Photos: Ivan Vdovin/Alamy; Lyn Alweis/The Denver Post, via Getty Images.
With no known contemporaneous sketches or paintings of Sacagawea, artists have largely invented her look, even as historians have invented her story by relying on Lewis and Clark’s misunderstandings.
In a long article at the New York Times Magazine, Christopher Cox writes about researchers trying to piece together the real story of Sacagawea. Will these more-accurate accounts stick? As I learned when reading Josephine Tey’s mystery The Daughter of Time, truth may be “the daughter of time,” but popular legends are often too stubborn to die.
Cox writes, “In a conference room in the middle of the Great Plains, 50 people gathered to correct what they saw as a grave error in the historical record. It was July 16, 2015, on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, not too far upstream from the camp on the Missouri River where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first met Sacagawea, the teenage girl who would accompany them to the Pacific Ocean and back.
“The story of that journey has been told many times: in the journals that Lewis and Clark kept; in more than a century of academic histories; and in countless more fanciful works that have turned the expedition, and Sacagawea’s supposed role as guide to the Americans, into one of the country’s foundational myths. The people in the conference room, members of three closely related tribes, the Mandans, the Hidatsas and the Arikaras, thought basically all of it was nonsense.
“Jerome Dancing Bull, a Hidatsa elder, took the microphone first. … ‘They got it all wrong!’ he told the people in the room, referring to the bare-bones, truncated life sketched out for Sacagawea by Lewis and Clark and the historians who followed them. In that telling, Sacagawea was born a member of the Shoshone tribe in present-day Idaho, was kidnapped by the Hidatsa as a child, spent most of 1805 and 1806 with the expedition and died in 1812, while she was still in her 20s. The Hidatsas insist that she was a member of their tribe all along and died more than 50 years later, in 1869. And not of old age, either: She was shot to death.
“History has always been a process; it has also long attracted partisans who insist that its judgments should be frozen in time. … Sacagawea long ago left the realm of the apolitical dead. Over the years, she has been pressed into service as an avatar of patient humility or assertive feminism, of American expansionism or Indigenous rights, of Jeffersonian derring-do or native wisdom. …
“The Hidatsas’ portrait of Sacagawea is both richer and more ambiguous than the one found in standard histories. By adding decades to her life, they have changed its meaning: The journey to the Pacific, rather than the whole of her existence, becomes a two-year blip in a story that stretches across the 19th century, from the opening of the Western frontier to the Civil War and beyond. Almost all those years were spent back where Lewis and Clark found her, among the Hidatsa.
“The meeting at Fort Berthold was organized by Dennis and Sandra Fox, married scholars who worked for the education division at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Dennis is a direct descendant of Cedar Woman, whom the Hidatsas believed was Sacagawea’s daughter, born some 30 years after the Lewis and Clark expedition ended. He has heard about his famous ancestor since he was a boy, an oral tradition that included direct observations of her life long after her supposed death. That memory of her, he knew, was at risk of being lost. …
“The Foxes invited tribal historians and Hidatsa elders, many of whom believed themselves to be Sacagawea’s descendants, to speak. Everyone who participated got a Pendleton blanket. ‘It was a long day because we let everybody tell their stories,’ Sandra said. The discussion repeatedly veered away from the historical accounts of Sacagawea herself to more personal stories of what followed, in particular how the tribe’s memories of her had been suppressed in government and public schools. There she was called Sacajawea, with a J, and she was a Shoshone. …
“Some of those present wanted to make a film putting forward their version of Sacagawea’s life. But Gerard Baker, a former superintendent of the National Park Service’s Lewis and Clark trail, suggested that a book might be a better approach. ‘The first thing we learned in academia,’ he said, ‘is if we see something written, we believe it.’
“It was an early hint of a theme that would come to define the work that followed: the long-running historical debate over the relative value of oral and documentary evidence. In the moment, though, no one doubted Baker’s judgment. The tribal government agreed to fund research toward a book, with Dennis and Sandra Fox managing the project. The initial grant was for $30,000.
“Before the meeting ended, the Foxes chose five Hidatsa elders to serve as an advisory board: Baker, Calvin Grinnell, Bernie Fox, Wanda Sheppard and Carol Newman. Though the book would be credited to them, as the Sacagawea Project Board of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, it was Dennis and Sandra who would do most of the writing. …
The board members themselves were important sources. Newman, one of the last surviving native speakers of Hidatsa, had polio as a child, which meant she spent an unusual amount of time among elder caregivers. From them she learned not only about Sacagawea’s life but also about the whole deep history of the Hidatsas, a tribe of farmers and buffalo hunters that, together with the Mandans and Arikaras, dominated trade on the Great Plains before the arrival of the Europeans. In passing along these oral histories, Newman was careful to cite her sources, most notably Philip Snow, her grandfather. ‘He’d describe it in our language,’ she said, ‘and I could see it.’
“Ultimately, the process of researching, writing and publishing the book stretched over six years and would cost some $250,000. ‘There were many nights when we thought, What have we done?’ Sandra said. ‘This story is just too complicated for anybody to understand.’ By 2020, though, they had a manuscript ready.
“The Foxes sent the book to a few independent and university presses but were dispirited by the responses. Even in written form, no one seemed to take their testimonies seriously. They felt themselves at a dead end and worried that the book might never reach the public. To the project board, it was a familiar result. … ‘the century-long efforts of the Hidatsa to overcome the power of the Lewis and Clark journals.’
“Academic historians have come a long way since, as E.H. Carr put it, they treated the past like a collection of facts ‘available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the fishmonger’s slab.’ For Lewis and Clark scholars, though, the journals have an irresistible pull that no oral history can match: an illustrated, contemporaneous, day-by-day account of the journey. ‘It’s something you can put your hand on,’ said Gary Moulton, the editor of the definitive version of the journals. ‘You can trace its lineage.’ …
“After a year of trying, in 2021, the Sacagawea Project Board found a small press in California, the Paragon Agency, that agreed to publish the book, with a long title drawn from Dancing Bull’s speech at Fort Berthold: ‘Our Story of Eagle Woman: Sacagawea: They Got It Wrong.’ In one of the few reviews the book received, Thomas Powers, the author of a well-regarded book about Crazy Horse, wrote, ‘One way or another, every future history’ of Sacagawea ‘will have to take it into account.’ ”
Lots more at the Times Magazine, here.
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