The form of postcolonial writing in Diane Glancy, this paper proposes, works to appropriate and fit the text into `compulsory postcoloniality' where the postcolonial author discussing cultural encounters uses authenticating devices and prepares a `narrative society' that demands such `authentic' writing about the postcolonial condition and its revisionism of its past. Sacajawea's narrative functions as a `narrative parasite' because it formally disrupts and interrupts mainstream (white) information and induces a different order, asserting agency. The interaction of her narrative with the white men's produces a `noise,' but one which is agential in determining the shape of the overall narrative of the expedition. Sacajawea's narrative rewrites the history of white exploration itself by showing the native's individual as well as racial identity and mobility, without which the whites' exploration would have been impossible. The novel works as a tale of postcolonial agency because it takes the central trope of Anglo-European travelmobility as a feature of the native woman. It generates a narrative where we are perforce asked to acknowledge that one of the greatest exploratory expeditions was facilitated by a native woman's role as well. All the authenticating devices that point to `true' native/postcolonial identity are present in Glancy's writing. The paper proposes that we can discern a society that has learnt to disbelieve the story of `heroic' expeditions such as Lewis and Clark's and looks forward to texts like Glancy's that show another narrative as well.

Postcolonial reclamation of history is a theme too well rehearsed since the 1990s to require repetition. The forms of this reclamation, it has been suggested in the works of Jackie Huggins, Mudrooroo Narogin, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, and dozens of other postcolonial authors, are marked by a return to nonlinear, local (folkloric, mythic, oral, dreamtelling, spiritualized) storytelling forms that resist the cartographic, documentary, questionably secular, and categorical-classificatory forms of organized history-writing practiced by the Europeans. Diane Glancy refuses to reject the European tradition completely (as she points out in a 2002 interview, her mother was German-English) but relocates it in its relation vis-à-vis native history writing. This essay examines the narrative form of Glancy's fictional account of Sacajawea, the Native American woman who accompanied the Lewis-Clark expedition (1804-06), as it made the first overland journey across the United States to the Pacific Coast and back. Glancy's Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea (2003) seems to engage with the narrative contest between European and non-European forms of history-writing and, at the same time, cleverly reposition native forms so as to reduce this to a no-contest. Form, I want to propose, works to appropriate and fit into what I term 'compulsory postcoloniality,' where, unwittingly or consciously, the postcolonial author must (1) reduce cultural transactions to an encounter (with all its resonance of a binary, one-to-one, antagonistic relationship), (2) amplify already circulating authenticity devices such as folklore or myth to demonstrate distance from European (mainstream) writing, and (3) simultaneously create and feed into a `narrative society' prepared for, demanding such 'authentic' writing. This last is, I propose, the construction of a body of readership for `authentic' writing and, at the same time, the production of a body of writing to suit that (politically correct, ready-for-the-authentic-postcolonial) readership. A 'narrative society' is one that understands itself through stories rather than statistics, through autobiographies rather than government reports (Dawes, 1995, p. 38). Since the 1990s at least, America's narrative society has constructed itself through stories of the legendary massacres of Native Americans, the marginalization of African Americans, the oppression of women and minorities, and other pernicious and historical evils of dispossession and exploitation. The form a narrative takes is, of course, conditioned by and contingent upon the society of readers. A narrative can be made to tell a story because of the conceptual apparatus of that particular society and age, where, even when the narrative does not make a meaning explicit, the conceptual apparatus of that society, its techniques of interpretation, and the conventions of meaning-making enable an unraveling of the story. Barbara Herrnstein Smith (cited in Waldman, 2004, p. 86) directs our attention to this context of meaning-making when she writes:

American Literature Journal, American Travel Narratives, Cultural Encounters, African Americans, Cultural Transactions, Postcolonial Revisionism, Sacajawea Travels, European Travelogue, Postcolonial Paradigm, Compulsory Postcoloniality.