Native women of the American West
In 1805, Sakakawea, an abducted young Shoshone living at the Mandan village on the Upper Missouri, joined a voyage to the Pacific sponsored by Thomas Jefferson and led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—the Corps of Discovery.
While wintering with the Mandan, the captains hired Sakakawea’s French-Canadian common-law husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, as interpreter. She was one of two young Shoshone wives Charbonneau had acquired by winning a bet against their captors. Keen for someone who spoke the language of the Rocky Mountains First Nations, Lewis and Clark chose to take Sakakawea, then 15 years old and six months pregnant. In common with Malintzin, Sakakawea had been taken from her people against her own will and, like Malintzin, she earned a place in history through her exceptional linguistic ability. Moreover, during a voyage when food was often scarce, she contributed to the survival of her companions with knowledge of wild foods and cooking. Serendipitously, when the explorers met a Shoshone band, Sakakawea’s brother, Cameahwait, was their leader, a coincidence that greatly advanced the explorers’ interests, for they were in desperate need of Shoshone horses.34The Corps of Discovery’s journey did not resemble a campaign of conquest, although white settlers followed in its wake and, with them, the final subjugation of the remaining autonomous First Nations by the United States. Almost three centuries had elapsed since the Spanish conquest of Mexico, yet Lewis and Clark came upon many First Nations who had seldom encountered Europeans. However, even those in remote places had not escaped the dreadful effects of smallpox epidemics of the 1780s and 1803—1804. During a stopover at the Arikara villages, sexual hospitality was offered to the travellers, as was the case in the Mandan villages where they wintered in 1804—1805.
It is alleged that husbands encouraged their wives to have intercourse with the travellers ‘believing they would catch some of the power of the white men from such intercourse, transmitted to them through their wives’.35On the hundredth anniversary of the expedition, Sakakawea ‘was memorialized as the intrepid guide of Lewis and Clark, the person who revealed to them the way through the mountain passes. She was made the heroine of a book... Mountains and lakes were named [after] her. Statues... were erected, and paintings done’,36 her contribution to the expansion of the American empire at last acknowledged. In her own time, however, her services went unrewarded. The journals of the voyage represent women as defined by ‘sexual identity, reproductive history, and domestic labor’ to the exclusion of women as partners in an arduous enterprise.37 Charbonneau received $500.33 for his horse, his tepee and his services and, like all men under Lewis and Clark, in 1807 he was rewarded with 320 acres of land.38 Sakakawea did not taste the fruits of the voyage’s success. Nevertheless her participation in the Lewis and Clark expedition did afford her the opportunity to insert herself into the wider history of the United States; albeit only in the posthumous acknowledgment of her contribution to the opening up of the West.
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