American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Determining who are Sacagawea’s (or Sacajawea’s) descendants is a rather troublesome dilemma. The quandary lies in sorting out and understanding the claims that various tribal groups have made regarding this legendary woman. There are a large (and growing) number of American Indian oral traditions about Sacag/jawea’s tribal affiliation, cultural heritage, the pronunciation of her name and what it means, as well as about when and where she died. Sacag/jawea’s story is not opaque but a window into personal and tribal identity. I started to explore the history of this young woman as revealed in the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as well as in numerous Native oral traditions. In trying to make sense of the stories that generous people shared with me I began to understand how all histories are constructed. Additionally I came to comprehend how these constructions distill and clearly essentialize the worldviews of Native people, western historians, suffragists, and others. As complex constructions of social histories, these stories reveal connections between the past and the present. They are potent and they will (I hope) remain permanently ambiguous. This essay explores ways in which both public representations and private memories produce a sense of the past. There are acute differences between western conceptions of the past and American Indian ways of envisioning and interpreting their worlds. Subsequently, I will investigate how communities imagine and re-imagine a past that includes themselves as that imagined past relates to the life of Sacag/jawea, the teenage Shoshone interpreter who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their “Corps of Discovery” (1804–1806) to the Pacific Ocean and back. Native American history, like all history, is not static but represents a dynamic ongoing relationship between past events and the present. It is also primarily an oral history, unlike Western history, which is almost exclusively written.