Voyage of Domination, "Purchase" as Conquest, Sakakawea for Savagery: Distorted Icons from Misrepresentations of the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Imagery of Lewis and Clark as brave explorers making valuable discoveries between 1804 and 1806 in the vast and wild territories of the northwestern half of North America does great disservice to understanding the native peoples they met along the journey. Native societies in these areas lived in well-adapted social structures. With the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition rapidly approaching, many native scholars and traditionalists are making their own observations regarding the impact of these contacts. Particularly, we address notions of discovery (as in the Corps of Discovery), ideologies of purchase (as in the Louisiana Purchase), and misrepresentation of native women as bartered "squaws" (as in portrayals of Sakakawea).¹ This essay will critique and reframe each of these terms or icons, countering them with imagery that stresses existing native nations in the early 1800s, cultural sovereignty of their societies, and the full participation of women as leaders and elders of their respective peoples.

First, we will review the historical underpinnings and ideological uses of the word "discovery" as they extend from the early Columbian penetration of the Western Hemisphere. Implied in the term are European representations of non-Europeans as "savage," heathenistic, incapable of reason, and consequently unsuited for self-government. Such constructions undergird the genocidal expansion by the United States from its inception through Thomas Jefferson's thrust up the Missouri River, legitimating conquest and domination well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this respect, the mythos and ideological constructions of the Lewis and Clark expedition contribute to the continuing distortion of who native peoples were and are, especially in the western United States.

Next, we will review the terminology and political intentions behind the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Denoting the future conquest of the western half of continental North America as a purchase is an ideological act of vast proportions that is further widened in its casual acceptance throughout Euro-American society and its scholarly world. In basic mercantilist or capitalist terminology, a purchase of some determined property requires that one entity, in control or possession of that property, sells its interest or possession rights to another entity. None of this occurred in the Louisiana Purchase except for the much smaller territory of present-day Louisiana.

Finally, we will review the distorted histories of the journey and their meaning for "America" within the gross misrepresentation of Sakakawea as Shoshone rather than as being from the Hidatsa people. Most historians view her as simply being war booty kidnapped during a Hidatsa attack on the Shoshone people, although there is no reliable historical evidence to support such a view. Moreover, she is considered a purchase herself, an object of barter or a gift to the French trader Charbonneau, thereby accompanying Lewis and Clark as a kind of female baggage—albeit baggage that was of great benefit to the expedition. Alternative views from traditionalist perspectives and oral tradition sources seek to debunk such claims and yet are rarely taken into account by scholars. We maintain that these distorted icons better represent gender relations of Euro-Americans than Hidatsa, Shoshone, or other native peoples and are constructions that demean native nations and Indian women.²

The Corps of Discovery as Doctrinaire Conquest

The 1804-1806 Lewis and Clark expedition was called the Corps of Discovery, with white America later referring to it as the Voyage of Discovery. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term "discovery" was already deeply embedded in the Euro-American conquest, linked with the ideologies of colonialism developed after the return of Columbus to Spain in 1492.³

The principles utilized for the conquest of America were European princes' "Rights of Conquest" and the newly developed "Doctrine of Discovery" (over indigenous peoples in a "new world").⁴ Essentially, [End...