Sep 06, 2024 We Recommend — The Legacy of Sacajawea

This September, join the American West Center for a series of lively talks and readings about Sacajawea’s legacy… Presentations will include readings from Dr. Wanda Pillow and Debra Magpie Earling. Earling will be reading from her recent novel The Lost Journals of Sacajewea.

The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
Debra Magpie Earling
Berkeley, CA: Editions Koch, 2010
N7433.4 E22 L6 2010 

In the Spring of 2005, during the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Missoula Museum of Art had two simultaneous exhibitions that were critical responses to the celebratory afflatus that customarily surrounds such events. The exhibitions included works from Peter Rutledge Koch and Debra Magpie Earling. From this meeting, the two proposed a collaboration which would later become the first iteration of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. This artists’ book edition is currently on display in the Special Collections Gallery as part of our recent Rare Books exhibition, Record Keepers and Record Makers: The Artist in the Archive. 

Earling, a member of the Bitteroot Salish Tribe of the Flathead Reservation, provided the narrative that takes the reader behind the eyes and ears of a pregnant seventeen-year-old slave girl traveling up the Missouri River with the “expedition of discovery” in 1804-5. Koch accompanies the texts with photographs taken along the expedition’s trail years later. The images, or “photo-interventions” as Koch calls them, were retrieved from the Montana Historical Society in Helena and the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture in Spokane, Washington. 

The typeface is a version of the historic Fell types presumed to be the work of Dutch punchcutter Dirk Voskens and interpreted by Jonathan Hoefler in a conscious attempt to reproduce the imperfect image that the Fell types left on paper when printed in the eighteenth-century. The Fell types have been described as “retaining a retrogressive old-style irregularity” which somehow seems appropriate given our purpose here in this book. The text is printed on Twinrocker Da Vinci hand-made paper at Peter Koch Printers and bound at the press by Jonathan Gerken. The smoked buffalo rawhide cover paper was designed and hand-made by Amanda Degener especially for this edition at Cave Papers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The spine is beaded with trade beads and small caliber cartridge cases. The images were prepared by Donald Farnsworth at Magnolia Editions and printed on Kozo hand-made paper with the assistance of Jonathan Gerken and Tallulah Terryll. Edition of sixty-five numbered copies. University of Utah Rare Books copy is number 8. 

The American West Center events are co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the English Department.
All events and exhibitions are free and open to the public.