Last week, a group of seven citizens decided the image of Sacajawea should succeed that of Susan B. Anthony on the face of the new dollar coin.
They were the members of a Treasury Department’s advisory panel appointed to make a recommendation to the president. But I want to know who they really are.
Are they related to Miss America pageant judges who claim they evaluate women on intelligence and personality?
Are they kin to the editors of Time who stuck a picture of Ally McBeal on the July 29 cover and called her a feminist?
The new dollar coin was supposed to bear the image of a real American woman who took a stand for liberty and justice.
And the only woman they could name was a poor girl recorded in history for her ability to beat dirty laundry on a rock?
If the advisory panel has its way and Sacajawea follows Susan B. Anthony into currency history, it is a jagged little pill to swallow.
The hard work of Susan B. Anthony is validated by the freedoms enjoyed by contemporary women. Her struggle on behalf of temperance, abolition of slavery, women’s rights and suffrage left a broad wake of social reform and prosperity.
The only thing Sacajawea left behind was fodder for folklore.
Consider their difference. Anthony was the 19th Century suffrage leader whom Gertrude Stein once praised as “the mother of us all.”
Sacajawea was an Indian slave who accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their 1805 expedition. The only commendation she ever received is recorded in Clark’s log, where he declares his admiration for her ability to do heavy labor without complaint. She was a poor woman, a servile and obedient slave.
For generations, our popular folk legends have regarded Sacajawea as the Indian who guided Lewis and Clark on their expedition west.
But when history is stripped to the buff, Sacajawea is exposed as the child she was, poor and exploited.
She was only 16 years old when she was kidnapped by the Hidasi tribe and sold into slavery to the explorer Toussaint Charbonneau.
When Charbonneau joined the Lewis and Clark expedition, Sacajawea came along as his common-law wife. The child she bore Charbonneau was still an infant when they joined Lewis and Clark.
According to expedition log books, she cooked for the men, foraged for them, mended and cleaned their clothes. Her time in the limelight of frontier history was short, but history cannot hide from the fact that during that time Sacajawea was little more than a handmaiden to the Lewis and Clark party.
True, she was the first woman in recorded history to cross the Rocky Mountains. But it was a journey she never would have made on her own. Sacajawea’s situation was probably desperate, lonely and hopeless.
Like Pocahontas before her, Sacajawea’s indentured life has been obscured by an acceptable, romantic legend that portrays our male explorers as heroes and their property-persons as generous accomplices.
For generations we have hidden from the ugliness of slavery. The person of Sacajawea has been imagined as an adventurer, a bold and courageous beauty with native instincts that saved the expedition.
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But Sacajawea was none of these things. She was a cooperative, compliant captive, skilled in the tasks assigned by the white men who controlled her fate.
The Sacajawea coin is bound to stir as much controversy as the Anthony dollar did when it was minted in 1979.
This time, American women and Native Americans of both genders will complain about the new coin, and not because it will be too small or oddly shaped.
Native Americans will protest because they have never appreciated the patronizing pseudo-recognition of our federal government.
And women will speak up because this time, we were ready to be called to the plate. Our bench was deep with a gang of heavy-hitting, powerful women.
Instead of a fantasy woman from American folklore, we wanted to see the image of a real American heroine on our dollar coin.
Not a wide-eyed, fantasy-inspired Indian maiden. Nor an imaginary heroine with imaginary courage.
Not this time. This time we were looking forward to the image of a real woman appearing on a real, dollar-sized dollar.
A humanitarian like Eleanor Roosevelt or Sojourner Truth. Or a doctor like Karen Horney, an educator like Mary Lyon or a great teacher like Annie Sullivan.
Heck, my friends and I could name 20, 30 more, if anyone asked us. No one ever did.
Instead, the Treasury Department took the advice of a group of seven citizens who came up with a fantasy maiden they named Sacajawea.
Who are these people?