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Magazine|What if Everything We Know About Sacagawea Is Wrong?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/magazine/sacagawea-biography-history.html
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In a conference room in the middle of the Great Plains, 50 people gathered to correct what they saw as a grave error in the historical record. It was July 16, 2015, on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, not too far upstream from the camp on the Missouri River where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first met Sacagawea, the teenage girl who would accompany them to the Pacific Ocean and back. The story of that journey has been told many times: in the journals that Lewis and Clark kept; in more than a century of academic histories; and in countless more fanciful works that have turned the expedition, and Sacagawea’s supposed role as guide to the Americans, into one of the country’s foundational myths. The people in the conference room, members of three closely related tribes, the Mandans, the Hidatsas and the Arikaras, thought basically all of it was nonsense.
Listen to this article, read by James Patrick Cronin
Jerome Dancing Bull, a Hidatsa elder, took the microphone first. The day was warm enough that someone had propped the door open to the outside; the sun was blindingly bright, the prairie a labrador’s scruff in the distance. “They got it all wrong!” he told the people in the room, referring to the bare-bones, truncated life sketched out for Sacagawea by Lewis and Clark and the historians who followed them. In that telling, Sacagawea was born a member of the Shoshone tribe in present-day Idaho, was kidnapped by the Hidatsa as a child, spent most of 1805 and 1806 with the expedition and died in 1812, while she was still in her 20s. The Hidatsas insist that she was a member of their tribe all along and died more than 50 years later, in 1869. And not of old age, either: She was shot to death.
History has always been a process; it has also long attracted partisans who insist that its judgments should be frozen in time. In March, the Trump administration released an executive order with the title “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which condemned the “widespread effort to rewrite history” and called for “solemn and uplifting public monuments.” It was a timeworn complaint turned into a wanton threat: Mess with our national symbols, and we’ll pull your funding.
Sacagawea long ago left the realm of the apolitical dead. Over the years, she has been pressed into service as an avatar of patient humility or assertive feminism, of American expansionism or Indigenous rights, of Jeffersonian derring-do or native wisdom. Her face is on U.S. currency, her name has been affixed to a caldera on Venus and there are statues of her spread throughout the nation, each incarnation seeming to pull her further out of context. The Trump administration has said it wants to include a sculpture of her in a planned National Garden of American Heroes, effectively claiming her as an honorary citizen — though to the federal government at the time, she was closer to being an alien enemy.
