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8. Sacajawea, Meet Cogewea

A Red Progressive Revision of Frontier Romance

Joanna Brooks

The Journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark offer incidental, idio-syncratic glimpses of Sacajawea: her pregnancy and delivery (January–February 1805); her skill as a gatherer of wild artichokes, apples, and “Lickerish” (April and May 1805); her extended illness (June 1805); her relationship with the sometimes abusive French trapper Toussaint Charbonneau (August 1805); her return to the site of her childhood abduction and her reunion with family (July–August 1805); her vote to establish winter quarters at a site plentiful with “potas” (November 1805); and her insistence on seeing the Pacific Ocean (January 1806). Clark additionally acknowledges her work as a “pilot,” negotiator, and “interpretess.”^[1] Two hundred years of Lewis and Clark studies have confirmed little more about the factitious Sacajawea. Some local historians still like to debate her name, her tribal origins, her role in the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the circumstances of her death.

Her postfactual afterlife has meant fuller celebrity and broader circulation for Sacajawea. In her most recent incarnation, she has joined a select group of American Indians—real and imagined—to be featured on the currency of the United States. Now, as a replacement for the ill-fated Susan B. Anthony, she appears on a golden dollar, smiling, an infant strapped to her back. Ironically, this image of Sacajawea was invented and popularized by Anthony and other suffragettes a century ago. In 1902, the Oregon suffragette Eva Emery Dye published The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark. Dye's novelistic treatment of the expedition recuperated Sacajawea as a heroine of western women's history, amplifying her role as an expeditionary guide and emphasizing her travails as a new mother in the wilderness. Dye also presented Sacajawea as a pioneering liaison between white and Indian worlds—in sum, as the “Madonna of her race.”^[2] Dye set out to materially

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incorporate her vision of Sacajawea with the organization of the Sacajawea Statue Association in 1903. The association raised more than $7,000 to commission from the sculptor Alice Cooper a seven-foot bronze of the Shoshone woman as Dye had imagined her: a pioneer-Madonna, facing westward, carrying a cradle-boarded infant. The statue was unveiled and dedicated on 30 June 1905, “Women's Day” at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. Officials of the National Woman Suffrage Association, which had been invited to hold its annual convention concurrently with the exposition, spoke at the dedication ceremony. In her opening address, Susan B. Anthony hailed Sacajawea as an unsung heroine of western history:

This recognition of the assistance rendered by a woman in the discovery of this great section of the country is but the beginning of what is due. Next year the men of this proud State, made possible by a woman, will decide whether women shall at last have the rights in it which have been denied them so many years. Let men remember the part that women have played in its settlement and progress and vote to give them these rights which belong to every citizen.^[3]

Following Anthony at the podium, Anna Shaw, the association's president, lauded Sacajawea in the popular, pathetic rhetoric of the “Vanishing Indian”:

Sacajawea. … Your tribe is fast disappearing from the land of your fathers. May we, the daughters of an alien race who slew your people and usurped your country, learn the lessons of calm endurance, of patient persistence and unfaltering courage exemplified in your life, in our efforts to lead men through the pass of justice, which leads over the mountains of prejudice and conservatism, to the broad land of the perfect freedom of a true republic.^[4]

Shaw and Anthony poetically transferred the westward movement of the Lewis and Clark expedition onto the movement for women's suffrage. They claimed for Sacajawea historical value as the woman who “made Oregon possible” and symbolic value as an icon of woman-piloted progress (Figure 6). But Sacajawea's career as a suffragette was short-lived: after Oregon voters defeated women's suffrage in a 1906 state referendum, her statue was rededicated to “the pioneer mothers of old Oregon” and permanently installed at Portland's Washington Park.^[5]

Following the Lewis and Clark exposition, more conservative clubwomen redefined Sacajawea as a mascot of true western womanhood and regional pride. Monument campaigns and historical pageants in North Dakota, Washington, and Montana honored her as both an instrument of Manifest Destiny and a model of its civilizing successes. Typical of these projects was the North Dakota Women's Club's effort to install a statue of Sacajawea on the state capitol grounds in Bismarck. Promotional pamphlets published by

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the club erroneously celebrated the Shoshone woman as the “first Indian west of the Missouri River to convert to Christianity.” In 1912, when the Bird Woman statue was dedicated, the secretary of the North Dakota State Historical Society claimed that Sacajawea made it possible for “our good friends” the Indians to be educated in government schools. His eulogy of Sacajawea as an emblem of Indian education was met with an ironic response from Native Americans in the audience. A group of young Shoshone, Hidatsa, Mandan, Arikara, and Sioux government-school graduates, featured as honored guests, told reporters from the Bismarck Tribune that they had never heard of Sacajawea before the statue campaign.^[6] Her incorporation

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into colonialist historical romance did not secure Sacajawea's legacy among American Indians.

American Indian intellectuals were solicited to settle emerging disputes over the Shoshone woman's biography. Conventional historians held that Sacajawea died in Missouri in 1812, but the University of Wyoming professor Grace Raymond Hebard asserted that Sacajawea died in Wyoming in 1884. Controversy flared in 1924 when Hebard lobbied for a federal Sacajawea memorial in Wyoming. The Bureau of Indian Affairs commissioned Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux), a Dartmouth- and Boston University-educated medical doctor then serving as general inspector for the agency, to establish an authoritative account of Sacajawea's final years. After collecting testimony from tribes in Wyoming, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, Eastman concluded in support of Hebard: Sacajawea had outlived Charbonneau, wandered south, married a Comanche man, and died in Wyoming in 1884. East man also offered an explanation for the shadowy, contested character of Sacajawea's history:

At the time history was unknown to even some of the Rocky Mountain white men, much more so with the Indians. One of the striking characteristics and habits of the Bird Woman is that she is very modest in claiming any honors of being guide to that party; one reason for this is the Indian woman will put her husband as the head in any matter of that kind. She never considered herself as a guide or interpreter. She evidently assumed that the great duties performed by her were the natural consequences of the expedition. … It was not her choice but fate seemed to have compelled her to live the life that she did.^[7]

In his books Indian Boyhood (1902) and The Soul of the Indian (1908), Eastman had promoted Indian culture as an innately, if primitively, virtuous alternative to anxious, illsridden modernity. The same aims shaped his public presentation of Sacajawea as a model of traditional Indian modesty. Privately, Eastman maintained a more radical view of Sacajawea, describing her in his personal correspondence as the “Ben Hur” of Native America.^[8] What began as a project of historical reconnaissance, for Eastman, ultimately produced another species of Sacajawea romance.

Sacajawea's transformation from historical personage into cultural icon ensured her survival in popular memory, but it sacrificed important dimensions of her story. As Philip Deloria demonstrates in Playing Indian, the long American tradition of turning Indians into symbols—a tradition reaching from Pocahontas, Chief Logan, and King Tammany to Chief Seattle—both perpetuates and masks the darker aspects of colonialist cultural politics. The celebration of Sacajawea as protosuffragette ignored, if not obscured, the federal disenfranchisement of Native Americans: most Indians, male and female, did not enjoy the right to vote until granted citizenship by an act of Congress in 1924. More egregious was conservative clubwomen's use

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of Sacajawea to affirm their assimilationist programs and policies. Charles Eastman's presentation of Sacajawea as a model of traditional gender values may have appealed to the nostalgia of white audiences, but it did little to advance respect for Native women as modern beings. Indeed, little about Sacajawea's story was traditional: her career as interpreter and borderlands guide significantly extended and complicated white-Indian relations. Romantic representations of Sacajawea transmitted little of this complexity.

We find a very different view of Sacajawea in one of the first novels published by a Native American woman. Christine Quintasket (1885?–1936) grew up a Salish-speaking Okanogan, indigenous to northeastern Washington. Like many Native people of her generation, she was educated in convent and government schools with intensely assimilationist agendas. In 1912, while living in Portland, Oregon, Quintasket chose a pen name—Mourning Dove—and penciled a first draft of a novel. There, in the birth-place of the iconic Sacajawea, Mourning Dove developed her own story about a young northwestern Native woman negotiating the dislocations of colonialism. The protagonist was an interpreter and mediator between white and Indian worlds; she eventually rejected romance with an exploitive white fortune seeker for a more satisfying partnership with an Indian man. Down to the detail of its protagonist's nearly homophonous name, Mourning Dove's Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range suggests a critique of popular Sacajawea romance. Mourning Dove used the novel to record, preserve, and perpetuate tribal perspectives—once passed down as oral narrative—on the coming of the Lew isand Clark expedition. Her story also offers distinctive insights into the complexities of contact between white men and Indian women in the aftermath of the expedition. According to the novel, what Cogewea experiences as a conflicted, race-conscious, thoroughly modern “half-blood” is a predicament shared by northwestern Native women since the time of Sacajawea. Cogewea's survival and happiness depend on her ability to hear, understand, and interpret that legacy.

Cogewea is a revisionist Western, a love story that rejects the premises and reworks the novelistic conventions of frontier romance. Mourning Dove knew these conventions well: she first learned the English alphabet by reading dime novels, introduced to the Quintasket household by an adopted white orphan named Jimmy. She also learned from her Okanogan elders an indigenous perspective on the story of Lewis and Clark. She explains in her

Autobiography,

When Lewis and Clark made their famous exploration, they did not reach Okanogan territory, but my people heard many stories of white-skinned

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strangers who wintered at the mouth of the Columbia. The stories came from the south—from Yakima who told Wenatchi, who told Okanogan. … The first white explorer to enter our country was David Thompson of the Northwest Company of Montreal, a rival in the fur trade with the great Hudson's Bay Company.^[9]

The conventional American view of Lewis and Clark did not hold for her people: among them, “the first white explorer” was a Canadian fur trader. Lewis and Clark entered Okanogan territory as a story, a story transmitted from tribe to tribe. Mourning Dove's account deauthorizes Lewis and Clark as producers of their own history, and it decenters their party as one among several to “explore” the region. Additionally, it emphasizes that the land was already inhabited by distinct Native populations—Yakima, Wenatchi, Okanogan, and others—who were known to one another before their “discovery.” To Mourning Dove, the story of Lewis and Clark was not an unprecedented epic, a narrative progressing from east to west. Rather, it was another installment of the stranger-comes-to-town genre, a story set entirely in the Pacific Northwest.

Mourning Dove brought this perspective to bear on the composition of Cogewea. Its frontier setting is not the boundary between civilization and wilderness, nor between white and red. Rather, it is a simultaneously wild and settled space, where cattle ranches abut open rangeland; it is a social borderlands, home to a range of highly differentiated and dynamic identities. Its protagonist, Cogewea McDonald, is a half-blood, the daughter of an Okanogan mother and an errant white father, and a recent graduate of Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Both her situation as a half-blood and her education place her in the borderlands of racial identity and cultural belonging. She has returned home to the Horseshoe Bend—or “H-B,” for “half-blood”—Ranch, which is owned by her sister Julia and her white brother-in-law, John Carter. The ranch hands are a comic crew of mixed-bloods and migrants: “Rodeo Jack,” a “quarter-blood Texan of uncertain qualities”; “Celluloid Bill,” a trickster “half-blood Cheyenne”; “Silent Bob,” a displaced, drawling West Virginian; and James La Grinder, the half-blood Flathead foreman.

The plot of Cogewea feminizes frontier-adventure by mixing in key elements of the captivity narrative and the novel of seduction. As the novel opens, Cogewea stands on a bluff overlooking the Pend Oreille River, facing west, surveying the landscape, and musing aloud over her future. “What had the future in store for her? What would it bring? Would it, through her, illuminate the pathway of others?”^[10] Mourning Dove positions her protagonist to pilot readers through the social complexities of Indianness in the twentieth century. The plot thickens with the arrival of Alfred Densmore, a dastardly, duplicitous city dweller “with a cold, calculating grey eye” (43).

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Cogewea finds herself strangely attracted to the Eastern fortune seeker, and she volunteers herself as Densmore's guide to life on the range. Densmore erroneously believes that Cogewea owns large land holdings; he plots to seduce, marry, and abandon her. Densmore's seduction strategy is a calculated appeal to Cogewea's liminality: he feigns interest in Indian customs and sympathy for Cogewea's situation as a half-blood. This indulges her tendency to lapse into impassioned soliloquy, to play the native informant, to reveal and explain her vulnerabilities. At times, Cogewea becomes so absorbed in her own internal debates that she fails to read and interpret Densmore's motivations. Here Mourning Dove remakes the novel of seduction in modern Indian terms, and she turns the captivity narrative formula into an indictment of white men who entrap Indian women.

The voice of Native tradition in the novel belongs to Cogewea's grandmother Stemteema, a full-blooded Okanogan who has been entrusted with the stories of the tribe. Stemteema staunchly opposes her granddaughter's deepening fascination with Densmore, whom she sees as the latest in a series of opportunistic “Sho-yah-pee,” or white men, who have come west to take advantage of the women of the tribe. Stemteema recounts their fates to Cogewea: an ancestor given as a wife to a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition; a childhood friend seduced and abandoned by a white American soldier; and Cogewea's own mother, left alone by her gold miner husband with three girls to raise. She warns,

My grandchild! You talk too much to that pale face. He does not mean right by you! He is having sport with you. He wants to make a fool of you, that all the young people may laugh. You think he has love because he follow you. Not so! He is blind you with false words. He is here to cheat you; all that any white man wants of the Indian girl. It is only to put her to shame, then cast her aside for his own kind, the pale faced squaw. (103)

In an attempt to derail the romance, Stemteema insists that Densmore and Cogewea meet with her to hear the customs and histories of the tribe. “I will tell this Sho-yah-pee a tale of the long ago. I will tell him of the coming of the pale face; when the tribes were many and strong. … Yes! I will tell him of the invasion by the despoiler, and of the wasting of my people. … I will speak and you shall interpret my words” (105). In commanding Cogewea to interpret these difficult stories, Stemteema forces her to disengage from her solipsistic, romantic reverie and to recognize the historical context of her relationship with Densmore. Stemteema's story contests the privileged discourse—the romance of discovery—which assures Densmore that the West and its indigenous people exist to be explored and exploited.

The meeting between Densmore, Cogewea, and Stemteema takes place in Stemteema's tepee, located at some distance from the H-B ranch houses. Similarly, Stemteema locates her story and her authority in the context of

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tribal tradition: “This story I am telling you is true. It was given me by my father who favored me among his many children. … He told me the tales that were sacred to his tribe; honored me with them, trusted me. Treasured by my forefathers, I value them” (122). She describes Okanogan life as it existed before contact, then recounts the portents, history, and impact of colonial incursion. According to Stemteema, “Black Robes,” or priests, preceded Lewis and Clark among the Okanogan. She continues, “Then they saw the pale face again, two of them. They had no black robes, but the people tried to pray to them, as they remembered the words of the Black Robe. The pale faces only laughed at them. But this is another story which I may tell you some time” (128). As they leave the tepee, Densmore interrogates Cogewea about the accuracy of Stemteema's narrative. His motive is “more to court favor” with Cogewea than to advance his understanding of Native history, “a subject in which he felt no particular interest”: “Cogewea! are all those supposed facts as narrated by your grandmother concerning the first coming of the white man, or only legend? They seem to be no part of the chronicles. … Lewis and Clark were the first Caucasians to reach and explore the great Northwest. That is recognized history” (129).

Cogewea defends Stemteema's story: “They were the first white explorers of the Northwest, but not the first to penetrate its sylvan wilds. It is my belief that the last two ‘pale faces’ Stemteema mentioned were the famous path-finders sent out by the Government, and I am sure that when you hear her story of these men, you will agree with me on that score. Stemteema was a small child at the time of this second coming, and she has certainly seen more than a hundred snows” (129–130). Cogewea continues, goaded by Densmore's resistance into a critique of Christianity, white supremacy, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Densmore does not find these subjects “altogether engaging” but nonetheless assumes a look of “studied intent” (133). Ultimately, he begs to learn more about “tribal marriage ceremonies,” as a way of distracting and entrapping her (136). When she tells him she must marry a half-blood, he appeals to her sense of modernity: “Why erect an imaginary barrier about your life? A true mate is one who has sympathy for your ideals; who understands and is willing to adapt himself to your ways. Don't you think I would make a good half-breed?” (150). Densmore successfully captivates Cogewea with the absurdity of his question, and the significance of Stemteema's story is lost. Cogewea and Densmore never return to hear the complete history of Lewis and Clark, and the seduction scheme advances.

Stemteema finds a more reliable audience in the ranch's half-blood foreman, Jim LaGrinder. LaGrinder shares her suspicions about Densmore, and he watches over Cogewea with protective affection. “You are an Indian,” she pleads, “you will understand me, what I am to tell you I am distressed and need your help” (216). To enlist his help in preventing Cogewea's impending

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elopement, Stemteema relates the story of “the second coming of the Shoyahpee.” She herself witnessed the arrival of Lewis and Clark as a child “more than a hundred snows” ago: “The men with hair on their pale faces impressed me. … I remember well both Shoyahpees. I was afraid! I clung to my mother for protection. With pleading and coaxing, she made me to understand that I was not to be afraid of them; that they were not common mortals as we were the warriors and medicine men, but were gods—a higher people than the Indians—which all my tribe believed to be true” (218).

Stemteema relates how her father established contact with Lewis and Clark, seeking them out at their camp. “The pale faces were both holding weapons against us. Even the strange Indian woman who was with them, held a gun in aim. She was a brave squaw! We found afterwards that she came to show them the trail to the big water, towards the sunset” (220). She continues, recounting a prophecy made by one of her ancestors:

Evil and death will come to my people in the wake of these two pale faces. … I saw on this great new trail a might nation sweeping over our hunting grounds, armed with dread weapons of war. I saw our villages made desolate with fire and the graves of our fathers profaned. I saw the death-trail worm smooth by the moccasined feet of the dead and the death wail grew loud on the storm-rack of night. (224)

Stemteema concludes by connecting the story of Lewis and Clark directly to Cogewea's predicament. “You now know why I do not want Cogewea to marry this Shoyahpee. They are all false to our race” (226). As a half-blood, Jim hears the story of Lewis and Clark as a commentary on his white ancestors. His responds feelingly, “I have heard Stemteema and I am not proud of my white blood” (226–227). Jim tells Stemteema that “the white man's law” trumps “tribal rules” and allows Cogewea to choose her husband. However, he promises to take revenge if Densmore proves false. With Jim as her audience, Stemteema successfully rehistoricizes the mythology of frontier romance. Her testimony confirms the agency of Indian women—Sacajawea and Cogewea—as accomplices to white explorers’ schemes. Jim also recognizes Cogewea's autonomy in negotiating the terms of white-Indian contact, and for this reason he refuses to interfere as she chooses her own path.

As Mourning Dove reconnects the predicament of Sacajawea to the situation of modern half-breeds, she comments on the strategies used by her Indian contemporaries to address the white world. Her generation of Indian intellectuals, like Cogewea, had been educated in both white schools and tribal customs. They cultivated a ground-breaking awareness of their shared status as Indians and founded intertribal organizations such as the Society

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of American Indians to advance their common cause. The so-called “Red Progressives”—including Charles Eastman; Henry Roe Cloud (Winne-bago), the first Native graduate from Yale University; the noted authors Gertrude Bonnin / Zitkala Sa (Sioux) and Francis LaFlesche (Omaha); the anthropologists Arthur Parker (Seneca) and Ella Deloria (Yankton Sioux), and others—were deeply divided over how Indians should advance into modernity. Some were strong advocates of complete assimilation; others were firebrand opponents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. All seemed to share a consciousness of the opportunities for cultural and political power their precarious position as Indian intellectuals afforded them. Philip Deloria explains that the Red Progressives “wanted to become bridge figures, using antimodern primitivism to defend native cultures against the negative stereotypes left over from colonial conquest.”^[11] Like the Sacajawea of popular imagination—if not the Sacajawea of history—the authority and power of the Red Progressives derived from their liminality and their skills as interpreters and mediators.

Mourning Dove experienced the limits of this power and authority in the process of composing and publishing her novel. Cogewea was the product of editorial collaboration between Mourning Dove and Lucullus V. McWhorter, a West Virginia–born archeologist and Indian affairs activist. Mourning Dove first met McWhorter in 1914 at the Walla Walla Washington Frontier Days celebration; he encouraged her literary ambitions and offered his assistance in securing publication for her drafted manuscript. During the winter of 1915–16, Mourning Dove lived in the McWhorter home and dedicated herself to manuscript revisions.^[12] Consequently, the published novel is marked by McWhorter's editorial interventions: poetic epigraphs, anthropological annotation, and extended political invective.^[13] While awaiting the long-delayed publication of Cogewea, Mourning Dove began work on a collection of Okanogan folklore. There too she found her efforts hampered by the intervention of white “professionals.” She wrote to McWhorter:

There are some that are getting suspicious of my wanting folklores and if the Indians find out that their stories will reach print I am sure it will be hard for me to get any more legends without paying the hard cash for them. A white-man has spoiled my field of work. … This Mr. James Teit has collected folklores among the Indians and has been paying five dollars a piece for good Indian legends. (viii)

Teit, an assistant of Franz Boas, compiled wordlists and folklores still considered authoritative. Still, Mourning Dove did manage to compile her Okanogan folklore, which was published as Coyote Stories in 1933.

In Cogewea, Mourning Dove created a protagonist who shared her Red Progressive authorial ambitions and who encountered many of the same

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limitations.^[14] Cogewea states early in the novel that her ambitions are to be an “authoress.” One motive for this ambition is to correct inaccurate and demeaning literary representations of Indians. Cogewea reacts violently to The Brand, a dime novel romance in which a self-hating half-breed hero offers himself in a self-abasing marriage to a white girl of the Flathead range. Pitching the book into the kitchen stove, she criticizes the colonialist mis-conception of Indianness: “Cogewea reflected bitterly how her race had had the worst of every deal since the landing of the lordly European on their shores; how they had suffered as much from the pen as from the bayonet of conquest; wherein the annals had always been chronicled by their most deadly foes and partisan writers” (91–92).^[15] Cogewea considers it her responsibility to use her education to advance public awareness of and respect for Indian culture. She also envisions print as a venue for the preservation of Indian traditions. Cogewea fears that “the new order of things” threatens the survival of tradition and believes that “her people's philosophy must be irretrievably lost unless speedily placed on record” (33). Her duality, her liminality positions her uniquely between white and Indian, oral tradition and print literacy. As the novel explains,

Most of the old people do not make use of English, although the majority of them understand many words and can speak them but will not do so unless absolutely necessary. If alone with the whites, they will talk if occasion demands; but if in the presence of the younger Indians, they can hardly be induced to do so. … Recognizing the linguistic ability of the educated youth, it is expected to them to assume the role of interpreter. (118)

Only an English-literate Indian like Cogewea could translate traditional Indian lore into the modern medium of print. Cogewea's liminality between white and Indian worlds also situates her in a unique position to mediate Indian culture for a broader reading public.

Yet the offices of translation, mediation, and interpretation place Cogewea and her contemporaries in a difficult position. Education in government schools could teach them English literacy, but it could also inculcate a deep resentment of white incursions into Indian territories, cultural and geographic. Thus, while younger Indians knew how to communicate with outsiders, they were more distanced from Indian traditions and more resentful of the beneficiaries of their translation. The complexities of this situation are demonstrated in an anecdote from the novel, an anecdote—according to McWhorter's annotations—drawn from Mourning Dove's life. One winter when Stemteema, Cogewea, and her sisters were living on the banks of the Columbia River, two young white men came to ice-fish. The fishermen inquired at the tepee about the condition of the ice; Cogewea and her sisters pretended not to understand English. Chastised by Stemteema for failing to warn the fishermen about the thin ice, “What did you

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learn the language and books of the pale face for? They do no good unless you make use of them when needed!” Stemteema cried out in “a jargon of English,” successfully warning the boys off (119). The McDonald sisters’ mischievous refusal to interpret for and to guide the two young white explorers reveals the potential for resistance. This strategy is corroborated also by the half-breed ranch foreman, Jim LaGrinder, who admits that he and the boys of the HB ranch have fed would-be white authorities tall tales and half-truths about range life and Indian lore. When Alfred Densmore suggests that “confidence” might improve Indian relations with whites, “facilitating both social and business interests,” Jim replies, “That there ‘confidence’ card has been our undoin” (94). The indictment of Densmore as confidence man becomes more provocative when considered in connection with his last name; Frances Densmore was the early twentieth century's leading scholar of American Indian music. Perhaps Alfred Densmore is a stand-in for all the opportunistic “friends of the Indian,” from Lewis and Clark to the romancers, land speculators, and anthropologists of the modern age. Jim's comment reveals a little recognized aspect of the Sacajawea predicament: in a colonialist context, the relationship between Indian and white, “interpreter” and explorer, is never in good faith.

Indeed, Cogewea herself will discover the bad-faith basis of Densmore's marriage plot. After the pair elopes, Densmore learns that his intended bride has no large land claims. He robs her of a small cash fortune, ties her to a tree, and abandons her on the range. But Mourning Dove does not leave Cogewea to die in the wilderness. Resisting the conventions of the seduction novel, she allows Cogewea to recover and learn from her mistakes. In a chapter entitled “The Cost of Knowing,” the heroine is rescued by Jim LaGrinder, to whom she reveals, with some humiliation, the extent of Densmore's duplicity. At novel's end, after a lapse of some years, an older, wiser Cogewea and LaGrinder resolve to marry in a happy joining of half-blood equals. The conclusion of Cogewea marks a way to survive the Sacajawea predicament: it is “knowledge,” self-knowledge, rather than service as someone else's tutor or guide. Playing Sacajawea subscribes Indians to the schemes of whites rather than advancing their own independent interests. Acting as an interpreter recycles and reinscribes the colonialist mythology of the frontier.

Here, then, is a powerful Red Progressive response to popular representations of Sacajawea. In historical novels, on statehouse lawns, in public parks, and at roadside historic sites, the name and the image of Sacajawea indexed a broadly accepted romance of how the West was won with the help of a Indian woman, a story white people told themselves about their relationships with Indians. For many Indian intellectuals of the Progressive era, playing the Sacajawea role—patient guide and interpreter—seemed one of most effective avenues to broadening Indian cultural and political power.

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But Mourning Dove's novel reveals a darker aspect of the Sacajawea predicament. It challenges Native women to resist the bad-faith lure of colonialist romance and to pilot their own meaningful path through the chaos of modernity.

Cogewea also challenges contemporary readers to imagine the Corps of Discovery from the perspective of the “discovered.” From this perspective, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacajawea are not singular characters. Rather, they belong to a broader genre of strangers-come-west stories, a genre that the expedition neither pioneered nor exhausted. Cogewea restores this sense of multiplicity to the record. It decenters the legacy of Lewis and Clark. It reminds us that there were multiple Indian witnesses to the expedition, that Sacajawea was not the only Native woman with a Lewis and Clark tale to tell, and that our singular fascination with her proceeds from a paucity of knowledge about American Indian women. Similarly, the novel resists our ambitions to “discover” and establish new knowledge about Lewis and Clark; it will not use Native oral tradition to authenticate or legitimate our historical fascinations. Rather, it counters the heroic formulas of historical narrative with a more profound, primeval, place-based, and cyclical sense of story. As Louise Erdrich asks in the conclusion to her novel The Antelope Wife, “Did these occurrences have a paradigm in the settlement of the old scores and pains and betrayals that went back in time? Or are we working out the minor details of a strictly random pattern? Who is beading us? Who are you and who am I, the beader or the bit of colored glass sewn onto the fabric of this earth?”^[16] Mourning Dove's novel Cogewea suggests that Lewis, Clark, and Sacajawea were but beads in a more extensive pattern. They were the elements but not the authors of randomness and chaos. Cogewea—like the best Native American literature—asks us to confront the idea of sovereignty: to recognize that “discovery” does not confer authority, mastery, or ownership. Two hundred years after Lewis and Clark, we have yet to learn this lesson.

NOTES