louise in Perma Red and about the experiences she both endured and enjoyed. I also had to write about my own experiences in that novel. I can’t say it felt like a choice. Now I feel I have choices and can have even more fun writing.  

I finally get to flirt with my childhood self that was enthralled with Romeo and Juliet. I memorized the play when I was eleven years old. That’s crazy! I realized then how fantastical writing is! How a story from the 17th century had the power to reach through time and clobber me. It strikes me as both profound and silly.  

Mere words on a page can and do speak to us through time. Shakespeare, great big grand Shakespeare, as well as other writers, are always present. I still can't get over the wonder of the writing. How is it possible that scratches on a page ignite image and story and that these stories  can travel through time and space? Romeo and Juliet captures the rapture of young love and the devastating consequences of hatred and division. We are always in the throes of this particular story as it plays over and over in life and literature.  

It's amazing. A miracle of sorts. 

RR: Agreed. It is a miracle. Can you tell me more about what you mean when you use the term “conjuring”? 

I use that term loosely, and reverently. My great-grandfather was a medicine man. He was a powerful healer, and he did much good in his life. He had the ability to conjure things—manifestations and spirits and light—to heal and to cure. I don't keep that foremost in my mind, otherwise, it would be overwhelming. But I try to connect with the spirit[s] that invite me to be present with humanity and the vast expression of experiences and emotions. To think that we can conjure stories, characters, whole worlds from a thought, a word, an image, from a day, an experience, from a mood—from a specific tonal quality in the air—is tremendous. From deep unconsciousness—from all that we are unaware of—we have the ability to pull from inside ourselves, and beyond ourselves, across vastness and time, and draw absolute wonder down from the ether to the page. 

The blank page is a certain void, a specific expectant pause, isn't it? But the void isn’t nothingness or an abyss or a vacuum, maybe it is that too, but the void can be a scent in the air, a chill, a flush of warmth that conjures ideas and characters. Smells and scents conjure memory for everyone. From these threads of the ordinary my deepest passions stir, everything I adore and love and cherish, is present so I can gaze into darkness and write about the horrific without flinching. I go to such dark places in my writing I feel I need an angel to attend me.  

Haunted places and haunted towns are conducive to writing. I go to writing retreats in haunted places. The world is haunted but not every place is electrified with longing. When I sit in a wish-haunted landscape my imagination tunes in.  

RR: Wow! That's great. 

Yes, or maybe not. Some people fear the haunted world.  

RR: It's interesting because I had a conversation with Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and I don't know if you've read her memoir, but it's all about spirits, and almost like a magical realism within living. 

I have heard tremendous things about her and about her writing. I really liked her when I met her so I would love to read her book and will. 

RR: The Man Who Could Move Clouds is great. I'll just ask one last question, and then we'll turn it over to Thomas. Why do you write? Why is it so important to write? 

I write to be in communion with the natural and unseen worlds. I write to understand, to revel in wonder and beauty. I write to chronicle and address injustice. I write to be better than myself. I write because it’s wondrous, bigger than I am. All.  

RR: I am so with you. It is wondrous. 

Writing thrills me. I love it! It provides grounding in my life, joy. I think I said this when I was at IAIA, but the one thing that gives me “discipline”, especially when I go to Port Townsend, or when I go on any writing retreat is a release from expectations. I need the release from the duties of my life. I admire Louise Erdrich because she is so disciplined, always centers her writing. I remember when I was in Paris at a conference for American writers that Louise Erdrich had a writing schedule. A writing schedule in Paris! I’ve always admired her writing, but I was smitten with her discipline and beautiful desire to write.  

I don't call myself a disciplined writer. But I am a joyous writer. How much can you seek outside pleasures? From going out for ice cream to going to a park or movie, or entertainment of any sort. How much can you seek that? And not find yourself wanting something deeper? Writing provides that depth in my life, that joy and power. It's also a way that I've been able to express my love for friends and family members. 

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I've written many eulogies for my family. You become that person, or you become the person who writes the family story. So it's a connection to others in a deep and personal way for me. So that's why I write, and I can't imagine not writing. I hope I'm just writing till the last moment, and the last breath I take, because writing isn't just the process of putting your pen to the paper, right? It's about dreaming. It's about wonder. It's about questioning. And, seeing things anew and trying to understand how people behave. I've had people whom I admire and secretly have had crushes on even though I know they don't like me. 

I’m not sure if I wasn't a writer I would be able to appreciate them. Does that make sense? 

RR: Yes, very much so. That's why I feel such a strong connection with you and your work, because I'm very joyful and writing adds to the joy. I'm doing this MFA at IAIA and I feel like I'm living my best life. 

Oh, yeah. I’m so happy for you.  

RR: Okay, Thomas, take it away. 

TD: You mentioned Louise Erdrich. While preparing for this interview, I watched your conversation with her at the Minneapolis Central Library on YouTube. I was struck by your words about beauty. And as I read your work I notice constantly a very complex beauty at the center of all of it. In Perma Red, one of Louise’s first epiphanies is that Baptise can be both beautiful and ugly. In the conversation with Erdrich, you mentioned an image of a bloated buffalo corpse floating down a river. I want to ask, because beauty is so important in both of your novels, How do you see beauty? 

Beauty is a really complex idea, isn't it? Certainly, if we didn't see each other differently, or if we didn't each have our own compass. There’s understanding in how we see beauty in the world, how we connect to it. I grew up in a very violent household. My father was abusive to my mother as well as my mother to my father. As a child, I had to begin to see the world's beauty at the fringes of the world. Even in the midst of all of this tension. If you've been in a household that's abusive, and all the fear, you know the overwhelming fear, you have when your father is beating your mother. How do you deal with that as a child? For me, it was always by finding wonder at the edges, so that I knew there was always some kind of magic just at the edge of all that violence. My parents were most times loving, giving, and caring. 

But there was this kind of vortex, this dark vortex, that they would enter. Survival became the constant effort to see the beauty in even the darkest things. To accept my family situation, to live, I had to peer very deeply into a particular darkness, and that has informed my writing. I tell my students you can take your reader to hell if you give them the handholds to make the descent. 

When there's something horrific right in front of us. For example, when you come across a bad accident, or something terrible happens. There's that weird juxtaposition of violence or horror and beauty. And so, your brain will focus on tulips blooming on the other side of the road, or the glitter of broken glass. The lived experience has its own kind of beauty. 

Unfortunately, we live in a world of violence, even if you look at the animal world, there's violence. How do you reconcile that? For me it's trying every day to see the beauty in things that surround us. The actions that the President is taking are so horrific. And America as a whole is shut down and numb with fear and you feel the fear of what's going on. So I've heard so many people say, I'm looking for the beauty in things. I'm going to enjoy my life. I'm going to have a rich life with my friends. They're reaching out to community. And I think that's all the same response. Isn't it so? My response to writing when I sit down is if I have something that I have to engage in then I have that power on the page. I can control this. So I end up feeling a certain amount of giddiness that I'm the person in control of this story and the way in which I tell it. 

I stopped worrying so much about book sales because I thought well, I didn't think anyone would buy The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. My editor said, “Well, that's okay.” And Daniel Slager, the editor and CEO of Milkweed, gave me permission. And with the freedom to write I was able to enter that dark space Sacajewea must have witnessed and experienced. To see it fully. There were some things I chose not to write. I wanted the story to move swiftly, to show the rapidity of encroachment. 

I hope I've answered your question. 

TD: Yes, thank you for sharing. I’m inspired in your writing by your ability to inhabit characters who are not the main characters in the novel. You are able to show how they see the protagonist. In Perma Red, I think of Charlie Kicking Woman, in The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, White Man. The first person to mention beauty in that book is White Man. He tries to show Sacajewea what beauty is. He points to this and to that, and says, this is beauty. This is beauty. How as a writer do you try to inhabit other people's perspectives and show how they see beauty, or how do you understand other people's idea of beauty? 

To see the world even 50 years ago, or a hundred years ago, or 150 years ago, or 200 years ago, you have to enter the space where your characters or historical figures reside. And so I read a lot of French fur trapper journals and the Lewis and Clark journals. A lot of these trappers were horrified by Native people. They didn’t see the beauty that Native people saw. And one of the things that I was struck by was that the buffalo, the bloated buffalo floating down the stream huge dead buffalo, and those gaseous smells of death must have been horrific and remarkable.  

But I had to get in the mindset. The Mandan and the Hidatsa people, and many tribes, including my own, view the buffalo as sacred. And drowned and bloated buffalo was the buffalo’s sacred gift to sustain the people. An easy food and a delicacy. If you travel anywhere in the world, you see that there are certain foods, and because you're not accustomed to eating those foods, we find them repugnant or repulsive. 

But it's always important to shift and think about what is beautiful to people, and the bloated buffalo was one of the windows into beauty. The customs of the Mandan, their daily practice, and the hard work that it took to survive. The severe winters that people faced, the hardship. Just imagine being wounded in those days, giving birth, living through a night so cold you have to have your toes clipped off. 

And living with such wonder and power. Those people had remarkable medicine power as well, so all around they saw things we don't see today. I'm always amazed because my elders have told me that not too long ago we had the ability, like the animals, to camouflage. We could be one with nature around us. And that clicked for me. If we can be one with nature around us, then, of course, all of that would make perfect sense like as an animal, as a wolf-like animal, we would devour these bloated buffalo. 

You're a person, and still one with all these things, kindred to all animals. Then all those things are beautiful. You see the world in a different way. But it takes a while. Then you think about the connection with the buffalo that Native people had, and continue to have, although certainly, the Government has tried to cut us from our ties to the earth, our place with the living earth. So it took me time to get back to that place of wonder and understanding. But what beauty surrounds us in all that hardship? I find it fascinating. Don't you find it fascinating when you see someone who is truly suffering, who is mourning or who's enduring something that is beyond our endurance, human endurance, and they endure it anyway? 

I've had people in my life that I know have suffered so much, and I look at my elders and what they've gone through, and they have a sense of humor, and they're laughing at things and things that just make me really angry. They just laugh at it. 

That's a beautiful thing, isn't it? It really is, so it's all those things. 

TD: Could I ask you about your literary elders? Last week, I read James Welch's, Winter in the Blood. I thought it was such an amazing book and I wonder if you could speak to the effect of his mentorship on your writing. I see you as a very different writer, but obviously he's had a big impact on you. 

Oh, he did. When you're in the presence of someone, like Jim, who was extraordinarily talented and visionary, it’s wonderful that his genius never got in the way of the man. And I think that’s because Jim Welch had a tremendous sense of humor. He also was humble. He wasn't a show-off in any way. He was a person to emulate, and he cared more about his writing than anything. His wife, Lois Welch, would field calls, so he didn't have to speak to many people so he could do his important work of his writing. If you met Jim Welch, he had this irresistible way of being present. He'd look at you with these piercing, animated, sparkly eyes. And he reminded me of a beaver, because he was always so focused. His eyes were round and dark and penetrating. He was always filled with wonder. 

And I always thought, “Oh, my God! He's paying so much attention to me. I'm probably going to be in one of his novels,” but he gave everyone the same attention. You'd see him, and he'd be engaged by what people were saying, and aghast sometimes at what they were saying, but always focused and present. 

So about his mentorship, I don't think Jim Welch ever ever gave me back written comments. 

I do remember one time when I was in his office, and I studied with him at Cornell, and he had E.B. White's office. E.B. White's typewriter was on a small black desk with his stationary, and he let me take a few. Where’d those stationary pages go? He looked at my manuscript, and he said, you know, Debra? There are a few ideas in your work that you pass by, and you need to go there. And then he just pointed out those places on the page, tapped them with his finger and it felt like what he did was touch something fundamental to the story and then the words came spewing out. It's like there was a waterfall at the places he identified. He found the weak spots and from him I learned to find those rich spots in my work. I think that was a tremendous gift. Mentorship is not always about guiding you in your writing as much as showing you how to be a writer in the world. How to be a good person. 

Years ago, I was having dinner at his house, and Jim Welch was talking about the Catholic Church, and how it had done such terrible things to Native people. I was Catholic at the time, driven in part by my mother's strong faith in Catholicism. I felt I needed to uphold her faith because she had suffered so much at the altar of Catholicism. I remember him looking at me with such incredulity and disappointment, saying, “I just can't believe that you're Catholic. I cannot believe it, Debra. With all that they've done to us. How can you?” 

If you can speak to the dead or the dead can hear us – Jim, I was wrong. As soon as my mother died I realized that I didn't hold those ideations at all. I'm probably not an atheist, but I'm certainly not a person who believes in that dogma. Although one of the things that I love from that experience is that you can learn from anything. Even the cruelty of forced assimilation. 

I went to parochial school when I was a kid, and the nuns would tell us such wild things, and then force us to go to the funerals of strangers. And because of their peculiar rules and forced adherence, I had a sense of being connected to something both wondrously strange and horrifically dark that made me a writer. When you have to listen to nuns very personal ideas about God, when they give you the craziest answers to your childish questions like how old will we be in heaven and they tell you thirty-three and that answer made me laugh out loud. I was ten years old and if I died I’d suddenly be an old person. Was that heaven? I found the idea both preposterous and hilarious. But they also made me wonder about religion. Can you make stuff up? I believe you can. Nuns made me question the world in ways that I'm grateful for. 

TD: I came across this great piece you did in a collection called Because You Asked,  a response to one of your student's poems. I saw in it the style of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, but done in a completely different way. And I wondered if you could talk a bit about that. It's certainly an unorthodox thing to do, to write a response to a student's poem which is a literary experiment all on its own. 

I don't know what got into me. I remember I thought about how we're in conversation with poets, as teachers, and as writers. We're in conversation with other writers. There's this tendency as teacher to be this fixer or to respond as an authority, but I think to be in deep conversation, to be present with another writer’s work, is to respond more deeply and reflect to them how their work has impacted us. 

I wanted to convey to this poet she had released something for me, and I wished to respond as an equal rather than teacher. And so many young writers have so much beauty, and so much power in their work. I was moved to respond to her work in a way that broke me free of the convention of teacher. I was maybe too ambitious. I wished to respond in a way that was a spark of creativity that hopefully sparks other creativity. 

I always thought that I failed as a teacher because I wasn't in any way a person who could necessarily be prescriptive, and in some ways, I was just stopped by some student's work. It stayed with me. It wasn't like something that I could say, oh, well, you know, here you need more stuff, or here you need. And that's what I admired about Jim Welch. He didn't beat around the bush. He didn't say anything unnecessary. He said a few things that were powerful that struck me as a writer. And for that particular writer, I felt the need to respond in a way that supported her as a writer. Although I don't think I'm a poet. 

TD: Could I ask if the conversation continued beyond Because You Asked? 

It's been so long ago. The one thing that we were talking about was actually, which is strange, Tarot cards and reading in response that is a metaphysical response to each other. And I remember that a large part of our conversations was based on an intuitive response. She gave me some witch tarot cards. They were old-fashioned playing cards. 

I taught a storytelling class, and had students come up on stage and tell stories, and I noticed that students responded to offbeat things. So I tried to reach young writer's creativity and get them to write something that maybe they wouldn't have otherwise written. I had things like a palm reading. I told them to look at somebody's palm and ask, “What do you think the story is there?” 

I had one student who was by himself, and, I asked him to come up to my desk. So he read my palm, and then I read his palm. And I said, “You're going to find great happiness in your life, and you're going to be married, and you're going to find a child. A child will come from this marriage.” 

Years later, he wrote me this letter where he said he didn't believe in himself at the time. It's this poignant letter about how that palm reading made him think about his life in a different way. And now, he’s a professor, he's a scientist at the biological station at the Yellow Bay, he has a son, and he's happily married. I think about that experience. Do the stories that we tell each other become our stories? 

I mean, I don't think of stories just as stories on the page, do you? Stories on the page have this echoing effect. How many times have you been writing a character and you see this character so clearly in your mind. Talk about conjuring! I write about a character and then the character appears in real life. A person I’ve never met before? How often does what we write spin off into the universe and create something wonderful? So I'm kind of hopeful that there's that conjuring with writers. And it's always good to send your good stories out into the world. 

TD: You've written a lot about prophecy. In the collection, Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes, you start out your work with a prophecy. I wonder: What is your idea of prophecy in history and today? Do you think the same voices of prophecy are operating in the world? 

Thomas, that's a profound question. Well, what I'm hoping is that…What I'm hoping is that it is. You know we may be telling the dark stories, but I gravitate toward telling those stories that I believe need to be told. But I tell them with the hope that by telling them there will be healing, and that horrendous deeds will come out into the light. When you're wounded, you need to come out into the sunlight, and you need to heal. 

Students are coming out of IAIA with these amazing stories. Some of the most fantastic writers I've read in my whole life are coming out of IAIA and it's because there's vision there. Vision is a prophecy. When you're a visionary, it matters in the world. And these students coming out, these writers coming out of IAIA are truly visionary, and somehow there’s that spark – you can feel it when you're there. I have never been to a reading in the company and presence of so many brilliant and knowledgeable writers. I thought, Okay, well, I think that will probably be the last astonishing one. And then another young IAIA writer would step to the podium and blow me away. And it was writer after writer after writer. And I thought, Okay, I'm just going to give up. I will just accept all these readings. It was like I was being lit up. Something ignited in me. That wonderful, brilliant attention to each other, the love that you have at IAIA for every single writer who stepped up to that podium, no matter if they were the last one in line. And that’s vision, isn't it? It's a community vision. And there's something within us. Maybe we don't even understand, or we don't even know, that it's there. But deep in that…like a pocket where we keep our writing, we also keep others, in our community, like a deep sense of other people, of community. 

So, I find it so powerful there. That idea of prophecy is so connected to vision, and the vision of our elders, what they wanted for us and what they hoped for us. And it's freed us in some ways to tell our stories, and to tell our stories with great insight and clarity. 

TD: Wow! Thank you for that. I have a few questions which I absolutely must ask about The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. I'm currently writing a novel where I try to describe the world in parts through a specifically Navajo lens, like you describe the world through Sacajewea’s lens rather than the scientific or record-keeping lens. I’m wondering what your process was for developing a world for Sacajewea. In this world, there are water Babies, ogres, He-is-Woman, She-is-Man. How did you develop and then inhabit this world, and what were your resources for it? 

Well, I'm older, and it's life. It's being present, and I'm not saying that you can't get that when you're younger, Thomas, because you have great vision. But I gave myself permission. Does that make sense? I gave my writerly license permission, and my editor gave me permission as well, but I'd already been writing this without his permission. I gave myself permission to inhabit this world. I wasn't trying to please anybody. I was trying to be present with Sacajewea. I was trying to be present in the world that she was living. 

Sometimes I felt I was there with her. That I was somehow a witness with her, something that she needed, and I know that sounds so arrogant and full of myself, but I felt I had to make that deep sort of…I wouldn't say investigation. Although I think that's what history is like when you look at any history book. And this is what I encourage. When you look at any history book there's so much, of course, there has to be. But when they said, “Oh, there's so very little information about Sacajewea…” She's only mentioned, I think, 23 times or something in the whole of the journals. But she's always present. She's always present in every single entry. So, trying to see what she's seeing isn't hard at all. Sitting with her allows her more witness, more presence. And I encourage you in this story that you're writing to allow yourself to deeply inhabit the place where you wish to be, the place that you love and sometimes hate. But allow yourself to be present in the world that you write. 

When they asked me for revision, there were a few things I had to go back in and rework, and I thought, oh, this will be simple. I'll just be able to do this really fast because I could write it fast. But I couldn't go in quickly, because the world of Sacajewea calls you to slow down just by using caps. Just using capital letters for something important – like Tree, Stream, River, Mountain – makes you slow down and have reverence. If there's a capital letter on Mountain, yeah, we should stop and think about a mountain. But I think that's kind of the beauty, like: what in your culture makes you stop and think? What are those guideposts in a story? The guideposts that have a big vision, but lead you to look at something very particular, very, very individual. Each story will have its own power because our cultures are also unique. So your story will naturally have unique power that will drive it. But you have to give yourself permission! Because sometimes when writing, I’d think, Oh, God, do I sound like “Me see him”? “Big waters,” you know. Those old Westerns on television that have Indians talking in such a repugnant way. And I thought, God, I hope I'm not taking the language down like that. But I knew that I couldn't…I had to take the language down to the thing itself. So when we think about the thing itself, we think in so many abstractions today, don't we? But when you begin to say something that is a thing itself like how in James Welch’s Fools Crow “Ears Far Apart” is an owl. It's so clear, but people are like, what the hell is this? But it's a thing itself, right? People can't see it anymore. They're not looking very specifically at something. So, that's what I would encourage you to do: look very specifically at something, the thing itself, and that will be fresh and new from you. From your perspective. 

TD: Thank you so much for that advice. I was so struck by your use of “the thing itself.” Something I find amazing about the book is that it's hard for me to understand these journal entries as stories. It seems like you've invented a language to point to something which is inexpressible, or which is not available to us with our everyday language, and I find that so wonderful. I and many other people at IAIA read this book, thanks to Chip Livingston. 

Oh, man! I love him! 

TD: I love him, too. He was my mentor last semester, and I asked him if he had any questions that he wanted to ask you. He was interested in the difference between the writing experiences writing your first novel, Perma Red – which was about someone in your family – and your second novel, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea – which was about someone in the historical record, hidden in the historical record. Could you speak a little bit about that? 

Oh, that's a great question. 

Writing Perma Red was a journey for me. Through family stories, through my own stories. I had a lot of mourning to do,. a lot of grief, and it felt like, at times, like I was in Louise's company. My Aunt Louise did die in 1947 when the car she was riding in plummeted off an embankment. And she was taken from the car. She was removed from the car and laid on a flatbed railroad car. And her body was covered with a blanket. My uncle was there at the time, and he said that she had…she had…she was still alive. And that they let her die out on the railroad car from exposure.  

As I was researching the book, going to the BIA and looking at old records and looking at years of old death certificates, I found out that what my uncle said was true. She died from head injuries and exposure. So that was a hard one. But…but fun, too, I mean trying to bring that story back was a joyous thing, like giving back. Bringing it to my family and to my mother, and working with that story for so long. It didn't take 20 years for me to write the story. It took 20 years for me to get it in shape to be published. I just kept going back, trying to make the story work in ways that would be acceptable to a publisher. So, I had to cut out the death of Louise at the end. A lot of people understand that she did die. That was a crossing for me. That was kind of an awakening. Your first novel is tough, I think, because you don't know what the process is, and you don't know what to expect. 

But I've got to say writing The Lost Journals of Sacajewea was a pleasure from the beginning. This voice came in it seemed out of nowhere. After I'd written Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes, the essay “What We See.” I read passages from Lewis and Clark and what stayed me. I was haunted by one particular passage: Sergeant Ordway was given a wife for the night and then her husband stabbed and beat her even though he had offered her to the Corp, and she ended up by the Interpreter's campfire. I was just haunted by her. She stayed with me. 

I was on a panel with N. Scott Momaday two times. He'd written about Sacajewea and I was inspired by him but I kept thinking, there's more here, there's more. That story was inside of me like a storm. And when I released it to the page, it was effortless in some ways. Every time I sat down the story rushed out. There's the original if you want to look it up under Peter Koch. You can see how it's kind of lined up. IAIA probably doesn't have a copy of it, but you know you… 

TD: I have it. I actually have it right in front of me. It’s an amazing text. Did you know that you were going to write a greater novel at this point? 

I didn't. No…Blessing is a complicated word, but it felt like Sacajewea came to visit me. And I didn't always get it right. I failed many times in that book, but I felt like I was in a place of wonder, like I was allowed entry into this world years ago, and I don’t know why. Why are we called to write certain stories?  I'll never write anything like that again. It'll never happen like that again for me. It'll never be like that. 

The differences between those two novels is: one I had to write Perma Red. Your first novel you have to write about yourself, I guess, and this one The Lost Journals of Sacajewea just released me into the world of writing, and I love to write essays, but I felt released in this book, to begin my journey as a writer. It feels like a powerful journey, too, one that's filled with giddiness and fun. And now I get to write what I wanted to write when I was a kid. 

TD: It seems like “blessing” and “haunting” are maybe the same. The same process. 

Oh, I love that, Thomas. Blessing and haunting. I'm going to write that down. I think so, isn't it? Yeah. The blessing and haunting. 

TD: I'm wondering whether you were blessed or haunted by any literary work while you were writing Sacajewea. 

Oh, gosh! You know. I think probably Fools Crow was a really big impetus in writing that book, because Welch took so much. I mean, I got to read that when it was mimeographed, the first couple chapters, and when you smell – I don't know if you even know what that is, it’s so old. I got to read that. I remember being lit up by it, and I was, I don't know, in my twenties, early twenties. I lost track of the question. Sorry. 

TD: Oh, yeah, it was just whether you were blessed or haunted by a literary work, whether any literary work helped inspire Sacajewea. 

You know what? I've been inspired, certainly, by Leslie Marmon Silko, and by N. Scott Momaday's work. For The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, one of the things that was really helpful to me was House Made of Dawn. It’s a remarkable novel, isn't it? It doesn't ask that you will ever understand it fully, right? It's broken in places, and it has these time swings, and it goes from the past to the present. It goes through a serious amount of brokenness. I was really deeply inspired by that. I was deeply inspired. That it called upon the reader to be so present and, in some ways, forgiving. 

Maybe I'm wrong, but I read a lot and a lot of the books that I read today I'm disappointed because they don't have a voice. They don't have a particular voice that I can say: that's what it's like. Thomas Wolfe, Jim Welch had a voice, Louise Erdrich has an amazing voice, you can tell. You can tell Erdrich's work when you read it. You go, “Oh, that sounds like Erdrich.” My work is always described as “dreamlike,” which is always upsetting to me. Do people not really get it, or whatever? But it's like, “dreamlike prose of Earling.” 

TD: I'm remembering now in The Lost Journals of Sacajewea how Sacajewea’s Bia [mother] tells her: every woman speaks two languages, the language of the people, and then the woman's language, the voice you have inside of you. And if you stifle that voice, you are “bone crunch.” It seems like you take this very seriously also in literature, having a voice. 

Raise your voice! Your voice is important. Yeah, I don't think people do it enough. 

TD: I was haunted by the character of Lewis in The Lose Journals of Sacajewea. Clark seems like a bumbling but good enough guy, at least in the light of their mission. But Lewis had a certain darkness to him. What are your thoughts about this? 

Years ago, I took a trip up the Missouri River. I was invited by the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art to go on this journey with other artists and writers, and I went with Susan Stewart, who's a fabulous Crow artist. We were the only natives on this boat going up the river. I'll never forget going through those corridors. The rock is kind of mealy, it doesn't hold up well. 

But there was one place where we saw this hand in the rock itself. It wasn't a petroglyph. It looked like it had been zapped there, or something. There was tremendous power in this hand. And so that experience of writing about Lewis in that journey…his story is haunting. It's grim. I've heard that he took sheep shears to his throat after he shot himself and wasn't dying. It took him 3 days to die. 

They couldn't believe it. Some think it was murder. I often wondered if he stopped and had his own psychic impression of the damage that he was bringing – what he was unleashing into this country. Few Native people had seen white people before and Lewis held this tremendous responsibility to the people whose lives he would change by the Expedition. I think he saw the damage that he wrought. So, there was this haunted feeling when I was writing about him, thinking how he would take a musket to his head and shoot himself, and then sit with that for days. 

Something was going on with him. He saw things. He kept saying things in his journal like, “Oh, those superstitious Indians…” He tried to puff himself up. And yet at one point, he knew there was some enchantment going on. There are things in the journals that white people still can't reconcile or understand. They heard this weird sound in what is now Montana and likened it to a cannon going off, and yet they understood there was no way the sound could be caused by a cannon. The Native people wouldn't tell them what it was, this mysterious sound, and I think it haunted Lewis. I think they actually saw things that they weren't willing to discuss. I do believe they saw spirits as they were traveling through. I do believe they were haunted by the future. They were scared. Lewis’s voice in particular was haunted. I think Clark was just grateful to be considered a captain, but Lewis had this tremendous weight on his shoulders. He was responsible for the what was sewn in the idea of “manifest destiny.” We are still suffering the cost. He trampled the land of our ancestors and named or renamed everything he saw. He paved the way for mass destruction.  

Think about that, being the spearhead of such devastation and destruction. Whole tribes wiped out. He admired the cultures that he was dealing with and yet remained standoffish. So yeah, I think he was haunted. 

TD: That's fascinating. Lewis is not a big part of the book, but when he does come in he brings a heavy presence. Chip Livingston wrote me that when he was reading The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, it felt like a transformative experience for him, like he was learning a new way to speak and experience the world. And he said, even physically and metaphysically, he felt this kind of transformation, and he was wondering if you also felt a certain transformation inside yourself and your expressive capabilities as you were writing. 

You know what? The novel became endurance: to hold that, to stay in that particular place. But I have to say, when I first started writing, when I was working with Peter Koch, the master printer out of Berkeley, California, he'd say, “Give me more buffalo, I need more buffalo,” or whatever. I could sit down, and as fast as I could write it, it would appear. I only changed two words. And it was just this connection to…I guess it's the thing itself, it's ethereal. It's grace. It's like light. A source of light. It's empowerment. Even when I felt pressed or tired, even when it was hard to find just a place to write, there was this tremendous sort of propulsive light that kept on like insistence. I felt a physical push from behind to write this story. Even if I was wrong. Just to get it out there to make people, maybe even a few people, begin to question what “manifest destiny” is, and what it does to cultures, and how devastating it is. And it's scary, now that we're facing that again, that the term has been resurrected, “manifest destiny” has been resurrected again. Which is frightening, isn't it? 

TD:  It is. One last question, I don't consider myself a storyteller or someone who tells stories. My novel is built more out of memories and flashes from the past. Any advice? 

I love that you're reconsidering the idea of what it is to tell a story. Katherine Mansfield, toward the end of her life – and she didn't consider herself a poet – started seeing glimpses of memories, those powerful things that won't let us go, that don't have a beginning and a middle and end, the rise in tension to the crisis point. They're just these powerful memories that we have. She became convinced that that was the truest way to tell a story, that Chekhov was wrong, that the ways in which we see the world are really highlighted by these glimpses of our lives. If you ask somebody for a powerful memory or if you go to your class and say, “Tell me a memory that you have, a glimpse of something that has always stayed with you,” they will tell you something searing and unforgettable. To think about a story or narrative in that way is a powerful and potent way to connect with others, and to connect with yourself. 

TD: Thank you for that insight. 

Thank you! Because of you both, I'm going to go back to my books and I'm going to be reading them in a different way. 

RR: Well, thank you again for your generosity of time and wisdom. We are so grateful to you for this interview. We both have gained so much from it. 

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute of American Indian Arts' MFA Program. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review.  

Thomas Dayzie is working on his first novel. He earned his undergraduate at Princeton University with a concentration in English and certificates in Creative Writing and Humanistic Studies. He is a first-year MFA student in Creative Writing at IAIA and an instructor in the undergraduate department.