The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

foremothers created a feminist hero from the scant references to
the teenage Shoshoni wife of the expedition’s official translator,
Pierre Charbonneau.
7. The implications of this maneuver did not go unnoticed by
either whites or Indians, for the statues of the idealized Shoshoni
woman, the Native American matron Sacagawea, suggest that
American tenure on American land, indeed, the right to be on
this land, is given to whites by her. While that implication is not
overt, it certainly is suggested in the image of her that the
sculptor chose: a tall, heavy woman, standing erect, nobly
pointing the way westward with upraised hand. The impression
is furthered by the habit of media and scholar of referring to her
as “the guide.” Largely because of the popularization of the
circumstances of Sacagawea’s participation in the famed Lewis
and Clark expedition, Indian people have viewed her as a traitor
to her people, likening her to Malinalli (La Malinche, who acted
as interpreter for Cortés and bore him a son) and Pocahontas,
that unhappy girl who married John Rolfe (not John Smith) and
died in England after bearing him a son. Actually none of these
women engaged in traitorous behavior. Sacagawea led a long
life, was called Porivo (Chief Woman) by the Commanches,
among whom she lived for more than twenty years, and in her
old age engaged her considerable skill at speaking and
manipulating white bureaucracy to help in assuring her Shoshoni
people decent reservation holdings.
A full discussion is impossible here but an examination of
American child-rearing practices, societal attitudes toward
women and exhibited by women (when compared to the same in
Old World cultures) as well as the foodstuffs, medicinal
materials, countercultural and alternative cultural systems, and
the deeply Indian values these reflect should demonstrate the
truth about informal acculturation and cross-cultural connections
in the Americas.