00:03:50.300And can you first explain to me the journey of how you came to write this novel?
00:03:56.980Because I think it was, what was it? It was a poetry project first?
00:04:01.340Actually, before that time, I was commissioned by the historian Alvin Giuseppe to write a piece, Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes.
00:04:11.980So as a Bitterroot Salish woman, I was to tell the story of, you know, our encounters with Lewis and Clark.
00:04:18.800So as I was doing sort of the research for that project, that essay, I came across something that just stayed with me and I couldn't let it go.
00:04:28.120it was just kind of, you know, I'd heard some, you know, you hear the mythology of, of Sacagawea,
00:04:34.580but then when you get down to, into the grit of those journals, which everyone seems to like kind
00:04:40.440of pass over, um, and not really examine so many historians, just, I don't know whether they ignore
00:04:47.600this, but they don't usually account for this. And if I may, um, the thing that snagged me in
00:04:54.020the journals. May I read that selection? Yes, please. Okay. It's from Clark and it's on November
00:04:59.88022nd of 1804. And he says, I was alarmed about 10 o'clock by the Sentinel who informed that an
00:05:07.720Indian was about to kill his wife in the interpreter's fire. I went down and spoke to
00:05:12.580the fellow about the rash act, which he was like to commit and forbid any act of the kind near the
00:05:19.300fort. He goes on to say that one of his sergeants has slept with a wife, and if he wanted to, he
00:05:26.500could kill her. And so it goes on to say that later she shows up by the interpreter's fire.0.99
00:05:34.780She came to the interpreter's fire apparently much beat and stabbed in three places.0.96
00:05:40.220And then later he says, Clark in the same sort of tone, and I advised him to take his squaw home0.94
00:05:47.120and live happily together in the future.0.71
00:06:16.400And most likely murdered after they left, after, you know, they went on their journey.
00:06:24.440So I took that bit of information and I began to really look at the ways in which women were treated and how colonialism had kind of fostered a whole new way of seeing the world.
00:06:35.480One of the things that bothers me about it was if we refocus that lens of colonialism and slavery on the life of Sacagawea, it just fractures a fundamental and foundational myth of the American West, which was, you know, Lewis and Clark were on this grand expedition and they were, but they also endangered so many lives.
00:06:58.220And really, since the coming of Lewis and Clark, Indigenous women have been murdered, raped, sexualized, sold into slavery for money, conquest and power.
00:07:09.260And I think that Sacagawea, for me, was like the first trafficked woman.
00:07:13.640She was captured by the Hadatsas in one account, and she was taken to Knife River, where she was gambled or sold to Charbonneau.
00:07:24.000And they continue to refer to her as his wife, which I find really troubling.
00:07:29.200Like, you know, and I was hoping that this book would open that conversation about ideas
00:07:34.560of women in the West, especially Native women who were sold or bartered to white fur trappers
00:07:42.080and they were considered like less than beaver pelts.1.00
00:07:46.600And then they were referred to as wives when they didn't want to, clearly didn't want to1.00
00:07:50.920marry these men and were subjected to them.0.99
00:07:54.000had to live with them. I just wanted to mention, and wasn't she incredibly young at the time also?0.98
00:08:00.500Here's something that really, you know, when I started, you know, I'm no historian and goodness,
00:08:05.760I'm no anthropologist, but when I began to open up the whole narrative, they say, these historians
00:08:11.900will say that Sacagawea is born circa 1788. So circa means, you know, circulatory, it could be,
00:08:19.640it could be as much as 10 years, but most likely it was three or four years, give or take. So
00:08:26.000she could have been eight or nine, or she could have been 16. Most likely she was younger. And
00:08:32.260the reason why I thought she was younger is because Clark's fiance at the time that he left
00:08:38.180Virginia was 12 years old. So 11 or 12 years old. And I thought, you know, it pardons the Corps,
00:08:45.540the expedition if she is 16 or possibly they push the the the historians have traditionally
00:08:53.460pushed her age up so that she is 16 17 18 but you know and to think of her as a child with child
00:09:02.700is kind of unthinkable and certainly not a wholesome depiction of the expedition it's I
00:09:08.660mean the whole situation is obviously awful and there's something there's an added level if you're0.82
00:09:15.520picturing a pregnant 18 year old versus a pregnant 12 year old. Yes. Yeah. There's something just so0.91
00:09:23.300much more chilling in a different way to have her be that young. Yeah. To have her be that young.
00:09:29.240And so, you know, when I read through the journals, I started looking at her. So there's not much
00:09:33.720written about Sacagawea and there's not much information in the journals themselves. When
00:09:38.820they do show her, she's plucky, I guess is the word. She's literally plucky. She plucks out1.00
00:09:45.840their instruments from the water when everybody is having, well, freaking out about like these
00:09:52.160big waves washing over their barge and all of their stuff is floating away. And so Sacagawea
00:09:58.740has a peace of mind to grab these things and pull them in. But I thought, okay, she's a mother. She
00:10:05.060as a baby, probably on her back. And it didn't strike me as a woman who would behave that way.0.98
00:10:10.620An older woman would behave that way. A more mature person would behave that way. Kids are1.00
00:10:16.000kind of fearless about things, you know, that what frightens others makes them laugh. And
00:10:21.140I just thought some of the things when they capture her within the journals, I kept thinking
00:10:26.920about how I had to find her. I had to search for the real flesh and blood Sacagawea and rest
00:10:35.040her from the mythology and try to find out what she would be thinking. And certainly when I look
00:10:42.360at her whole story, when I look at the ways in which the cultural misinterpretations, because
00:10:49.080okay, so Lewis and Clark were gathering all of these things, like sacred things, like gathered
00:10:55.580a sacred fox and they sent it of the Blackfeet and they sent it back to the great white father.
00:11:01.760They put a magpie, they kind of folded it in under the skin of a fox and sent it back.0.75
00:11:09.640And to me, like I was thinking about medicine bundles and the power of those things and
00:11:13.040how they talked about the great white father.
00:11:15.380So to this young girl who was in this camp, what was that like?
00:11:51.700And when he got when he stepped forward, he said, you know, I'm a monster and I'm going to eat you.0.98
00:11:57.440And he said this to the children, and they ran away from him. And, you know, and Clark was kind of upset that he got so much attention. So there's all these places where I was reading in the journals between the lines about the jealousies and about the things that were happening to the women that just seemed to be run of the mill, like they didn't even really talk about that, wasn't important, the stories weren't important.0.94
00:12:24.620But you can kind of tell when they do tell a story, because these men weren't creative.
00:22:55.160Let me show you. She died at the age of 23 or she lived to be 80. Her son, Baptiste, was adopted by Clark, was supposed to be well-educated in Europe, came back, and there's stories that he could have been a train robber in California.0.98
00:23:15.900So these wildly sort of like stories about the whole about her and her life seem kind of almost magically obfuscated so that they allow for our interpretation and for us to see things.
00:23:32.960Although I think what astonishes me is how historians will say it is this with such authority, that she was Lema Shoshone, that she was, you know, 12 years old.
00:23:45.920I mean, they don't have, like, that's just speculation.
00:23:50.460And it's like writing is kind of like writing fiction is speculation.
00:26:28.660And you're somewhere you shouldn't be.
00:26:31.320And they got that sense that, you know, different times during the, you know, when you're reading
00:26:37.520those journals, there's things where they're a little uneasy.
00:26:41.240they're spooked by things. So I think that was so much, that was so enlightening to me to read
00:26:48.840these journals. And, you know, when you're really searching for stories and how people respond and
00:26:54.240behave, it just becomes another kind of journey through, you know, very old, you know, river
00:27:00.940stain pages. Like, what is this? What is this story really? At what point did you make the
00:27:06.340decision to to write this as a book having already actually you started describing sort of how you
00:27:13.240came to start thinking of her life can you talk about the other projects that led to this book
00:27:18.400and how it ended up being yeah i was invited to write about about the lewis and clark um bicentennial
00:27:25.320and so there was a group of native artists who had responded to the bicentennial with um you know
00:27:32.800beautiful works of art. And so the person who was supposed to write pulled out of the Missoula
00:27:39.060Museum of Art. And so I got a call from Laura Millen, who's a director of MAM. And she said,
00:27:46.540would you please write something? And I said, God, I know nothing about art. I'll make a fool
00:27:51.480of myself. And she said, no, we can write anything. So I took my, I took them up and I started0.91
00:27:59.180writing and the weird I guess weird or strange or curious you know writing is always strange
00:28:05.540when I sat down to write I wrote this thing and probably the whole it became the original
00:28:12.440Lost Journals of Sacagawea for for the for my work with Peter Koch and it was probably
00:28:18.16030 minutes and I just wrote it I wrote it just exploded on the page uh this voice came up out of
00:28:26.100really must have been years of thinking about November 22nd in 1804 when Sacagawea attended
00:28:34.980to the the woman who was stabbed there was something in me and I I feel like I was like
00:28:41.100the tree that exploded um over Lewis and Clark and just you know just tumbled down with it you
00:28:48.680know and set this field of fire I felt like there was a story in me that I didn't know was in me
00:28:54.900And it came rapidly at first. And then there became times when it seemed like it was
00:29:00.940something that was tapping at me or knocking at me or it came in sounds. And a lot of times it
00:29:09.180came in just sounds of things, a hissing, a tapping, a drumbeat, a heartbeat. So in the book,
00:29:16.220I use two periods to represent both an ellipsis and a heartbeat, a drumbeat. When things are
00:29:25.260frightening to Sacagawea, there's a rapid heartbeat, a heartbeat or drumbeat sound in the
00:29:33.900journals themselves, in the lost journals of Sacagawea. So it started with this, this book
00:29:41.240sort of began in this blaze of inspiration when you were working for this, on this art project.
00:29:46.920And then did the story stuck with you? You thought like, I want to explore this more?
00:29:52.080Yes. Well, Peter Koch had his, his wife, Susan Filter came up and she saw the, the writing and
00:30:01.040she grabbed him and said, you, you must work with this, Peter. And he's like the head of codex and
00:30:06.300a master printer. And he said, you know, you must do something with this. And so he contacted me
00:30:12.320and we began a collaboration that ended up in this gorgeous, really museum piece book
00:30:18.600that has like smoked paper from Minneapolis that looks like smoked buffalo hide. And we have like
00:30:25.500bone beads and shell casings on the side. It's a really beautiful book that opens up on vellum
00:30:31.440pages so that you can see both sides of the story. Like you can see the print and then you can see
00:30:38.380these images overlaid on the print. And it's also, he had the ability to go deep into it with his
00:30:45.960equipment, to go deep into old photographs and pull out these images that had never been seen
00:30:51.180before, like the background. And there's these haunting images that he pulls out for this book.
00:30:57.620So that was what started me. But over the course of writing this, I had some experiences that I
00:31:05.160talk about, but I still feel reluctant to talk about them because they're the muse or there's
00:31:11.300things that happen that feel strange or haunted. I woke up one night and I had a woman standing by
00:31:21.580my bed. And she was very small. Like, I just remember thinking, this is a native woman from0.96
00:31:27.840a long time ago. And she had this cage at her feet. And she kept pointing at this cage. I wasn't0.82
00:31:34.000afraid. Usually I'm afraid if I see anything that's in the middle of the night, you're awoken
00:31:38.860by something. It was like, what is going on? And I had that sense of like, what, what is this?
00:31:44.140And I picked up a pin and in the dark, I kind of scribbled down this piece. And then the next,
00:31:50.280And then I forgot about it. I fell asleep. My mother woke me the next morning and she said, hey, I have some good news for you. Did you hear that the Smithsonian has released the sacred fox of the Blackfeet? They repatriated this fox back to the Blackfeet Nation.
00:32:07.100and she goes, I just heard that this morning.
00:32:10.140And I said, mom, I think I wrote about that.
00:34:55.920And that's what I loved about writing this was opening up to something that was inviolate, something that I couldn't get a hold of in my sane moments.
00:35:11.060I had to enter this other place and hear this voice.
00:35:16.080And the voice, I think, in the Lost Journals of Sacagawea is very peculiar.
00:35:19.900It's not, I would say, this sounds terrible, but I don't think it's reader friendly necessarily.
00:35:24.400It asks that you be as present as Sacagawea was in her life, though the words aren't given
00:41:18.440I think what's wonderful, no matter the truth of whatever, will we ever know the truth?
00:41:24.620There's so many stories that I've heard since I started writing this book from both the
00:41:30.200Hadassah and my own people who have stories of Sacagawea and seeing her and the living
00:41:36.500breath of my, you know, of my elders, they have stories of Sacagawea.
00:41:42.080And I think, oh, we are so connected in this world.
00:41:46.680We're so connected in such beautiful and wondrous ways.
00:41:50.820And if we just stop and, you know, begin to hold history, not just examine it, but really
00:41:58.200feel history, really try to embrace it, to see, it's just an amazing, amazing journey.
00:42:06.920Well, and that makes me wonder also about the tradition of oral storytelling in American Indian cultures, which I know a bit more just, I'm in Canada, so I know a bit more about what's happening up here, but I know it's similar.
00:42:20.240And so when we're looking at, like I was saying before, if someone's writing a nonfiction book and they're looking, well, what's written? What did people write down? And the people who were writing things down were the settlers, right? That's who was writing things down.
00:42:35.720But there's such a rich history of the oral storytelling. So I was thinking kind of of the native women whose names I heard growing up. It's Sacagawea. It's Pocahontas. Right. But I'm sure there's so many other great stories, but just they didn't happen to interact with white settlers who then wrote down their names. But those stories all exist in oral storytelling, I believe.
00:43:01.180Yes, yes, they do. And there are, oh, I've heard so many powerful stories of indigenous women. And I was fortunate enough as a young woman to be, you know, I dropped out of high school when I was 15. And somehow, I got hired at the age of 18, to be the first court advocate, which meant that I was a public defender in the tribal court system on the Flathead Reservation.
00:43:26.940So, you know, a lot of in the lag time between court cases and everything, I got to visit with the tribal judge who was Kootenai, and she told me so many incredible stories about powerful women and women warriors and the ways in which, you know, all the things that I would later go to college and learn and be schooled on things that weren't true at all, like the roles of women.
00:43:53.380And I thought, women could be warriors.
00:43:56.760They don't have to be all food gatherers.
00:43:59.100And so it just kind of, it was, you know, just listening to another tribal woman who's
00:44:07.080very steeped in culture tell these like incredible stories.
00:44:11.340And then to hear about Sacagawea and her story, to hear people talking about her, like somebody
00:44:18.540recently sat on, made a comment on Facebook because one of my friends has said, oh, yay,
00:44:24.500I'm really looking forward to reading the Lost Journals of Sacagawea. And then she published
00:44:28.900this, I'm going to say this, rather ham-fisted and true, like representation from Publishers
00:44:36.740Weekly of, you know, a review of Lost Journals. And it says, it just puts it out there, you know,
00:44:43.920just kind of summarizes the novel and this non-native man had posted and said kind of like
00:44:52.120who did I think I was and that I was busting the the grand mythology of Lewis and Clark and0.97
00:45:01.180certainly the lady he uses the term lady it made me laugh like the late like ladies
00:45:06.940and I was like, wow, that is really a cultural misinterpretation of who she was, a lady.
00:45:15.760And then he said that I was guilty of presentism. And I thought, well, aren't we, like, number one,
00:45:23.680that's a racist thing to say, but aren't we all guilty of presentism in, you know, history? Like,
00:45:29.720as writers, we have to make the narrative come alive. It's our job to make it, you know,
00:45:36.040to look back through the lens of contemporary culture and make something happen, make us feel.
00:45:43.420Yeah. So I thought, oh, and then I had another woman who was really very, very, I thought she
00:45:50.560was honest and I thought she was a good person. But when I was speaking to these booksellers at
00:45:57.560this conference recently, she came up to me and she said, I support this novel and I support you.
00:46:03.760However, where I'm at in Montana, in my bookstore, I cannot carry this book. I cannot sell this book in my store. It would end my store. Because it's right in the heart of this real, and people just hold on to this mythology.
00:46:24.700I find that just fascinating and curious.
00:46:29.560And it seems like, you know, if one of two things always with a novel would happen, one, it'll just slip into obscurity and no one will read it, or it will begin to spark conversations about the American West.
00:46:43.660And now whenever I see those signs like this, Lewis and Clark pointing, I don't, I just think, oh, of all the destruction and all the devastation that occurred with Lewis and Clark.0.81
00:46:56.660And I think of the missing and murdered indigenous women, the traptic women, you know, some of the women who have not been found.0.82
00:47:03.400And especially in Montana, we, you know, are still searching for, you know, many of our missing young women.1.00
00:47:10.020And I see those signs and they're pointing and it just is, are they pointing to the women who are lost? Where are they pointing in these signs? And they're all over the state of Montana and all through the West, you'll see the road signs of Lewis and Clark and Lewis and Clark interpreter centers.
00:47:30.700And, you know, it all upholds this mythology of the West.
00:47:36.160And I thought, wow, there's been a reckoning in the South about the Civil War, about slavery,
00:47:41.840but there hasn't been a real reckoning in the West about what happened to Native women
00:47:51.180It always seems like something in the far distant past when it continues to reverberate today.
00:47:57.320that's so interesting for you to contextualize for me because before I read your book well
00:48:03.500actually as I was reading your book I took a pause to just learn more about Lewis and Clark
00:48:08.240because that's not being from Canada that's not something I was ever taught so I didn't realize
00:48:13.600how foundational that story is like you described as the mythology and it sounds like it runs so
00:48:20.540deep that to challenge that I didn't realize what a how extreme people's reaction might be to a book
00:48:28.100like yours I didn't realize how how people the importance that Lewis and Clark and that method
00:48:34.140even you're just saying the road signs like I didn't realize that it was so it's everywhere
00:48:38.780yes it's everywhere and plus their um their fingerprints their names are on everything
00:48:46.220They went through this country and they named everything, which is, you know, naming and claiming things, you know, your authorship, your control, the conquest of naming, erasing.
00:49:00.760and uh it's so shocking to me really it's so it is so devastating aside from the fact that
00:49:09.680you know when i studied at the university of washington the tribes along the columbia
00:49:14.960you know there's 20 tribes that have disappeared and the languages that have gone and so this
00:49:21.820settlement of the west also has you know this idea that this god has given dominion over0.87
00:49:28.700white, you know, over native people, you know, that you conquer, you control, you subsume,0.85
00:49:37.420you use up. And it, you know, what's shocking to me is, you know, with climate change is that we're
00:49:42.680still, we're still like, like loving these myths, you know, holding tight to these myths, like,
00:49:49.420don't shake my interpretation of these myths or don't shake this foundation. You know, and I
00:49:56.300I thought, God, it's kind of like George Washington chopped down the cherry tree or something.
00:50:00.240You know, it's time to, it's time to face some music.
00:50:04.020It's time to face the reality of some of these stories.
00:50:07.760But I think they're so deeply entrenched, maybe even more entrenched than the Confederate flag is, you know, was.
00:50:16.960And hopefully is not so much anymore, but that's not what I'm hearing.
00:50:48.540It's like you were taught this in the third grade
00:50:50.440and those are the facts and you don't want to learn any, any, anything new. Cause you're like,
00:50:55.620no, I learned this in third grade. Like, don't tell me. So I haven't luckily encountered very
00:51:01.680many people who give me pushback about the work that I do, but I have had some people and it's
00:51:06.740fascinating to me that it's like, no, this was disproven. Like we know this now, but people
00:51:12.500just like, no, like people hold tight to it. It's, it's, it's so different from how I think
00:51:17.760I have to pause and remember, no, other people, lots of other people are this different way.
00:51:23.540And we're facing here in Montana, the state legislature is trying to legislate some kind
00:51:31.160of anti-shaming of white people, which they associate mistakenly with telling the history
00:51:42.260from another viewpoint, that that is just, yeah, they're trying to legislate that you can't,
00:51:48.320you can't shame someone, you can't tell this history. And in grade school, you can't, you know,
00:51:53.960it has to be, everything has to be the way that it is, that doesn't involve any kind of thing
00:52:02.460that might make somebody question what really happened in history. You know, when you think
00:52:08.700about that you think about these young minds and these these young students sitting in a classroom
00:52:13.300and I was one of those students and we're fed this history and that really is a history of
00:52:18.820erasure and shaming which was even worse in boarding schools you know like you're they just
00:52:25.100out and out came came out and said you know my mother went to a boarding school and she was told1.00
00:52:30.140that because she was Indian she was too stupid to learn and so when she was in the eighth grade a lay1.00
00:52:35.400teacher at Mission School in St. Ignatius told her, you're too stupid to learn math, so you can1.00
00:52:42.040clean my house and I will give you grades. So my mother's education was like cleaning house for1.00
00:52:48.860this woman, scrubbing her floors, washing her dishes, cooking meals for her. So this kind of1.00
00:52:57.920idea that that my my culture was inferior um that everything that my my ancestors had taught was0.99
00:53:10.080stupid and not we're talking about and in some ways like you know against god somehow that you0.99
00:53:17.980were yeah that you were just so inferior carried with my mother the her whole life and she used to1.00
00:53:26.200say to me when I was having trouble at university, she would say, you know, well, you're not as smart0.99
00:53:33.320as those white kids. You just don't have the, you don't have the same brain that they do. So1.00
00:53:39.900don't be so hard on yourself. I was like, oh my God. So I'd sit in these classes sometime and
00:53:45.520think that cranial capacity maybe is larger than mine. I mean, it's just like, if your parent is
00:53:51.260telling you that. And now I think, you know, thank God there's these incredible, there's an
00:53:57.680incredible resurgence of language and culture and art and tradition that's happening all over the
00:54:05.840country with people who are, you know, the Gen Xers, you know, and they're carrying forward
00:54:12.000something that's really, really beautiful. But I do hope that they remember that there are those
00:54:18.600of us who went through that, there was a buffer zone between boarding school and my generation
00:54:27.380and then theirs. I hope that history is not again erased, that there were tribes that were
00:54:39.560wiped out. As much as we have survived and thrived, there have been people who have not.
00:54:46.520And that's an important thing to remember and to continue to fight that that never happens again.
00:54:53.960I think that's so crucial to not to get into everything that's happening in the world or in the United States today.
00:55:02.480But I think so much of it is if you don't allow people to learn all aspects of history, then you can't stop people from learning.
00:55:15.340you can't stop people from being curious. You can ban a book, but people are still going to learn
00:55:20.140this information. And I don't know where I'm going with this, but it just, it's like,
00:55:26.120you can't, the spirit is always going to persist. The spirit of these stories of these,
00:55:31.440of the truth, quote unquote, of what really happened. I don't know. It's, it's so,
00:55:37.700it just seems so pointless to me, all this stuff that's happening lately about,
00:55:41.440so in Canada I'm sure you've heard there's like it was called the residential school system
00:55:46.800up here and there's been these horrific discoveries of bodies of children where these
00:55:51.780schools were and stuff like that and there's people here who like in the city where I live
00:55:55.500who are just like oh but yeah but people but it was still a good thing those those schools are
00:55:59.780still a good thing like the people like even seeing this evidence they're just like oh it's
00:56:05.080just overblown you know maybe they had influenza there or whatever so it's like people who just
00:56:09.600can't if you can't start even believing the evidence is being revealed now like well I'm so
00:56:19.680that's why I'm so grateful to vulgar history you know I mean really like um we can not only
00:56:27.060read and learn and understand and get like information and kind of geek out over history
00:56:33.960But we can also just take a deep dive, take another look, look behind that door, lift up that skirt, you know, look down paths and pathways that haven't not been examined before and, you know, light up, light up history, light up, you know, the diversity that's so rich in both Canada, in America and throughout the world, you know.
00:57:01.500And if we all had, you know, our voices and we weren't silenced by people who, and I hate
00:57:07.720this word, people who consider themselves the conquerors, we would, we would have such
00:57:13.260a wonderful, and we do have such a wonderful, rich history, something to talk about, great
00:57:20.400That's the thing I'm all about, as you know, listening to the podcast, like the stories,
00:57:25.540finding a person who's interesting and making it a story.
00:57:27.720And I think I find it very rewarding when I hear about especially young people like teenagers who I've heard who listen to my podcast.
00:57:34.720And I thought, oh, if I was 16 and I had learned these stories, how would that have changed me?
00:57:39.620How would that have shaped me if I had known that history wasn't just the stories of conquerors, men doing white men causing wars in various places?
00:57:49.680If you knew that it was interesting and that there's been powerful and strong and problematic women in all these different cultures.
00:57:56.860I just, I'm grateful. I'm glad to be able to let young people know that because maybe they can take
00:58:03.300that and that'll make them develop in a different way than maybe where I did.
00:58:08.840Yes. I think about if I had known about Sacagawea when I was a young woman, if I had heard,
00:58:14.600if I had read, if I had examined or that this material had been given to me that made me
00:58:20.000question the narrative, I would have embraced her. I would have truly felt proud of her.
00:58:25.500But as it was, I was really kind of ashamed of her. I thought she sided with the wrong side. I thought she was responsible also for so much devastation and destruction and that she was all part of that because what I had read, what historians had presented was that story, that very, very negative, very narrow interpretation of her life.
00:58:55.940I want to talk to you forever, but I know we should wrap this up.
00:58:59.840So my question is, your book is going to be, you know, it's going to be published.
00:59:03.260By the time that this podcast comes out, people will be able to buy and read it.
00:59:08.440What are you hoping or what would you like to see people get out of your book, people who read it?
00:59:14.640I hope it sparks a new conversation about those old narratives.
00:59:19.720I hope it, I think like my story of Sacagawea is just one, just one of many.
00:59:25.500And I was recently talking to a good friend of mine who's Hidatsa, and she was saying that the Hidatsas claim her and that their tribal council was saying they wanted to get Elizabeth Finn, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian, to write the Sacagawea story.
00:59:43.900And I told my friend Jodi, I said, why don't you write it?
00:59:48.040Like, why don't you write, like, there's as many stories about her.
00:59:52.840I don't see, like, there's no definitive story. So what I'm hoping is that people will open their minds and open their hearts to this young woman who was really so abused and who rose up and determined her own destiny.
01:00:13.640I mean, they don't really show that, but I was so, like, I feel like I was so proud of her when
01:00:21.100she said, you know, I'm going, I'm going to go see the whales. I mean, you know, however she
01:00:26.520interpreted that through Hidatsa language or Shoshone, she said, I'm going to go and I'm
01:00:34.800going to continue with you. I have my own journey. I just, I thought that was amazing. I thought that
01:00:41.060was so uplifting and such a spirited thing so what I'm hoping is that in all things that it
01:00:48.800begins to open up that this book which is such a small book and you know in the history you know
01:00:55.020such a great huge history but I do hope that that it does make it into the hands even with its
01:01:02.800slaughter names for women that it makes it into the hands of a young person who says ah
01:01:10.000there's there's something different here there's something I should explore in my own history0.99
01:01:14.920and you know that's that's a grand desire the biggest hope I would love for there to be like
01:01:23.000you were saying you know you encourage your friend why don't you write this book also
01:01:25.940you know how many books are there novels even just about someone like Anne Boleyn or someone like
01:01:33.000that. It's like, there doesn't need to just be one book, one person. Yeah. Or while you look at
01:01:41.160Sacagawea, there's walls of books, like there's a wall of books for, you know, on Lewis and Clark
01:01:47.260and Sacagawea and there's all, and, you know, I, you look at that and you think, well, there's
01:01:51.820nothing more that I can write here. So I'm going to, but that's where I think that's where maybe,
01:01:57.580maybe we all make this mistakes, but young writers make that mistake in particular is looking at
01:02:01.960these wall of books and saying, I have nothing to add to the conversation here. When you have
01:02:05.400everything to add to the conversation there, enter, there's a crack, there's a seam, there's
01:02:10.300a place when you can enter into history and you can see it anew and you can look at it with fresh
01:02:15.380eyes. If you're trusting these old, festy historians who looked at this material and who
01:02:21.760make these outrageous claims, like Ambrose made this claim, you know, and he was the definitive
01:02:28.260book, Undaunted Courage, on, you know, the travels of Lewis and Clark and the, you know, the
01:02:33.920expedition, he made this claim. And I'm just paraphrasing here, but it was like really
01:02:40.060celebrating these men because, you know, they had not done anything to this Sacagawea help
01:02:46.320as they were traveling. These men, he didn't say these randy men, but the gist of it was that,
01:02:52.840look at they didn't uh rape her as they were going along good for them wow yeah that's the
01:03:01.400bare minimum of humanity yeah yeah so uh so that's what i'm hoping is gosh in all of these things
01:03:10.920absolutely i think that the person that has been written the most about is where you should go and
01:03:18.920see, like, look, turn that, turn over those books, you know, look under there because there's so much
01:03:24.480to discover. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. This was such a
01:03:31.300treat. I was so excited to talk to you and this lived up to my expectations. I was just so excited
01:03:39.320to talk to you and I'm thrilled. Thank you so much for seeking me out and for putting me on
01:03:45.300your podcast. I'm grateful. So again, Debra's book is called The Lost Journals of Sacagawea,
01:03:53.040and that is available everywhere. And I really encourage you to read it. It's such a good and
01:03:57.440interesting book and really just tilts the focus of the narrative that has been so mainstream for
01:04:04.980so long where it's like Lewis and Clark were these great white men and Sacagawea was just
01:04:08.720kind of helping them out to be like, oh, actually, no, that's actually not what was going on.
01:04:13.100making her the main character, I think, is such an important reframing of this historical situation.
01:04:19.040So this is Vulgar History. My name is Anne Foster. And so you can keep up with this podcast. We're
01:04:23.380on Instagram at Vulgar History Pod, on TikTok at Vulgar History. There's a website, vulgarhistory.com.
01:04:31.460Or if you go there, we're starting to slowly but surely get some transcripts of these episodes. So
01:04:36.840if you prefer to read an episode or if you want to go back and see it in words, those are going to
01:04:41.360be showing up pretty soon. And the transcriptions are being done by Aveline Malik from The Wordery.
01:04:47.000And also I have a Patreon, patreon.com slash Anne Foster Writer. And that is where I share
01:04:53.860early ad-free access to all of the episodes, as well as special Patreon-only series, like,0.97
01:05:00.400so this asshole talking about gross men from history, perhaps. I will do Lewis and Clark.0.93
01:05:04.560Lewis and or Clark are both of them. At some point, I have talked about Hernan Cortez,
01:05:08.940Christopher Columbus. So like, I'm ready to explore some more sort of like people who have
01:05:13.700been celebrated for their explorations when actually they were shitty people. Anyway,
01:05:17.920that's all on patreon.com. And otherwise, we're going to be back next week with some more of the
01:05:23.840Mary Queen of Scots series. And until then, all my friends, please keep your pants on and your tits1.00
01:05:29.540out. Vulgar History is hosted, written and researched by Anne Foster and edited by Christina0.99
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