Women’s History Month is here again, and I’m thinking of the histories we’re familiar with and the histories that have never been uttered.
I was overjoyed to hear that Debra Magpie Earling, Bitterroot Salish, born in Spokane, living in Missoula, recently won both the PNBA and the Montana Book Award for her new novel The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. While writing about an iconic historic figure, Earling is also, herself, a history-maker: She was the first Native woman appointed as Director of the University of Montana’s writing program (she is now Professor Emeritus). Of The Lost Journals, a Publisher’s Weekly review states, “Earling adds a much-needed Native woman’s perspective to Sacajewea’s story, bringing a note of resilience to her unflinching account of the white men’s violence and depredation: ‘Women do not become their Enemy captors. We survive them.’”
I recently spoke to a class at SFCC about my novel The Cassandra, and one of the young students there mentioned how grateful he was that the issues women faced in the 1940s are nothing like what women face today. I pushed back against his comment, bringing up this article in the NY Times and discussing how someone with a criminal history of violence against women can continue to be embraced as a potential leader of our entire country. In intimate family systems and in larger systems, women continue to be told we don’t matter. Our bodies are expected to be the empty receptacles for the desires and rages of men.
Part of my job is doing reference work in the Inland Northwest Special Collections at the Central Library, under the tutelage of our amazing Archivist and Special Collections Librarian Dana Bronson. The stories collected on our shelves here are largely told by, and center, white men. It reminds me of what “archival silence” author Carmen Maria Machado discusses at the start of her memoir In the Dream House. Machado writes that this concept “illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way, something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.” (Worth noting here that Carmen Maria Machado will be the headliner for this year’s Get Lit! Festival. In the Dream House fills an archival silence by centering abuse in a queer relationship, uplifting survivors and the queer community, both).
There are, of course, women in the INSC archives, too. One of the most beautiful books in our collection is the anthology Tales of the Okanogans, compiled by Mourning Dove (Sylix and Sinixt, Colville Tribe), although the book doesn’t even list her name on its cover; her editor was compelled to put his own name there. We do have a lovely hardcover of Mourning Dove’s Coyote Stories—I recommend making a visit to the Inland Northwest Special Collections to admire these titles in person. I’m eager to secure a first edition of Mourning Dove’s novel, Cogewea, for our shelves, thought to be the first novel ever published by a Native woman. There’s a great article on the History Link website about Mourning Dove, penned by Spokane’s own Claire Nisbet and Jack Nisbet.
If my thoughts are rambling or disjointed here, it’s because they are frothing and coursing around an idea I’ve come to believe is central for our individual and collective health: That we benefit from a wealth of stories and perspectives, and that life becomes more dangerous and fraught when stories are silenced or limited or erased. The most moving book I’ve read so far this year, a graphic memoir by Seattle author and illustrator Tessa Hulls called Feeding Ghosts, dives deeply into the pain of women’s histories. Hulls researches her grandmother’s and mother’s terrifying journey through Mao Zedong’s China to their lives as immigrants in Northern California. And Hulls, too, must examine her own pain and fear, the truth of her own history as affected and shaped and fractured by the women who preceded her. The memoir pulsates with grief but also with hope, healing, self-knowledge, and hard-won understanding.
We will move through our pain forever, but our shared stories can help us move through it together. I’m thinking of the voiced stories of women and I’m also thinking of the never-been-told, the stories lost to us because of powerlessness, fear, harm. There is archival silence everywhere, and the silence, as Machado writes, is violent.
What can we learn from the pain of womanhood and femininity throughout history and of the ways we are taught to carry our pain alone? These books—all published within the last year or so—offer illumination and belonging.
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls
Check It Out: Book
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea: A Novel by Debra Magie Earling
Check It Out: Book
Fearless Women: Feminist Patriots From Abigail Adams To Beyoncé by Elizabeth Cobbs
Check It Out: Book
A Sign Of Her Own: A Novel by Sarah Marsh
Check It Out: Book
The Story Of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel
Check It Out: Book
Lady Tan’s Circle Of Women: A Novel by Lisa See
Check It Out: Book
Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History Of Black Feminism by Jenn M. Jackson, PhD
Check It Out: Book
The History Of A Difficult Child: A Novel by Mihret Sibhat
Check It Out: Book
Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II by Lena Andrews
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Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam
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The Once And Future Sex: Going Medieval On Women’s Roles In Society by Eleanor Janega
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The Witching Tide: A Novel by Margaret Meyer
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Wild Girls: How The Outdoors Shaped The Women Who Challenged A Nation by Tiya Miles
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Redwood Court: A Novel by DéLana RA Dameron
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Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black Brown Asian & Indigenous Women Who Changed The Course Of History by Rozella Kennedy, illustrated by Joelle Avelino
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Hula: A Novel by Jasmin ʻIolani Hakes
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Brave The Wild River: The Untold Story Of Two Women Who Mapped The Botany Of The Grand Canyon by Melissa L. Sevigny
Check It Out: Book
