The jacket flap describes the book as "lyrical, dreamlike prose," and that evokes the transliguistic experience of its first-person narrative, which starts when Sacajawea is only seven years old. Earling uses ellipses, capitalization, and grayed out italic text to allude to aspects of the sacred that don't translate or cannot be said in English.
It's a beautiful but justifiably grim story of a woman before she should have been a woman. The clash of American/English values with the various Indigenous peoples is constantly on display, starting from the very purpose of the expedition to map land, identify peoples, and enumerate species — to know what was newly owned and give it a name. Earling writes,
Long ago, the People knew Life rested in must-not-be-named. When all things are named, when all Earth's gifts are claimed without thanks, without stories, without prayer, Water and fire will come. Pray to all Four Directions. Pray to heal the desecrated path (page 151).
If you've ever wondered what this woman's life was like, or how she came to be part of the famous expedition, this book can give you an idea of the possible answers. Answers that are outside the way men have thought of it, and beyond what women from polite society have allowed themselves to write about.
About 20 years ago, I visited Astoria, Oregon, and learned that was their western endpoint, the place where they camped for the winter before returning to the East. I climbed up to the top of Coxcomb Hill where there is a monument that honors the expedition, among other major points in the area's history. But I still didn't learn much more.
I saw the Sacagawea dollar coin when that was in circulation and thought it was cool, sure.
Yesterday, from reading Earling's book and motivated by what I learned in it, I went to find out more about all of this. These are facts I never knew, or if I did, I had forgotten them:
- Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were both Southerners.
- Clark brought his enslaved body servant with him on the expedition.
- That man, known to history only as York, was raised with Clark and then was bequeathed to him by his father.
- While the free white men who went on the three-year-long trip all received double pay and hundreds of acres of land in compensation for its grueling nature, York received nothing and was not even freed from bondage by Clark, despite (records show) working harder than most if not all the other members of the expedition to ensure its success.
- The mission reached the West Coast in November 1805. News of its success returned to Thomas Jefferson by ship (via Canton, China) before the expedition arrived by ground,because a fur-trading ship was working with the Chinook people near present-day Astoria and took a letter back from Lewis.
- After the expedition's return, information about the mission fell into obscurity fairly quickly and was not well known in the 19th century. Lewis and Clark were not household names.
- It wasn't until its centennial and the beginning of teaching of Manifest Destiny as mainstream history in schools in the 20th century that it rose to prominence. Several novels were written, including ones about Sacajawea (with various spellings of her name, which is its own controversy).
What did Sacajawea receive for her role on the Corps of Discovery Expedition? That is not even mentioned. She is just "the Shoshone wife" or the "teenaged Shoshone wife" of a French-Canadian fur trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau. In one reference I saw, Charbonneau is referred to as her "husband and captor." That's more in line with how Earling tells the story.
Somehow in the official versions, Sacajawea is ascribed a birth year of c. 1788 that magically makes her past the age of consent in 1805. That's when she was already pregnant at Camp Mandan at the time Lewis and Clark appeared, but clearly no one knows what year she was born. Earling portrays her as significantly younger than that.
It is likely that Sacajawea died in 1812, at age 24 at most, not long after giving birth to a daughter. The cause is recorded as "a putrid fever." There is some possibility, based in oral tradition, that instead she left her husband, went to Wyoming and married into the Comanche tribe, then returned to the Shoshone near the Idaho/Montana border in the 1860s, living until 1884. It's a nice idea. I hope it was true.
Earling's book is a corrective read to the Doctrine of Discovery, but despite the correction, it's in no way a chore. I enjoyed her writing and the enrichment it has brought. Like the characters, the reader comes out of it stronger than at the beginning: "When we suffer together our bones knit as one" (page 241).
__
Astoria Column photo by knightofthedead from the Wikimedia Commons.
No comments:
Post a Comment