Sacagawea and Son: The Visual Construction of America's Maternal Feminine

"Sacagawea is our mother. She is the first gene pair of the American DNA."

—Sherman Alexie, 2002¹

In his 1900 essay "The Dynamo and the Virgin," American philosopher Henry Adams laments his nation's lack of a potent symbol of female force, blaming Puritanism for suppressing appreciation for the power of reproduction, which he considers "the greatest and most mysterious of all energies." According to Adams, because Americans have no iconic symbol to worship—no pagan goddess or Christian Madonna—they fail to recognize this uniquely feminine energy, so much so that "[a]n American Virgin would never dare command, an American Venus would never dare exist."² Yet Adams believed that some remnant of such an awesome force would have survived its voyage across the Atlantic, and he concluded that it must have been channeled into the dynamo, a secular sexless machine. In 1900, however, he could not have foreseen the elevation of an almost forgotten historical figure to the status of female icon, the transformation of a captive Indian girl into a national heroine. For over the course of the next century, Sacagawea, the Shoshone teenager who accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition from what is now North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean, became the most celebrated "daughter" of the United States, even though never officially a citizen. In fact, more public statues have been erected of Sacagawea than of any other woman in this country. As Bernard DeVoto, the editor of the Lewis and Clark journals, writes, Sacagawea "has received what in the United States counts as canonization if not deification."³

Figure 1.

Leonard Crunelle, Sakakawea, 1910. Capitol Grounds, Bismarck, North Dakota.

Photo: © Hans Anderson, 2004, Wikimedia Commons.

As a young girl growing up in North Dakota, I worshipped this saintly young woman, my state's most honored historical figure. When my family finally took our long-awaited journey across the state, leaving the flat fertile fields of our farm in the east to see for the first time the rugged badlands of the west, we stopped in Bismarck to see the capitol, and of course, Leonard Crunelle's famous 1910 statue memorializing Sacagawea (Figure 1), whom North Dakotans call Sakakawea, a Hidatsa name meaning "Bird Woman."⁴ Of the entire trip that summer of 1973, I most remember this visit to that statue on the capitol grounds, a recollection that remained vivid until my second visit in the summer of 2000. My second visit was somewhat different, for I approached the statue with intellectual curiosity rather than awe and admiration. I had encountered other female role models and heroines along the way, and I was no longer so sure I even knew who the "real" Sacagawea was, a historical figure or a mythic construct. The United States Mint had just issued its new Golden Dollar (Figure 2), which honored this teenager with an image remarkably similar to that produced by Crunelle almost a century ago. Glenna Goodacre's Sacagawea may appear somewhat younger and perhaps happier, but she is still first and foremost a mother, as she almost always is in the numerous depictions of her that have been produced in a variety of artistic and popular media. Because no visual representation or even physical description of Sacagawea exists by anyone who actually saw her, visual artists have borrowed freely from preexisting iconographic traditions, most notably the Madonna and Child—an adaptation deeply implicated within ideological structures concerning gender, race, and manifest destiny.⁵ Sacagawea is rarely shown without the visual marker of her maternity—her infant son, Jean Baptiste, nicknamed Pomp. This baby has become her attribute, the sign that forces recognition and signifies that for which she is most honored and remembered.

Figure 2.

Golden Dollar Obverse

© 1999 United States Mint. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission. United States Golden Dollar coin image courtesy United States Mint and used with permission.

The cultural phenomenon that is Sacagawea has received significant attention throughout both the scholarly and popular...