Page 26 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph: most Americans know only the most famous leaders of the

tribes. Very few could name any women. Muskogee Creek poet Joy Harjo writes, "Historically, there are

no female voices, and especially no female Native voices. The only two who appear are Pocahontas,

and she has no direct voice but remains as an image, as a colonized figure in her English clothes. And

there's Sacajawea, who has a voice because of her link to two white explorers, Lewis and Clark. We

7
don't hear her voice.”Sacajewea has been an enigmatic figure from the start: no one really

knows how old she was when she joined the expedition, when or where she died, or how much or little

real power she had during the journey, given that both leaders were dismissive of Indian women in

general. Historians disagree as to how to spell or pronounce her name. As Earling notes in a personal

correspondence, she deliberately spelled Sacajewea's name the way she grew up pronouncing it:

“There is such an element of controversy in the pronunciation of her name and I think it has done

much to silence her and remove her even more from the idea of personhood—a person, not an idea.

She has become so many things to so many different people and there are so many legendary tales

about her that the simple recollection of her name is in dispute. In essence she is torn apart, lay claim

to like a land divided into countries and we have lost her to myth. [italics mine]”

How to recover the sound of the name of a word? Of course, there are no lost journals of Sacajewea's.

She was, as were most Indian women of that time, illiterate in her native Shoshone language and her

husband's French and English, though she served as translator in their encounters with many different

tribes. During the journey, she would have had no time to write anything down, even if she could. She

gave birth to a son within a few weeks of meeting up with Lewis and Clark. She traveled at the pace of

men. She had her duties as the wife of the translator, Charbonneau. She was deathly sick a number of

times. And yet the possibility of a found journal, recoverable after two hundred years, written by a

woman with the unique vantage of having lived in the old Medicine World and traveling now with the

new, insider and outsider, Indian with the whites, woman among the men, is irresistible. It is the perfect