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Sacagawea has become a symbol: a reminder of the extent to which the Lewis and Clark story is also a Native American story.
Sacagawea's Importance to Native Americans
Shoshone and Hidatsa Tribal Claims

Sacagawea Stand-In
Amy Mossett is a Mandan-Hidatsa from New Town, North Dakota, and an expert on Sacagawea. Thin and elegant with a cascade of nearly waist-length hair, Mossett is something of a celebrity as a Sacagawea stand-in. Her image appears in travel brochures and on billboards promoting tourism — an uphill battle in North Dakota, among the least visited states in the country. She has lectured and told stories about Sacagawea everywhere from kindergarten classrooms to convents to a biker convention.
For many years after her rediscovery, most of the white Americans who wrote about Sacagawea seized upon her as the archetypal "good Indian," one who, like Pocahontas, had aided white men. But in the past couple of decades, and especially for Native Americans, Sacagawea has become a different sort of symbol: a reminder of the extent to which the Lewis and Clark story is also a Native American story. The expedition was, as the historian James Ronda has written, not a "tour of discovery through an empty West," but a "diverse human community moving through the lands and lives of other communities."

Lately, historians have taken to studying the expedition's mutually informative encounters with native populations and have been more interested in Lewis and Clark as pioneering naturalists and ethnographers than as standard-bearers of manifest destiny. At times this has meant paying less attention to Sacagawea, taking pains not to focus on her as the token Indian presence in the story. "For a long time Sacagawea was representative of all native people," says Ronda. "A lot of folks seemed to think, If I mention her, I don't have to mention other native people. I've done my job."

But if you think of her as the native informant closest to Lewis and Clark, then she acquires a new symbolic significance. "I see her as a source of pride for all the tribes," says Amy Mossett, pictured at right. "I know of at least seven tribes that have oral traditions about her or someone like her. I see that as a sign of their really wanting to have some connection to the woman who went on the journey with Lewis and Clark."

For some Native Americans, disputes about Sacagawea's life and legacy — where and when she died, even how to spell and pronounce her name — are of far more then academic interest. For the 400 or so remaining Lehmi Shoshone, who live on a reservation in Idaho, the connection to Sacagawea is one thread on which to hang their hopes for federal tribal recognition and a return of the ancestral lands they say were stripped from them. For the Wind River Shoshone in Wyoming, the connection to the woman they insist is "Sacajawea" (their spelling) and who died on their reservation (most historians dispute this; for more information, please see information about her life and death) could anchor them in the Lewis and Clark story.
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