CutBank Interviews

The Great Pink Cloud: An Interview with Debra Magpie Earling

April 22, 2024

Debra Magpie Earling is an acclaimed novelist. Born in Spokane, Washington, this Bitterroot Salish author studied at the University of Washington in Seattle and earned her MA and MFA in Fiction from Cornell University. From 1991 to 2021, Earling held positions in both Native American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Montana in Missoula, and retired in 2021 as a professor emeritus. 

Earling’s first novel, Perma Red, received the Western Writers Association Spur Award for Best Novel of the West in 2003, the Mountain and Plains Booksellers Association Award, WWA's Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for Best First Novel, a WILLA Literary Award, and the American Book Award. It is a Montana Book Award Honor Book and, in 2024, The Atlantic placed Perma Red on its list of Great American Novels. 

Her latest novel, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, which won the Montana Book Award, imagines Sacajewea’s perspective as a Lemhi Shoshone child abducted by the Hidatsa Mandans and sold to French Canadian fur trapper Toussaint Charbonneau before joining explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in their Corps of Discovery Expedition of 1804-1806. 

Debra graciously sat down with CutBank’s Interviews Editor, Pamela Huber, to discuss the myth of the American West, the mystery of creative inspiration, and the reclamation of Native stories by Native writers. 

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Pamela Huber: You’ve said of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea that once you began to imagine Sacajewea’s situation and agency, her voice poured out of you. When writing from Sacajewea’s voice, what did you find most challenging to address?

Debra Magpie Earling: I think in every part of Western culture, “The West” in the United States is governed by ideas of conquership, of conquering people, and Indians being erased. I think that's why they can have some egregious show like Yellowstone which doesn't have a real tribe. They invented a tribe because they didn't want to deal with real Native people and the issues that we face. So there's that kind of erasure. 

Sacajewea’s life story is still so resonant, so powerful, that she knew so much about taking care of herself, so much about surviving in a really hostile country and hostile group of people. I’ve heard that the Hidatsas claim her as their own, though they still sold her—either she was gambled or she was sold. They say that her grandfather gave her to Charbonneau but it doesn’t make sense to me; I can’t see it. The Hidatsas have a myth that she was stolen by the Lemhi Shoshone, and not the other way around, when she was a baby, and that she made her way back there with a sacred wolf that came to her and she followed this wolf back to her people. And I believe that could be possible. But if that's true, then why was she given to Charbonneau in that same story? Why would her grandfather release her to a white man when the man that she was betrothed to and the Lemhi Shoshone would not accept her because she had a baby with a white man? So those two kinds of accounts don't really square up, and it's not fair to her own sovereignty and her story, I don’t think.

You know, Lewis and Clark were incredibly imaginative people. They were explorers and they were on a military expedition. They did some amazing things, but they weren't inventing stories. And their accounts and later accounts talk about how overwhelmed she was when she got home, that she was silent through the whole time that she was traveling with them. And it's evident to me that she not only spoke Hidatsa and Lemhi Shoshone, but that she probably spoke many of the other dialects, many of the other tribal languages that came through. As well as, she was with ​​Charbonneau, she was forced to be with him, so it behooved her to pay attention to the language, and so I believe that not only did she understand French, she probably spoke it as well as English. 

She was really young, I think, and not 16, and not the invented date, this random [birth] date picked by non-Native historians of 1788, which excuses all kinds of bad behavior. If she was younger than that, let's say she was 12 or 13, and she was with child, and she was traveling with 32 men who were randy and exploitative at every junction in the long journey, that is kind of unforgivable. It's a sin of the opening of the West, and not a celebration. 

This novel isn’t the definitive novel by any means, or the definitive story. It's just a fictional story. It's meant to kind of eye-open, and hopefully we will begin to question other narratives, other stories, and other things that happened during the Corps of Discovery. 

PH: I did notice the parallels between Perma Red being about missing and murdered Indigenous women and Sacajewea's story, because you had mentioned how we don't necessarily know when and where and how she died. There's conflicting stories. So I wondered, as you were drafting the novel, how aware were you of that parallel between Sacajewea and the modern Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement?

DME: I don't pride myself on being a scholar or a historian or an anthropologist, but I'm always drawn to a good story or a powerful story. It always seems to me that [Sacajewea’s] story was powerful. But as far as understanding how much in peril she was, I didn’t. I just swallowed the stories that I'd been told about her. And the more that I sat with the story, the more that I began to investigate and question the accounts that Lewis and Clark and Sergeant Gass and Ordway give. 

The more that I became acquainted with her own story, her own very powerful story, if she was indeed gambled or sold to Charboneau, and it’s in the record that he really liked young women, I'm not seeing him taking on an older woman. Nothing points to that. Even the way that she behaves, her own actions sort of drive a different narrative. The way in which she behaves. When they were going down the river and these huge waves are crashing over the boat, three-foot waves,, and the boat was pitching and it looked like they were losing their equipment, and she had a baby on that she had strapped to her back, and Charboneau was crying—he was so scared, he was crying, and he was praying to God—I thought she behaved in some ways like not necessarily a mature woman, because maybe a mature woman maybe would have looked more toward protecting her child. But she so easily, like a child, went “I can get these.” There's a little bit of show-off in that. And she's not afraid. But I think that kind of indicates that maybe she was a lot younger. There's other times when it seems like, from what they're saying, she was afraid, she was silent.

I think the fact that she was so quiet during the whole journey, until they got to her people, reveals so much about her treatment.

Even as a girl traveling, I asked her, and I asked myself, would you be afraid of these men traveling? And I would be. Can you imagine? And traveling with a child, how frightening that would be. These men stopping to watch grizzly bears copulate on the shore while you’re the only woman and you’re holding a baby and they’re laughing and they’re enjoying the spectacle in more ways than one. It’s sad because when you really start to question history, just sit with it for a while, the narratives that we’ve been told by historians who were in the public eye, like [20th-century historian Stephen] Abrose, who wrote Undaunted Courage, which was a national bestseller, it was unquestioned. He was making these truly broad statements. One of his statements was about what gallant gentlemen they were because they didn’t do anything untoward toward Sacajewea. I can’t see that. When I’m reading the story, I don’t see that. 

One of the things that’s really been surprising to me is that there’s these women who are powerful who have picked this up, writers who are Native women, who’ve picked up this story and have championed it. I was listening to someone who does speculations about who’s going to win the Pulitzer and he said, “This book has staying power,” and I thought, “Native women are really powerful, putting this book in the spotlight.” When I look at the Pulitzer, the people who’ve won it, there’s no one from my class, with the exception of Junot Díaz. Even teaching for so many years, I am not a wealthy person by any means; I live very close to the bones. And I don’t have that kind of caliber in terms of my education or my background. I grew up with beginnings that are very humble, in a trailer park. My father was a surveyor and my mother was a housekeeper all her life, and they were not educated. And the Pulitzer—that literary work seems to me really above my class. 

PH: Well you did just get the Montana Book Award for The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. Congratulations by the way,

DME: Thank you. That’s wonderful.

I have been given many [awards] for Perma Red. It’s a long list. The American Book Award was probably the exception to the awards that I’ve been given, [where] it was really an honoring, it was never, like, “Here’s the award, but we’re taking this away from you.” Because when I won the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, I was so grateful to win, and I was so happy, and my mother came down to Sante Fe, and one of the judges came up to me and said, in front of my mother, “I didn’t want your book to win. I chose another book, and I wanted her to win the prize.” And I’m standing there next to my mother, my Native mother, [thinking], “How could you say that in front of my mother?”

And I had that same experience the first time I won the Montana [Book Award] Honor Award. A judge came up to me and said, “I’m the reason why you didn’t get the Montana Book Award for Perma Red, because I just couldn’t believe that many terrible things could happen to one person in a short time, in a year. I just couldn’t believe that could happen.” And she said, “I talked to my brother-in-law who works on the reservation” and he told her, “Well, you’re wrong, because this is just a small portion of what happens on reservations.” And she said, “So I’m sorry.” And I thought, “Why would you want to tell me that?”

I’ve had people come up to me and think that I’m getting too much attention and they’re very cruel in their judgments about who should win an award, who should be recognized, who should be speaking, who should be the person who’s the keynote, and it goes on and on. I’ve thought about writing a piece about that. There is a spirit of generosity [to awards], but it really is undermined by one individual who will come up and tell you that you’re not really worth anything. And I’ve had that happen so often that I used to believe it. I wonder if people who are of a different class than me get the same [treatment.] I don’t think so. 

PH: Has that been consistent or have you noticed a shift in your 20+ years publishing?

DME: I got a lot of derogatory comments and put-downs when I was young. I wasn’t that young when Perma Red came out. I was in my early 40s. But it wasn’t until after I won the Guggenheim [Fellowship] that the comments kind of rolled to a stop. Because, you know, I couldn’t sway the Guggenheim. I don’t know anybody who is in the Guggenheim and have no power. I noticed a sharp decline in the way in which I was treated [after that.] 

I think it’s curious, is there so little love, is there so little accolades or attention for the good work that people do that they feel the need to denigrate someone else when they get attention for the work that they do? I would like to be the person who helps make that go away. I’ve always been overly zealous in my support of my students and their writing and their work. I’ve always been really encouraging. I’ve had professors who were very encouraging to me, who pushed me forward, even when I didn’t deserve it, who believed that I was worth something and that my work would eventually matter to people. 

What do you think?

PH: I think as a younger generation, I always wonder, is this a shift? Is this still how it feels to be in academia and to be publishing and getting awards, or is there a shift in the industry? Is the industry going to have a pendulum swing back? Because I’ve seen older people make similar comments about, “Well I don’t get published because I’m X; you have to be Y to get published.” I don’t see younger people say that, but I’ve heard older people say that. And I’ve always found that a little shocking. And I wonder what the industry trends are and what it’s going to take to name the problem, to make it go away. Or is the problem already going away on its own, this denigration you are speaking of?

DME: I think the pendulum does shift. Now that I’m 66 years old, almost 67, there is a certain gravitas hopefully that happens when you reach a certain age where I find I am probably not so open to anyone saying anything like that to me anymore. I wouldn’t just smile. It’s shocking that they would fly me down to Sante Fe and then they would have this big awards ceremony and then one of the judges would want to say something to cut my writing and to cut essentially me and my mother. I’m aware now. I’m a little more savvy. When you get older, people usually don't say that to you because they know you’ve been around the block a few times. 

PH: But it’s discouraging if other young women or Native women are being told similar things.

DME: Oh, I’m sure. And that’s one of the things that I always want to be alerted to. I tell stories I’ve had experiences with, and they’re dark stories, and I’m sure in this current climate that they’d require a trigger warning. But they really are just a warning about the world that we face and the world that young women face and young men face and other persons face. It’s a treacherous world. 

I want to tell people about my experiences. This did happen. We need to be aware of this. When I was young, we were always told to be polite. I wonder if even in Sacajewea’s day, she was encouraged to be respectful to other people even though she was being disrespected and even though everything around her was being disrespected, all of the cultural values, everything she held dear, everything her people held dear. Not just grabbed or assessed, but really dear things were being sold, things you couldn’t get back. The beavers. They made comments, many of the Native people, saying, “What do they want with all these beaver pelts?” They’re wiping out the beaver population as well. Certainly they wanted to slaughter the buffalo population for many reasons. But just…taking. 

PH: One particularly haunting passage that me and a lot of my peers who read Lost Journals were struck by was when Sacajewea witnesses Lewis and Clark desecrate an Indigenous burial site. I wondered how you tackled addressing such challenging subject matter. How did you protect yourself as a writer, while also honoring the duty and the responsibility you felt to address these historical traumas that you were dealing with in the source material?

DME: I think that’s a really astute question, and I do believe it's one that writers should ask themselves. But I think once they ask themselves that question, they need to push the questions aside. They need to enter the space and be, as much as possible, a witness, and not only a witness, but a lucid and sharp-eyed witness to the things that they're encountering. So when you enter, especially historical stories, historical narratives, I think it's really important as a writer that you don't allow your deeply personal fears and past traumas to steer the powerful stories that are out there, in particular about women. Because these stories for Native women are about survivance. Not only surviving, but they have triumphed and they have held onto the culture. I don't dwell on those things when I'm in the writing process itself.

What I try to do is be in the skin and in the breath of the person that I'm trying to capture in the story. So I think I always see it like a water column. The past is laid over us and is among us, threaded among us. And they talk about veils in this world. But it seems to me that you never really pierce that veil but sometimes the veil drops the images on it and you see these images not always so clearly. And so I'm intent on seeing those things as clearly as I can, so I don't allow my own personal emotion to get involved. 

The only emotion that I feel, which people are kind of surprised at, is a giddiness about writing. I'm so thrilled and overjoyed, and I feel so privileged and lucky to be in this time in the 21st century, sitting at a desk, being in the nice, warm comfort of home, and being able to consider these things. The woman who wrote Cogowea, [Mourning Dove], she didn't get the luxury that I have. She worked picking apples after she had worked a long day; I think she also trained dogs, which is brutal in 90-degree weather. And you come home, and your home is a dusty tent with a beaten-up typewriter that you can't get ink for, or paper, and you write afterward. The kind of extraordinary privilege that I have in this world, that I always have food to eat, that I have people who love and support me, I can’t allow myself to wallow in the past. I can only capture. My job is to be clear-eyed, calm-hearted, and to capture what it is that I see with the most power that I can manage to elicit. 

I think when people get too emotional about their own writing, they lose the power. All of the energy is going very sentimentally and maudlinly toward their own concerns that have very little to do with the story that’s before them. 

And if you look at this historically, people in the past have survived with great joy. So it's not for me to feel that when I'm writing. However, once I’m past writing, and there's a glow to writing when you've finished something, or you feel like you have worked to create something that matters, that's meaningful to others, I don't see it until I read it. After it's all done. After it's all over.

I actually feel great sorrow for the suffering of Sacajewea. I don't know why it wasn't so plain for me, because I'm so deep into it, but I didn't see that true suffering until probably the last line. And then, looking back at that, “Ohhh.” I think she was visionary and prophetic. There's nothing in the story that really reveals that, except her solitariness, that she would have had to be prophetic in order to get herself into the future with all of the things that she faced.

PH: I'm curious if you can speak more to your research process. I'm curious if you found yourself doing the bulk of research up front and then just going straight in? Or did you find yourself referring back and adding new research as you went?

DME: As I'm not a historian and I'm not a scholar in that sense, I took a deep dive. I read really fast and I look for things that strike me as good stories. I look for an arc in the storyline. Like, if I was a filmmaker, what am I seeing? What's the story telling me? 

It's so evident, the kinds of things, the signs, that [Lewis and Clark] were ignoring, the things that they were totally oblivious to. And then they begin to see. I guess I am finding courage because I think that they were so scared. I think that they were witnessing some things that were really, you know, you're entering the woods that have only been tended to by Native people, and there's been fur trappers who've gone through, but there's ceremonies in the sacred places, and the animals themselves. Clearly they encounter a sacred place and they awaken to it a little too slowly in the journals. 

For me, I jump in. I jump right in. But the story came to me first. And I didn't realize how much of a story I had absorbed in my life. And it was just her voice that at first occurred to me. And I think you've got to go with that, when some voice comes to you and says, “This is my story. This is what it was like for me.” And then I would go back and think, “Oh, I need to check on some of these things.” But I did try to map her story. And one of the wonderful things about writing about a real person who's been documented is I could follow Lewis. I could see what events were coming up. So there's already built-in [knowledge]; people knew that she was going to go; they knew, when she was at Three Forks, that she was going to be abducted. They knew that she was going to be taken to this foreign place. They knew that she was going to have experiences and they knew that eventually she would meet Lewis and Clark and have almost these unworldly experiences at times.

So it just came to me, and I think the first thing you need to pay attention to, for me, when I write, I pay attention to the stories that grip me, and then I go back and I look. And if you go on a thread of story, usually [for] that thread, you can find things that support your vision. So events that occur, you can shape and use those in your writing. But I think maybe a mistake is to just go and read the journals in a way, or read any historical account, and then try to somehow fit your narrative around it. I don't think the truth is found in that, because even in historical narratives there's not necessarily truth in those things. So you must find the truth in your own story.

PH: I know you said in the past you were thinking about what women she'd be encountering, because they're often left out of the logs, and I wondered, in particular, for the woman and the children, the Shoshone and Hidatsa Mandan characters that you create in this story, what inspiration or research helped you shape those different characters?

DME: I think it's just stories that I heard in my own family. There's extraordinary stories where you’re privy to the power of medicine people, privy to the power of ceremonies and the power of women, and to not just give knowledge to younger women but to imbue their children with sacred knowledge as well as cultural knowledge. And all of that knowledge is sacred, something that becomes you and part of you and part of who you are and how you represent yourself in the world. So, I didn't necessarily do research on it. 

Although there's one character, The Woman Who Has Always Lived. When she showed up, she showed up a long time ago before I even was thinking about writing The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. She showed up to me in that kind of visionary daydream that you have as a writer. I kept seeing this woman who was very ancient, really old, and she had clothing that was see-through in some places. It was just of “the other.” She seemed like a mound of her body. She was blind. And so in her blindness, the only way that she could see was through these mirrors, and through these mirrors that reflect back others, somehow, in her spirit she could begin to see. She was a woman who would ask these warriors to go get her, bring her all the mirrors they could, save the mirrors for her, and she would have them line them up along the river so she could see who was coming up the river. And also all the spirits who inhabit the river, she could see those, and if they were upset, or if they wanted something, or if they were dangerous to her people. 

So when I was writing The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, she shows up in that. At first, Sacajewea tried to escape, so they sent her to this woman who is past the menstrual huts and had her own hut. They sent her there, and Sacajewea was like, “I can get away from this woman, she's blind!” And as she says that, the woman's mirrors move and show what she sees, and she, of course, becomes attracted to the power of this woman.

But in the story, you know, it's funny how you think you're going to write something, and what you eventually write becomes something entirely different. The steerage of a story is interesting as a writer. But when she runs away, I had no idea that The Woman Who Has Always Lived was going to be the person that she woke up to who helped her on her journey to go one. 

You just never know. I love that about writing. I love the mystery of writing. And I think for me, I can’t say for every writer, there are writers who are so much smarter than I am, there’s writers who do that steerage. But I love the turning when you just let go of the reins and say, “Where is this story going to take me? How is she going to show up?” I knew she was going to be in the narrative, but I did not know when she was going to show up, because she didn't show up when Sacajewea thought of running away, so I thought, “Where are you, Woman Who Has Always Lived?”

But I did later do research because I thought, I can't just invent somebody in this really important story. And so I thought, am I treading on something? Is there a story that I shouldn’t be writing?

There's a book on Mandan ceremonies, and I went through the book, and I swear, like the first few pages I flipped in, there was the Woman Who Has Never Died, and she was a sacred being among the Mandan and the Hidatsa. She was a Sky Spirit as well as a person who comes to earth. When teaching Native American studies, maybe I came across it, I won’t say that that's not a possibility, but I think I would have remembered because It's such a lovely, powerful story, potent story. So when I read that, it felt like I had another kind of experience as a writer. I wondered, do we channel the spirits of the dead? Because I used to believe that, because I certainly haven't been able to write the fun stories that I want to write. I write stories that are really hard and I’d rather write something whimsical. But I never get that. Does that make sense?

PH: It does. It's the story asking to be told, maybe, that comes to you.

DME: Don’t you have that? 

PH: Yeah, I think, a couple of people, Liz Gilbert's one, say that the story finds you. You don't find the story. And if you don't tell it, it's going to go to someone else who will tell it for you. 

DME: Oh! Do you know, one of my professors said—I was working on Perma Red, and it's a story about my Aunt Louise—and she said, “Here's what I recommend, Debra. This is a good story.” She said she believed that creativity was like this great pink cloud that circles high above the earth, and then every once in a while it'll descend, and it smears like maybe a little bit in, you know, Montana, maybe in, you know, South Africa, like just just a little bit here and there, and that's the story. And if you don't write it right away, somebody else will get it, and they're working on it now. So they got the same idea at the exact same time that you got this idea, so you better be writing this fast. I swear, I had to stop reading Louise Erdrich for a while because I had to change certain stories in my own story because they were already in her story. Like, darn it, Louise! 

I was just starting on my writing journey and remember when Louise came on the scene, I thought, Wow, I really have to sharpen my skills. And I think the same thing happens in an MFA program when you're with other writers. The reason why you want to get into the grad schools isn’t for the teachers. I'm always astonished when people used to call [and ask], “Who teaches at the University of Montana?” or “Who teaches at Cornell?” It doesn't matter. What matters is the caliber of students who are in your writing classes. How good they're writing. I never thought I could compete with any of the professors. But the students, my colleagues in my cohort, I had to compete against them. And so I found myself really competitive. I loved it. I thought, “I've got to up my game.” These people are great.

PH: It's the same creative cloud. I wanted to turn back to what you were saying about researching Mandan ceremonies. I'm curious about if you feel any kind of pressure when you're writing across tribes, when you're writing about the Shoshone or the Hidatsa or the Mandan, how do you approach writing across tribal cultures?

DME: In this particular case, I felt that Sacajewea was a sovereign person. She’s claimed by the Hidatsas and the Mandans, and she’s claimed by the Lemhi Shoshone, and then I believe the Crow actually have a claim to her. But she was a person who said, “I'm going my own way.” And when she was cut loose from her [Lemhi Shoshone] husband-to-be, really, I just admired her so much. She was like, “I’m going with you [Lewis and Clark]. I’m getting on that horse and I’m going to the ocean.”

So, I felt I didn't have to write across cultures. And I never would do that. I wouldn't go into somebody else's tribal culture. 

I know N. Scott Momaday in House Made of Dawn, he examined other cultures, other heritages other than his own. I probably shouldn’t say I would never do that because I think one of the things that's really unfortunate is that Native people are so respectful of each other and staying in their cultural lane, but non-Natives are not, and they've exploited our stories. Native people, it’s time we told our stories, and it's time that we just believe that we have our best interests at heart. To let go of those old wounds that have held us back for so long. There's very few people who can write, I believe, who can really write. There's a lot of people who write. There's a lot more Native people who are writing and writing really well, the highest caliber. But still, so little to cover all the stories. There will always be room for more. So I feel like we need to tell our own stories instead of having David Graham [who wrote Killers of the Flower Moon] come in and tell our stories. 

PH: I know you've talked about Sacajewea’s voice a lot. But I found it striking how her voice shifts throughout the novel as she's learning new languages. You have your preface at the front about using double periods and capitalization and grayed-out words to try to convey this inner world of her mind. And I wondered, especially since the novel’s written mostly in English, but she is learning multiple languages, Indigenous languages, French, and English, how did you choose to convey that multilingual mind? What was that creative process like for you, and deciding how to use form and innovations to show what's going on in her mind?

DME: Well, one of the things that I was really hoping people see—they say it's poetic, parts of it are poetic—but I deliberately didn't make it smooth poetics. I make it broken. So it isn’t like that incredible Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony where throughout there’s threaded these gorgeous passages that are about Native ceremonies and Native prayers and Native stories, the old stories, and they’re so beautiful, they’re so seamless and when you read them they just roll off your tongue. But I wanted to capture the brokenness of a young woman who’s been abducted. I wanted to capture the hardship. The very difficult ways that language gives us opportunities or gives us an out, and the ways in which it boxes us in, and the ways in which language will betray us and betray our thoughts, betray how we really feel. If we're inarticulate, if we're overly articulate, how those things can be seen as not authentic, not our authentic self. Even in real life, there's that idea if you're speaking in kind of a lofty language or elevated or above you. 

Even when she strives to capture these stories, there's such a brutal edge to the coming of the white men into that camp, the trading, and the trading of not goods, but of a cultural heritage. That feels to me like it's just blunt. And then razor-sharp kind of chuffing that comes toward them again and again, up river, up the very vagina of Native country. And just to take, to rape and rape and rape. So, how do you express that? How do you express and hold on to your own interior beauty, and the thing that sustains you and your will? And how do you succumb at times to things, to your own brokenness at times? I feel like I tried to reign in my desire to want to write a pretty passage, and I don't think there are pretty passages in The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. I think even when there’s a description of anything, it's a brokenness, or it’s a hard edge, or it's an ugly look at something that's really defiling women and defiling the culture. 

PH: Some of the most beautiful language, I thought, was the figurative language. And one of the lessons I learned from you, which I'm trying to take in my own writing, is to try to make sure your figurative language borrows from the landscape of your setting. 

My colleague, Norma Barksdale, who was helping me with these questions, said in Perma Red, Louise is also doing that quite often with figurative language, perceiving the world around here, comparing other characters to the world. And I wondered where this metaphorical intermingling of the human and the non-human originates for you? Or how does that play a role in you trying to maybe not make anything sound too pretty, but the language still has this, to me, beautiful association between different elements of the landscape?

DME: That's a big question. Thank you for so happily posing that to me. I believe that we all innately have a particular rhythm and sound that is our own way to relate to the world. If we had a record inside of us, it would record all of the beautiful things that we’ve seen, the ways in which we’ve been touched by the world, and the ways in which the world has betrayed us, and the natural world itself. We have that interface, again and again, with the natural world that also has its own language and its own way of speaking. A lot of times when I was working with the language in Perma Red, I was heavily influenced by Baptiste Yellowknife. 

Originally, I had two characters. One had a younger brother who was a visionary and saw everything and could rest in the grass and not be smelled by other people or not be seen, like a fawn will rest in the grass invisible or a snake will coil on a rock being invisible. I tried to listen to those things, I listened to his voice and the description of the world around him. So I was deeply guided by this vision. And then when I get off his character and go into others, his way of seeing was so powerful and I realized he was a voice of the way my mother saw the world, the way my great-grandmother saw the world.

We had the hardest times. Even when we would go on vacation, my father would say let’s go to some place, let’s go to California, but we were poor so we had an old beat-up Rambler. So the car would break down. We’d be out in the middle of the desert. The heat would be rising around us and it’d be 110 degrees and my mother would get us out of this hot car and, wherever she was at, she’d say, “Look at the land around us. Look at those colors. Can you hear that? Such a nice fragrance. Smell this sage.” And my mother would just bring you in the present world, aware. And then my father was really agitated and upset. But my mother would always make us see the ways in which we could survive here and the beauty in it. So it was always her guiding voice. And then when I wrote about Baptiste as a medicine person who sees the beauty in all things and the dangers that surround him, using that kind of language. 

And then, when I was young, working for the tribe and living on the reservation, I lived way out on Rocky Point when nobody wanted to live in Montana. You wouldn’t find another car in the road when I went to work in the morning. I drove from Rocky Point all the way to Dixon, over 40 miles one way for work every day, and I wouldn’t see another car. And I’d go home and I lived on this little place with all of the wealthy people and I just had this little junky trailer. And all these wealthy people had all their fancy cabins or really fancy homes there. But I'd go home, and there'd be no one around me. Just the loneliness and the profound kind of quietness that surrounded me. I had to start learning to really listen to the land. The stories that the land tells you. The story that water tells you. It’s really hard to write without the landscape.

PH: This question’s from Norma Barksdale. Many of the settings of Perma Red are real locations from Flathead and Missoula and beyond. She was startled soon after finishing Perma Red to drive by the Dixon Bar and see it was a real place, and she wonders what's it like for you now, decades after writing from Perma Red, to interact with the same streets and rivers and bars that your characters pass through?

DME: My mother grew up in Perma. And so many of these stories are her stories. And then when I worked for the tribe, and I was there working in Dixon, I heard these stories. These stories that are about Florence, as extraordinary as that seems, as wild and imaginative as that story seems, it was a story that happened on the reservation. Those old stories I grew up with and listened [to] and paid attention. And my mother said, “Over here is where this happened and up in these hills, right here,” and we’d walk the Perma property, because my parents bought some of the old allotments there, and we’d walk the river there, and I knew what it smelled like, what it was like.

PH: When you still interact with these places, now, having written about them, what does that feel like to you?

DME: Well, I think with great sadness because Montana is changing so much. I don't find it the same landscape. When I first moved here, I was 17. I worked for the tribe. I was hired when I was 17; I worked for the tribe when I was 18. And I remember driving the roads and there were rattlesnakes on the road. The rattlesnakes would come up on the road, and you'd see rattlers all the time, and you see rattlers in the field, and you could hear them when you walk in the field. And you don’t anymore. You don’t see rattlers on the road and the highway. There’s too much traffic, and there's too many pesticides, and so many things that are destroyed. That beautiful life.

I think there’s kind of a haunting residue that isn't pleasant. So many of my friends have died and committed suicide. So the reservation has a different sort of feel for me than when I was young and hopeful and believed that everything was going to work out okay and we’d find our path. And when I look back now as an older woman, as an old lady, it isn't what I hoped it would be. And if we don’t do something to change the way this world is going, it’s going to be vastly different. Frightening.

So I don't like to revisit very much. It makes me sad. 

The only thing that makes me happy is that we got back the Bison Range. And when I go on the Bison range, I feel a sense of wonder, and I feel true joy and happiness to be there. To be walking on that land again, to not have any entanglement with the state anymore, to feel like the tribe really does own, we own all that now, we determine what happens, it truly is sovereignty. And sovereignty feels really great! (Laughs) 

I only interact with many things now in my mind. But my husband, Robert Stubblefield, inherited his homeplace in Oregon, and people haven’t infiltrated where he’s from, so when I go there I have the same kind of sense of peace and sense of being able to just—the most beautiful part—blend with the land itself, become a part of it.

PH: I heard you say Lost Journals is a once-in-a-lifetime book. You said you may never write something just like that or have a process like that again. But I'm curious what you take away from it as a writer in your writing process? How has it changed you as a writer moving forward into future work?

DME: I think it's one of the most humbling stories I've ever—I think I laid down my own voice to write this piece. To listen. I couldn’t invent that voice. It literally was a gift. 

And as she grows and begins to understand, I felt a real loss as I continued to write that story, and as she encounters more and more non-Native people and really venomous white men who exploit Native women and murder them and rape them. 

That original kind of alertness that she had to the land itself becomes shifted toward other people. Onion Wife tells her, “This is what's coming up the river, and you have to pay attention.” And I thought it was heartbreaking. And heartbreaking is kind of an overused term. But I felt a brokenness in writing this story. A loss. And so to witness that kind of story with that kind of attention—I don’t even think it’s attention, it’s surrender—for that story to come to me again or for a story to come [like that] to me again, I don’t think I will inherit that from the earth again. I do think that’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. But I do believe that everyone has that. They tend to ignore it. And I’m so glad I didn’t. I’m so glad I didn’t bully my way through it and think that my own voice is so extraordinary that I’m not going to listen to anyone else’s voice, because I would have missed out on the chance of a lifetime. 

PH: Before my last question, I just wanted to mention, I spent the weekend on a road trip down to Big Sky, and I stopped at the Missouri headwaters. I was there with my sister, and I was telling her all about your book, and I said, “I wonder if these are the cliffs that inspired any of the scenes?” And it just added something special to being there, to have your words in my head. So I wanted to thank you for that, because that’s a gift I took away.

DME: Oh!

PH: Now that you're retired from teaching, I know you have a lot more free time for writing, and so I wonder what project you're working on now.

DME: I have all these stories that have backed up. I feel like they've just dammed up in me for so long. And so they feel like they're already written in many ways. 

I’m fascinated with the boarding schools and the stories that my mother told me about the boarding schools. She went to the Ursuline Boarding School with the nuns. And when I worked for the tribe, I used to work with a woman [who] used to tell me about her peculiar experiences with the school.

This is crazy, and I’ll just come out with it. Do you remember when Stephenie Meyer came out with Twilight? I remember everybody was scrambling, including myself! I would love to be a famous writer and make over a zillion dollars for this series. And I had students who were saying, “Oh, it's just so easy to write,” and I thought, “You write a story like that, with all the children that she has, with a plot like that.” Anyway, it was the impetus, I think, to say, “Do I have a story like that? Do I have a story that's kind of fun and different and could possibly be a series?” And so Witch came to me because there are medicine people that I've met, and that use their medicine for their own benefits, and are very powerful. And I think Dirty Butterfly [a real person who inspired Dirty Swallow in Perma Red] used her medicine for other people, but she also used it personally. Very powerful, you know, Dirty Swallow in Perma Red. 

Then I did a deep dive into Ursuline and then a deep dive into witchcraft and witches, and discovered that the Ursuline nuns were charged with witchcraft in the seventeenth century at the same time that the Salem Witch Trials were going on.

So it's a series, and I've mapped it all out, but it’s kicking my ass, I have to say. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to write because it is whimsical. If you can make something as dark as the boarding school whimsical… and it’s really, really dark. And how do you make something whimsical and dark? So that's my job!

PH: I can't wait to read it. 

DME: Thank you, Pamela.

PH: Thank you!