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Sacagawea

You have to go back and use our sense of who she was in history, where who her tribal people were, because we have no information about her as an individual. She never wrote anything down, as far as we know. Some believe she didnt know how to write. And to understand who she was, we have to make a series of imaginative leaps to try and understand, first of all, what it is to be a young Shoshoni Indian, living among the Minitari Tribe. You know, she hadnt been among her own people for probably five or six years by the time that she ran into Lewis and Clark. She was very young. She was probably fourteen. Shed been traded back and forth between different Minitari braves apparently, before she was won by Charbonneau in a gamble, in a game really. He won her from another Minitari brave in this gamble and he also at that time, when he won her, hed already had another wife. And she was fourteen. Within a few months she was pregnant.

For more on Sacagawea, go to the next page. You know, the one with my big question on it?